Live For Me
I was sitting at dinner 6 weeks ago, on September 12, and I had just gotten ice cream for dessert. I was with my friends, and we were planning to go to a volleyball game later that evening. It was Tuesday. I remember I had laundry to do, and I was procrastinating doing it. I don’t remember exactly what I was talking about, or focused on, but I noticed my phone buzzing and flipped it over. The caller ID said “LA COUNTY MORGUE”.
There is a certain feeling, a sinking through water, cold, cold, dark water, that runs through your body when you know something has gone really wrong. I knew at that moment that my mother was dead. For the next 8 minutes, a coroner explained to me the details of my mother’s death, and asked me about the circumstances leading up to it. I then proceeded to make the worst phone calls of my life.
I’m not sure how much I want to share about her death, her life, etc. I don’t want to be disrespectful towards her. There’s still this odd feeling that “I haven’t asked her permission to talk about her yet”. She cannot give me this permission. I will try my best. Before I go into any detail about any of this, please respect my mom and don’t ask further questions about the circumstances of her death if you don’t know me well. With that being said.
My dessert must’ve melted away, later that night. I didn’t eat anything else that night. After I told my friends what happened, I asked someone to clean up after me, and walked outside. It was still warm enough that I didn’t need a jacket. I could not tell you specifics of the weather, all I know is that I didn’t feel anything on my skin. I made the calls. I will never forget the calls. I said the same horrible words over and over again, knowing that I was changing people’s lives. It was not a bad feeling, per se, it was more so of an instantaneous connection to someone else. I was no longer alone, and yet I hated that it had to be so. Someone asked me, in disbelief, if I was kidding. Someone else was driving and had to pull over. Someone else burst into tears. I walked back into my empty apartment, sank to the floor, felt my body cave inward.
People say they feel like a part of them has been ripped out, and they mean it metaphorically, but I cannot express to you enough how I feel as though part of my heart is missing. There is a physically present emptiness within. My mother committed suicide on September 12th, 2023. Her name was Anna Marie José Bondoc. She was 54 years old. Like I said, I don’t know how much I feel comfortable sharing, but I can tell you this: she was deeply mentally unwell, and it was this that drove her to end her life. For much of the summer, I did not live in my own home, as I served as a trigger to her anxieties and stresses. The last time I saw her alive, she was not herself. I have said this to people who knew her many times over, but she was a shell of her true self. I had feared for her life several times before, and the call from the coroner sent a spike of fear through my heart that, for the few seconds before I heard confirmation of the news, I hoped would end in relief. A mistake, a wrong number, something amiss. Just not my mom. Instead I heard her ask me if I was Anna Bondoc’s daughter.
I will never forget that call. I will never forget that day. I will never forget the many faces I saw at the funeral, every single one treasured and beloved, no matter how long or short I have known you. I spoke at the funeral, and a lot of what I want to say has been expressed through that speech. (I’ll link it at the end of this piece for those that didn’t hear it, or that might want to reread.) I’m not sure how to write this, but I know that there are things I will never forget. A list of sorts. So I will list the things I cannot forget, moments and memories and recollections from the last month or so.
My best friends came to New York City to be with me, the weekend after my mother died. Lana, Maria, and Ethan. I am eternally grateful for them and their love. The night we were all together, I began to break down, and they all laid with me, holding me while I sobbed. Lana had both arms around me. When she raised one hand to wipe away a tear, I instinctively pulled an arm around her, and she pushed it away, to envelop me in her embrace. “I’m supposed to be the one comforting you,” she half-laughed, and then just held me, letting me cry. “It’s okay to let it go,” she whispered, “You don’t have to be strong.” I broke down then, a true release. A lot of people say to me, “You’re so strong.” I’m not sure what that means. Am I strong because I continue to go to classes, get ready every morning, turn in assignments on time? Am I strong because I still do a lot of things that I could technically halt because of my grief? Am I strong because I still experience joy concurrently with my depression? I do these things not because I am strong, but because they are all I can do to add balance to my life. I don’t know about strength, but Lana’s words echo strongly in my mind when I feel most out of control. It is okay to not be strong, to feel helpless, to feel like a mess. I am no better or worse to do otherwise.
At my mother’s funeral, many people spoke. The speech that made me cry the hardest, however, was my aunt and uncle’s speech at the graveside, just before her remains were lowered in a small wooden urn into a rectangle in the ground. They recited lines from an old assignment of my mom’s, one she had written at 15 or 16. I’m paraphrasing all of this, but she had written a response to some questions to a religion class’s assignment, which included the question, “If you died tomorrow, how would you want to be remembered?” My mom, at 15, had answered that she wanted to be remembered as compassionate, a good person, a good friend. She had spoken of selflessness, of wanting to make other people feel seen and heard. She had described herself as a good listener, and she spoke repeatedly of wanting to make others feel loved and comforted by her actions. My uncle said, “She can rest now in the knowledge that she has done exactly what she set out to do with her life’s accomplishments.”
The song I have listened to quite often recently has been “Bags” by Clairo, and I find it oddly accurate to the reality that I have found myself carrying bags everywhere I go. Packages, kindly sent by well-wishers have been carried around campus, as I struggle up the hilly walkways back to my dorm (the post office is at one end of campus, and my dorm is at the other). I have carried boxes, plastic mailers, notes- everything has been carried, a metaphorical weight on my shoulders. When going into the city for the first time since my mom died (I live 40 minutes outside NYC, and take the subway from Grand Central into Brooklyn, where my grandparents live), I found myself carrying a giant bouquet of cookies sent to me by some lovely aunties. I already felt so ridiculous, my life feeling absurd and melancholy and stupid and miserable, and now I had this ridiculous, sweet, silly and delicious (and loud- the plastic surrounding the cookies was crinkly) thing to haul around the Metro. It was an apt metaphor, a sad looking girl (I did not feel like a woman at that moment) sitting alone on a seat in the Utica Ave-bound 4 with a giant, loud bag of cookies shaped like little bears and hearts. I wanted to laugh at myself out of self-pity: what an idiotic decision to bring these cookies on the train, and how silly I must have looked! And how sad, how lonely, how absolutely awful the reasoning for the cookies, and the clothes in my backpack, and my presence on the train (I was on my way to be with friends to grieve together), and my existence, as brought into the world by someone who was dead and meant to be in the same world and not lying in the morgue and unable to see her daughter again, her daughter with her excess of cookies and too many bags to carry and her sad face. At any rate. I have been carrying too many things.
Two days after my mom died, one of my favorite musical artists, Omar Apollo, posted the lyrics to one of his new songs, “Live for Me”. I cannot express how very much these lyrics mean to me, and how much his new EP (named after this song) mean to me. I will put them below:
You told me
You won't live too long
And I wish I
Could say something to change
How you feel about the way your life is goin'?
And tell me why you'd wanna go through it alone, hey
Won't you live for me?
Or could I live for you?
There's nothing I won't carry
So you don't have to
Never meant to hurt you with what I said
Didn't think I deserved you
What you give
The color in my eyes is turnin' red, eh
How you feel about the way your life is goin'?
Tell me why you'd wanna go through it alone
Won't you live for me?
Or could I live for you? Oh
There's nothing I won't carry
So you don't have to, oh
Won't you live for me?
Or could I live for you?
Thеre's nothing I won't carry
So you don't have to
Nothing I can say feels right, or relevant, or in any way some sort of accurate description of my recent experiences, or my mother’s life, or anything that feels as though it fits into this equation, because my mother isn’t supposed to die before me like this. I will not see her age past 54. She will not see me age past 18, never see wrinkles or lines of age, beautiful age, grace my features. She will not know the friends I will make after her death, never see the inside of my dorm, never know my accomplishments, never see the creative works I hope to make, never watch me own a home or have a child or succeed or fail or fluctuate. I had hoped, for all my life, to be able to make her proud, to make art that she could see and show to her friends, her family, to be excited about and be proud of. There is an eternal hurt in me because of this loss. And this is simply my experience. She will never see her friends and family and their friends and their families grow beyond where she last saw them. Her life now has a self-contained quality to it.
It is bittersweet, but I know how to remember her in my everyday life, if I’m happy or sad or simply am. Existing, for me, is a radical act of love for my mother. She birthed me, from her own limbs and raised me with her own hands and body and blood and sweat and tears and love. I am proof of her existence, I am the physical imprint and reminder that Anna Marie José Bondoc walked this earth and created another life on this planet. When my heart pumps blood, when I laugh, when I blink my eyes, when I inhale and exhale and inhale again- I show my mother that I love her, that I care enough to take another breath in the body she gave to me. Her items are priceless to me now, but nothing is more priceless than the body she grew inside of herself for me. We are all proof that someone cared enough to create a life from their own body.
My mother had a copy of “My Year of Magical Thinking” by Joan Didion that I’d brought to college, and intended to read at some point. In a care package sent to me, a close friend of mine sent me a copy inscribed with a beautiful little note that my mom had given this book to him as well, after he’d lost a loved one. I treasure both copies: one from my mother, the other from another loved family member, who thought of my mom as well when he read the book. This is as close as I’ll get to my book and word-loving mother giving me something to seek comfort within, pages of words she found beautiful. In the book, Didion (one of my all-time favorite authors) describes life one year after her husband’s death. “I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. Let them become the photograph on the table. Let them become the name on the trust accounts. Let go of them in the water.” I am not ready to let go of my mom in the water, yet that is exactly why I wrote this. One step in the direction of letting her become the photograph on the table. A small part of the thought process, the years to come.
It seems small, but I realized, as I wrote this, that I will never see my mom again. It sounds stupid. I know it sounds stupid. But I will never see my mom again, never hear her, never visibly get to look at her face. This is a terrible thing to know, and a terrible thing to have to deal with. But I look at that photograph on the table, and I am reminded that her love was what brought me into this world, and her body bore me into this world. She is so much more than that photograph, and I am living proof of that.
Love and kisses,
Claire Bondoc Sand
P.S. You can still email me at desperatelyseekingsomeadvice@gmail.com. I’ll respond.
P.P.S. Link to my funeral speech.