I'm Glad My Mom Died Quotes

“Mom reminisces about cancer the way most people reminisce about vacations. She even goes so far as to MC a weekly rewatch of a home video she made shortly after learning of her diagnosis.”

“I take a longer look at the words on her headstone. Brave, kind, loyal, sweet, loving, graceful, strong, thoughtful, funny, genuine, hopeful, playful, insightful, and on and on… Was she, though? Was she any of those things? The words make me angry. I can’t look at them any longer. Why do we romanticize the dead? Why can’t we be honest about them?”

“This day was stressful and not fun, and if given the choice, I would choose to never do anything like it again. On the other hand, I do want what Mom wants, so she’s kind of right.”

“I can’t make sense of it. If my weight isn’t enough to get Mom to wake up, then nothing will be. And if nothing can wake her up, then that means she’s really going to die. And if she’s really going to die, what am I supposed to do with myself? My life purpose has always been to make Mom happy, to be who she wants me to be. So without Mom, who am I supposed to be now?”

“I yearn to know the people I love deeply and intimately—without context, without boxes—and I yearn for them to know me that way, too.”

“She wanted this. And I wanted her to have it. I wanted her to be happy. But now that I have it, I realize that she’s happy and I’m not. Her happiness came at the cost of mine. I feel robbed and exploited.”

“I was conditioned to believe any boundary I wanted was a betrayal of her, so I stayed silent. Cooperative.”

“I’m becoming an angry person with no tolerance for anyone. I’m aware of this shift and yet have no desire to change it. If anything, I want it. It’s armor. It’s easier to be angry than to feel to pain underneath it.”

“A pushover is a bad thing to be, but an opinionated pushover is a worse thing to be. A pushover is nice and goes along with it, whatever it is. An opinionated pushover acts nice and goes along with it, but while quietly brooding and resentful. I am an opinionated pushover.”

“Slips are totally normal. When you have a slip, it’s just that. A slip. It doesn’t define you. It doesn’t make you a failure. The most important thing is that you don’t let that slip become a slide.”

“I feel like the world is divided into two types of people: people who know loss and people who don’t.”

“Mom didn’t get better. But I will.”

“I always forget that trying to reason with the unreasonable is... unreasonable.”