How To Lose Your Mother: A Daughter's Memoir

My mother had a rare disease. After months of dead ends, I found one person in the country who could treat her. She told me there was a price. She said she needed a husband. I agreed. For my mother, I agreed. For six years I was her ATM. I bought her the bags. I bought her the watches. It got worse. She used my money to keep a kept man. She brought him into our bed. The day my mother had her last surgery, she walked out of the operating room halfway through to go celebrate her lover's birthday. The moment they pronounced my mother dead, I decided there and then, she was paying for that with her life.

My mother was the president of a listed corporation, she was both rich and powerful. More importantly, she loved me more than anything in the world. Meanwhile, my father was a man who cheated on her. When he found out his mistress was pregnant with a girl, he beat her until she miscarried and ended up in prison. So when the judge publicly asked me to choose between my mother and my father, everyone assumed the custody battle was just a formality. That was until I walked past my mother's trembling, outstretched hand and firmly chose my father instead. Everyone was shocked into speechlessness. In my previous life, I had chosen my mother, the one who spoiled me rotten. She was the type to buy the whole bakery just because I casually mentioned I wanted their cake. When I complained it was too sunny, she immediately arranged for four helicopters to put up a sunshade cloth and shade me. She even deposited a hundred thousand dollars on my school meal card because she was worried I wasn't eating well. Even though she spoiled me like a true princess and paved the way for me through life, I don't want anything to do with her in this life.

I was crushed into a pulp by a speeding semi-truck while my mother was at a baking class with my cousin. When I called her, desperate, she only snapped at me. "What's all the racket? Kyle burned his hand because your call distracted him. Did you do that on purpose?" The next day, in her capacity as one of the city's most celebrated morticians, she was assigned to restore the face of a body mangled beyond recognition. She worked on it for a full day and night and still couldn't bring back the dead woman's face. Mom, can you really not recognize her? That's the face of the daughter you hated most.

My mother is hospitalized due to a terminal illness. She's in urgent need of a kidney transplant to save her life. I'm the only one who can perform the surgery, but I give the kidney to a stranger. My father and husband get on their knees before me on the day of the surgery. They beg me to save my mother. However, I shrug and say, "I can't do anything about this. A life is a life, regardless of who the person is. This is what she gets for coming late—death is waiting for her."

My mother hated me, to the point that she wished I were dead. I knew I deserved to die. Sixteen years ago, if I hadn’t insisted on going out, my brother wouldn’t have died while trying to save me. Eventually, both of us got what we wished for. I got brain cancer. She had become a stranger to me as I forgot everything and went to die in blissful ignorance. Then, she went mad.

After my mom, Margaret Hale, dies of a heart attack, she starts appearing in my sister Claire Dawson's dreams. In a dream, Mom tells Claire to climb Mount Mistwood before sunrise and burn the entrance ticket for her, or the other ghosts will bully her. Claire doesn't tell me anything. She packs a bag in the middle of the night and forces herself to the summit. While she's gasping her way up that mountain, I'm asleep at home when I suddenly go into cardiac arrest. I wake up in the emergency room with doctors shouting over me. I barely survive before Mom appears in Claire's dreams again. This time, she says skydiving is her last wish. If Claire doesn't do it for her, she won't rest in peace. Claire signs up right away, ignoring everything I say. But then, her parachute refuses to open, and she plummets toward the ground. Luckily, she gets snagged in a tree and walks away without a scratch. Meanwhile, I miss a step going downstairs, tumble to the bottom, end up covered in bruises, and break five ribs. While I'm recovering in the hospital, Mom shows up in Claire's dreams again. Now, she wants Claire to go to the South Pole for her, saying she can finally move on and be reincarnated once Claire completes the trip. Claire doesn't hesitate and books a tour on the spot. While she's taking pictures with penguins, I freeze to death back home during a 104-degree heatwave. Only after I die does it finally hit me that Mom's missions for Claire always end with me on death's doorstep. What I don't understand is how Mom keeps shifting the danger meant for Claire onto me instead. The next time I open my eyes, I'm back on the morning after Mom first appeared in Claire's dream.