I had moved 2,027 miles from home when I started therapy for Complex PTSD. While I wished to discuss my recent divorce, it seemed like my therapist was focused on my mother. What we ended up working on was how to get me back to the west coast and reconnected with my established network of care and support.

“Read about this personality disorder,” she suggested before we parted ways. “I cannot diagnose her without seeing her, but see if it might sound like your mom.”

My mother and I struggled in a relationship that was caught between the the intense connection of having shared the same body for the first nine months of my existence and of our shared generational history of mental health issues and trauma. I deliberately ceased contact with her a number of times throughout my adult life, and this time would end up being the last. Around a year after I asked her to let me be, she mailed a copy of some information about her most recent diagnosis. A short note was penciled on the back.

“I am trying to understand this, but the doctor says I can’t tell when I do these things.” My eyes scanned the bullet points on the printout. The out-of-state therapist had been insightful. The official diagnosis was the same as her observational one.

Much of the creativity I rely on to help manage my own trauma was inherited from my mom. While my dad has always appreciated poetry even to the point of memorizing many poems by his favorite poet, mom wrote her own. Librettos and lyrics and verse were part of my everyday language from the very beginning. So, last December I purchased a thick spiral notebook and set out to write a poem a week for the whole of 2025. 360 clean blank pages, each with spaces to record the date, day of the week and page number, were ready to accommodate me. The first few weeks, however, held no desire or inspiration. I wrote about articles I had read and took notes on online talks and training, but the words provided no spark. The blank table of contents in the front of my notebook remained blank.

Then, suddenly, my mom died. My sister’s painful tears taunted my inability to cry. My life had curated a collection of varied griefs that had formed around her elusive symptoms; stalactites reaching out to and pulling away from each other in the dark places passed down by those who lived before us. My heart has doubled over in pain and my mind is still repeating the phrase “My mom died recently”, but it is like an idiom in a foreign tongue. I have learned each word yet the literal translation is senseless to me.

My tears for her are artifacts, already collected, preserved and labeled then carefully stored away. In their place the strange experience of losing what was already lost provoked instead the flow of metaphor and rhyme. A list of titles is filling the contents page with page numbers for spoken tears that are penciled on the dry pages.

This is my year of sadness. Just as my mother couldn’t understand her own symptoms, I will never understand this process of mourning her death. It is the moments of connection – our voices in harmony, the saturated colors in our art pieces, the moulding of words into sculptures of emotion – this is where I choose to find her now.

Goodbye Momma. Things will be much simpler the next time we are together. I love you. 

Image: Wallflowers, from the Shadows Series, Colored Pencil, ©2025 Martina Franklin Poole