My first name is Diana, who in Roman mythology was the goddess of the moon and hunting; to the Greeks, she was Artemis. (Although my more bookish father liked to think about my name in this context, the truth is that my mother chose my name after her favorite Paul Anka song.) Nevertheless, I’ve so often in my life felt like Atlas, the Titan who was doomed to bear the weight of the heavens for all eternity. I’ve certainly felt this way a lot lately.

When I first went no-contact with my mother, a toxic narcissist, about six years ago, the understanding about this newfangled boundary of mine was that it was both permanent and not permanent at the same time. I had no intention of relaxing my boundary, and I still don’t, but while she is still on this planet, there is the chance that I hypothetically could choose to do so.

The funny thing about hypotheticals is that they slap REAL different when we start talking about death as something quite proximal. This shit ain’t so hypothetical for me anymore. My mother wasn’t exactly in top notch health when I stopped talking to her, and that’s only gone downhill. She is many many miles closer to death now than she was before.

And I’ve been irritated as fuck about it, to use imperfect language. All of my sensibilities have been raging against the machine in trying to figure out what I’m supposed to do (spoiler alert: the answer is nothing) and how I’m supposed to feel (spoiler alert: the answer is everything). Part of my brain has struggled with this idea that I should just bite the bullet and “take the reins” (whatever that means!), call the hospital and reveal myself as the daughter who should handle all the advocating and be informed and make decisions and and and…yeah, none of that is necessary. The care she is receiving is all well in hand; the decisions I got pigeonholed into making last fall are still in place so there’s nothing else for me to really do. I need to consider that box checked. Part of this feeling comes from a need to feel like I’m in control of a situation that is out of my hands; another part of it comes from the societal expectation that the child is supposed to to be present to handle all of the stuff that needs handling for the elderly and ailing and dying parent. On both counts, the impulse to get involved directly undermines the hard-won success I’ve found in holding true to my boundaries and to myself.

The crux of the matter is that for so long now I’ve felt aggravated that I’m carrying around the burden of my mother’s impending death, which now is much more impending than it used to be, and I have no clue what I’m supposed to do about it (again, spoiler alert: nothing!). My therapist called me out on the fact that I seem to think I need to handle these feelings by “doing” something, when the truth is that I just need to let myself have my feelings. I told her I would work on that. However, it was only when I called myself out on the language that I used, that use of the word “burden” which was a word my mother always used to describe how she felt about my brother, that something even more problematic occurred to me.

The burden I bear is not my mother’s death at all. It is her life.

This sounds rather nasty at face value, but what I mean is that I have, for all of my life, been a vessel for my mother’s entire life story in great detail. For thirty-five years I’ve carried all of my own experiences, plus nearly all seventy of hers. She has told me everything about herself and then some, treated me like a therapist and peer instead of the child I was, confided far more in me than a daughter should ever know about her mother. Now, I am faced with carrying that on alone, because this shared memory bank will soon enough only have one shareholder. What am I supposed to do with that burden, which I suppose some people might call a legacy but which really just feels like almost-dead weight?

It’s like when you have a book someone gave you, and you don’t care for the book, but it was a gift, and the person who gave it to you is now gone, so you don’t have the heart to get rid of it but you don’t want to keep it either. What does one do with the book?! What am I to do with this huge frickin’ story inside my head?

I’m not sure how feasible it will actually be in practice, but my therapist and I came to the same hypothetical conclusion about it today. I may just need to write it. At first, it seems counterintuitive to say that in order to give myself more attention, I should write my mother’s story. But, I think that in doing so, that burden will get out of my system and I’ll finally make space for myself. Again, all hypothetical.

But it’s like I said — this shit ain’t so hypothetical for me anymore. Startin’ to slap real different.