I learned the other day that women are born with all the eggs they will ever have. Which means I existed as an egg in my mother’s womb before she was born—before that, even—and she existed in her mother’s mother’s womb. And so we are all much older than we realize.

I was with my mother during her turbulent childhood, through the screaming matches, slammed doors, and shattered plates. I was there during the long hours she worked at the deli to pay her way through college, and I was there when, at age 16, she broke her leg and my father helped her with her crutches in Spanish class and fell in love.

And my mother, she was there with my grandmother the night before her wedding, when my grandmother said no, it was all wrong, she didn’t want to marry him, and my grandmother’s mother said too bad, it’s too late, you have to go through with it. My mother was with my grandmother through that sleepless night, offering solace so tiny it was invisible.

And so it goes, back and back until we get to the first mother, the original grandmother, whoever she was. Perhaps she never existed at all. Generations of sorrow, the bleeding heart of Mary. I would have stayed a virgin if I could have contained my curiosity.

***

We accidentally threw a party before my grandmother died.

Maybe it wasn’t an accident, but I didn’t realize it was going to happen. Grandma was dying of the breast cancer that had metastasized to her brain. My mother had moved across the country to take care of her, sleeping on the floor in her one-room apartment and getting up in the night to ease her pain.

Toward the end, but before the imminent very-end, the whole family—her five children, their spouses, their children—descended upon that tiny apartment. We ate ziti and drank wine. There were chocolate-covered strawberries. Initially, the whole thing made me queasy. It felt too lighthearted, too extravagant. It felt like we were celebrating Christmas and ignoring the third ghost in the corner, with its death shroud and shriveled pointing finger.

The mood shifted rapidly during those three days, from raucous laughter to fear to sorrow to sentimentality. Through it all, my grandmother watched from her armchair with a soft smile on her face. The drugs mellowed her out, muting the anxious energy that had always compelled her to be everywhere at once—ladling tomato sauce, playing with the smallest children, cleaning up, shooing people out of the kitchen. It was the longest I ever saw her sit down. She was still her, but a paler version of herself.

On the last night, when most of her children were a little drunk, she brought up the reason for the gathering, which we had studiously avoided to that point.

“I know I’ll be gone soon, and I’m so happy we can spend this time together.”

She seemed serene, truly at peace with her looming death. I learned later from my mother that she struggled during those days. She feared death, and she hated her fear. A devout Catholic for 75 years, she started to doubt. The pain, the insignificance of her one human life, these things were more painful than the throbbing in her head and chest.

She continued: “I’ve never been a very romantic or sexual person…”

It was clear she was on a very strong medication. We enjoyed her latitude.

“…but I am so glad I had all of you. You are the joy of my life.”

She gestured toward the five healthy adult children in front of her, the dozen grandchildren.

 “I never needed anything else.”

I knew she believed that, but I could not.

Her marriage was not happy; not even she could deny that. She tried, and so did my grandfather, but he was manic depressive, and she was anxious, and they did not love one another. They were good people who managed as best they could, but they fought, they didn’t speak, they didn’t know one another.

They divorced when my mother was in high school. And a few years later, my grandfather married for love, and he became a different person: the father my mother had always longed for. He talked, he laughed, he raised two beautiful daughters. Initially, my grandmother and my mother were angry. Angry that he could throw them away for shinier objects. But when they saw how happy he really was, they begrudged him nothing. And my grandmother, who had suffered 20 years of unhappy marriage, was grateful for her newfound peace. She loved her children, and therefore she loved her life. She never had another romantic relationship.

I think there is more of my grandmother in me than my mother. My mother is confident, practical, engaging. I am anxious and shy. I speak my love through tasks and toil—cooking, cleaning, doing favors. I am a Martha through and through; I resent Mary for spending time with her guests, for choosing to sit with them rather than to clean up after them.

I venerate both women—my mother and my grandmother; Mary and Martha. I do not venerate myself, but if I see parts of myself as parts of them, I can start to find peace.

So my grandmother, dying but not yet on her deathbed, spoke more frankly than she ever had, and her children and grandchildren laughed and cried freely. To me, it was too much emotion; it made me want to roll up like an armadillo and protect myself from Uncle Vinny’s tears, which I had never seen before and did not want to see. Moments of unfettered emotion still make me feel that way. But in my memory, this moment is a sweet one. It was the last time I ever saw my grandmother. It was my senior year in college, full of so much hope, worry, and uncertainty. It was a time that nearly broke my mother, though she has never told me so. She never speaks of her own pain.

***

A year and a half later, I sat in a recliner in an ICU bed where my mother lay. She had just had open heart surgery for a faulty mitral valve. The night was long—the machines beeped and blinked, my mother groaned in her half-sleep, and my mind raced. After she regained consciousness, her surgeon visited. “I held your heart in the palm of my hand,” he said. “Good for you,” my mother replied.

For the next two days, my mother feebly begged the nurses for more fluids. “Dr. Gunnigle says he likes to keep his patients dry,” the day nurse said. The night nurse was more sympathetic; he brought ice chips and did something to the IV.

I found out later that the only medication my mother took during her post-op recovery was ibuprofen. She refused everything else—oxycodone, morphine—said it made her feel sick and out of control. The gash in her chest still needed draining.

If you have ever wondered why I measure myself by my mother’s strength, now you know.

For two or three days, her eyes were glazed and she didn’t say much. She did not want to burden us with her pain. That is her greatest virtue and her greatest flaw. I have always longed to be worthy of bearing my mother’s pain, and she, out of love, has never allowed me to glimpse it. So we are both miserable.

She was only in the ICU for a few days, but in that time I saw private tragedies and reunions through every door I passed. To get to my mother, I walked past the rooms of dying people. Some had visitors and balloons and flowers; others were always alone, their ventilators sighing into empty rooms. The old people without visitors made me want to sit on the linoleum floor and weep—that life could evaporate so quickly, that it could end in such silence. I imagined those dying patients feeling afraid, lonely, confused. I still feel pained when I think of them, but I also wonder: is it like that for everyone, even if your room is filled with loved ones? Didn’t my grandmother feel afraid and lonely, even as my mother tended to her?

I am old enough now to have friends who have died (though they were very young); I am old enough to know that death can belittle life and faith and philosophy. But belittlement does not devalue the thing itself. And perhaps it is not death casting gibes; perhaps it is the human mind lashing out at the thing that seems most mysterious, painful, frightening, and unjust. But that is our fault, not death’s.

***

I’ve just started trying to have a child. I worried I would never want one, and then all of a sudden I did. And now that it hasn’t happened yet, I’m terrified there is something wrong with my body. Even though I know it can take months or years to conceive—what scares me most is that there could have been something broken inside me this whole time, and I never knew it.

I’ve also realized how little I know about my own body. How little we all know about the factors that shape an embryo, a fetus. It turns out we can have some caffeine, but licorice is forbidden. It turns out it’s better for me to continue taking my antidepressants, rather than risk flooding a growing baby with waves of cortisol. But we still don’t know much, because we can’t study it; we can’t ask women to participate in a double-blind study that could put their baby at risk. So we do the best we can with our limited information. I can’t help but think, though, that if men could bear children, we would know a little more.

My breast swells with potential, my side aches with life—and I sit here fearing death. The potential for new life courses though my body, until it becomes evidence of another chance shed, shorn, released. The blood which signals renewal is the very blood of nonexistence. When will this aching in my belly cease—for age, or new life, or death? All three, if I am lucky. To be a woman is to long for the thing that you fear, to miss what never was. It is to be anonymous, unseen—and then suddenly to become visible at the moment you least wish it. So we learn to mute our desires and expectations, to put our heads down and bear the pain, as we always have done. It is not right, but there is a kind of honor in it. 

When I lay in my hospital bed—to give new life, or to say goodbye to my own—I will think of all the children I never had, who never were because of some accident of time and biology. Whatever is in my womb at that time, I will give it my blessing, even if it is nothing but emptiness. For in emptiness lies the potential for everything.

– Katie Carmer