Humanity
My Dead Mother and Me.
Grieving, healing, and changing the story I tell myself.
Gloria died 29 years ago tomorrow, one day before my birthday. She couldn’t take one more year of that day. Such is the pain of relinquishing a child, of birthing a human and surrendering it to strangers.
Such is the pain of storing that secret so deep in your body, one day it becomes cancer and another day you are dead.
In her article in The Atlantic, “The Most Mysterious Cells in Our Bodies Don’t Belong To Us,” Katherine J. Wu writes about microchimerism, fetal cells that drift from the womb into the mother’s organs.
The tiny cells — so small they are almost undetectable — mould a mother’s health for her lifetime. Decades after giving birth, microchimerism can be found in a woman’s heart, liver, lung kidney, and brain.
And colon.
On January 11th, 1968 an Arctic freeze blanketed New York City in record breaking cold. Gloria Gerwin, 23, suffered alone in her swanky Manhattan apartment. When the agony — a stomach flu she thought — became too great to bear, she telephoned her best friend Alexa. When Alexa arrived, Gloria collapsed on the parquet wood floor.
