As I began to work on getting my own life back on track, I relegated time with my mother to every other Sunday and holidays, holding her (and our relationship) at arm’s length. What seemed at the time to be self-care and boundaries was also a mixture of avoidance and burden—but I didn’t truly know this until a Tuesday afternoon one day in November.
She’d called me the night before and I’d ignored it; she was lonely and called me a lot, and I’d decided that I couldn’t always stop what I was doing to answer. But the next day I got a call at work from my brother, telling me to come home at once. When I got there I found that she’d died in her sleep the night before.
I checked the voicemail that she’d left me. In it she’d asked me to come over and see a movie with her.
The guilt caved me in.
The following weeks and months were a blur. I was beside myself with grief, regret, and the illogical thinking that can come with loss: Maybe if I’d come over that night she wouldn’t have died. Maybe if I’d been around more, called more, or been a better daughter, maybe that would have changed things.
Category: TRANSCIENCE
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My need for social relationships (if by that we mean relationships other than romantic relationships), which started very weak, had declined to nothing over the years. Was that normal? It’s true that humanity’s unpalatable ancestors lived in tribes of a few dozen individuals, about the size of a hamlet, and that that formula pertained for a long time–both among hunter-gatherers and among the first farming populations. But time had moved on since then; there had been the invention of the city and its natural corollary–loneliness.
Serotonin: A Novel
Michel Houellebecq
SO GOOD QUOTES 