"You Know, You'd Be So Beautiful If You Just Lost Weight,"

Memoir Series

he said, brushing my hair away from my face and kissing me. I nodded once he pulled back. I’d heard it so many times before from my mother and so many others that my head would automatically start bobbing anytime anyone else said it despite the screaming in my mind.

I would lose weight the following summer and shortly afterward my virginity to him. I was nineteen and living alone in the townhome in Wheeling the summer after my mother and sister moved to St. Louis.

He was not my boyfriend, not officially, even though we hung out together all that summer as I got smaller and smaller and we got more and more physical. I was just someone he was hanging out with and my loneliness and desperation instructed me to accept the scraps he was offering me.

“Something is better than nothing,”

Yeah, not always, and usually, more often than not, this is one of those bypassing/cliche terms that causes us to ignore the actuality of our pain and that the something we are enduring is potentially worse than nothing.

Our non-relationship lasted on and off (with long periods of off) for almost a decade. I met him when I was eighteen and we spoke last during that period when I was twenty-seven. He called me to let me know he was engaged to someone, asked if he could perform a sexual act on me one more time, and I hung up the phone while he was in mid-sentence.

He’s dead now. He was found dead on his kitchen floor in the late summer of 2020, acute pancreatitis after being sick for a few days. I have assumed that it was COVID-related. He had sent me a friend request at some point and I accepted, but he never really posted anything on his timeline. We had a few exchanges, very minimal, and he seemed oblivious to the damage he had caused me. I don't think he was oblivious, but I did not give him the space to unburden himself upon me.

I dreamed about him in the early winter of 2021. He and I were talking and he was apologizing to me. When I awoke the next morning it was as if we had been in the same room. I went to his Facebook page and read that he had died a few months prior, right after his birthday. As shitty as he was to me at times and as shitty as our dynamic was, he was my first love. I was sad.

Let me say this, finding out someone you had a significant relationship with has died via a Facebook post is not great, not great at all. This is also how I discovered that my childhood best friend had died. We grew up next door to one another and were besties once we were old enough to play together. We drifted a bit through high school, we were in very different crowds and a year apart in grades, but at a moment’s notice, we would run to the other if one of us needed it.

I was the maid of honor at her first wedding. I was not there for her second. She married someone who was politically, religiously, and ideologically on the opposite of the spectrum as I am and after some years passed, it took a toll on our connection. I also had put some space between me and anyone who was still enabling my mother and her abuse of alcohol, and she, unfortunately, was one of them.

My mother was like a second mother to her, and because she lived next door, she did not have to deal with my mother’s abuses and alcoholism. She got the good version of my mother, as did pretty much everyone but me, my sister, and the series of men she was in relationships with and perhaps, a few close friends. If you went to your own home at night, she was golden; if you lived with her, not so much. This is life with a high-functioning alcoholic.

Gina was living in Mississippi and had been battling cancer for some years. We had talked by phone a couple of times during her illness, but I was not aware that she had progressed to such a dire point. The night she died I had just logged onto Facebook, and the first thing I saw was a post from her niece, memorializing her.

I sat in my chair, stunned and instantly grieving. Even though we had not often been in each other’s sphere throughout our thirties and forties, I loved her still. During our childhood, we were inseparable.

”Frick and Frack,” her grandmother would say when she saw us together.

One minute later I got a DM from her older sister asking me to call her immediately. I did, but told her before calling that it was too late. I already knew.

It’s a real gut punch to jump onto social media and be hit with personally devastating news like this. I asked her sister if anyone had called my mom. They had not. Habitually, I ran to protect her, as she had an ongoing relationship with Gina, and I did not want her to find out the way I had.

It was September 16, 2017. Gina had died one day after her 51st birthday.

“Hi,” I said to my mom. She and I were back in a relationship at this point.

In 2004, a few months before our move to California I had let my mother know I could not be in contact until she sought treatment for her alcoholism. Initially, I had felt a huge surge of relief and energy in that space I had created. Four years later, in the spring of 2008, however, I realized that I had begun to use energy to hold her away from me and let her back in even though she had not sought treatment, clear on the fact that she was still actively drinking.

She had visited us a few times from Ohio since then and we were in sporadic contact at times and more regular contact at other times.

“Hey, Honey,” she replied.

I knew from her voice that she did not yet know the thing I needed to tell her that would make her cry and reopen wounds that she had barely touched since her childhood.

“I have something to tell you,” I said.

“What!” the anxiety was apparent in her voice.

“I am sorry, Mom, but Gina died today.”

“What???!!! What???!!!! I can’t talk to you right now!” and she hung up, leaving me there, her moment so huge that it did not even occur to her that I may be suffering this loss, or perhaps it did and she just was not available to me.

Her mother had died of cancer when she was eight years old. Gina had a young son at the time of her death along with two other children. The not-even-touched-with-any-form-of-healing-trauma buried in my mother drove her that night as she hung up on me, drove her most days and nights throughout my childhood and beyond, and continues to drive her today.

In 2013 after returning from visiting with me in California, she wrote these words in her will: ”I specifically make no provisions in this Will for my two children named Nora Eileen Herold and (insert my sister’s name here)”.

I had yet to discover this when I called her that night in 2017 to tend to her loss regardless of my own. I had yet to discover this during the years that followed, the visits with her, the time I went to be with her after her sister had suddenly died, and the many texts and phone calls all during the first year of the dreadful pandemic that took so much from us all and sent her into such an anxious state that she could not sit still.

“They are very safe at the places I go,” was her response when she told me she was, “just one of those people who could not stay home alone”.

In the spring of 2021, right as we were heading into the first of two eclipses I got a strange email from my mother submitted via the contact form on my site. She claimed she had gotten a new phone and her data did not transfer. She was asking for my phone number.

This, as I thought, was a lie. It turns out she had lost her phone which I found out via a text message from my mother’s cousin. My mother had been slipping into dementia. She was frantic, my mother’s cousin, and was calling to get me and my sister involved.

And we did, she and I, try to get involved.

“Who is your power of attorney?” I asked my mother.

“I think it should be you,” she said to me, not bothering to tell me that she had already created legal documents years ago naming other people to take on these roles, one of them, my younger cousin who lives near her in Ohio, the daughter of her younger brother who has died since that conversation due to full-blown alcoholism, the other, a “close friend” in Michigan. My sister and I have heard about her. I am sure she has quite a story in her head about us.

I did not yet have this data as I spent hours talking with my mother, her financial advisor, my sister, my cousin, my mother’s cousin, and on and on. My sister, meanwhile, was doing her calling and talking on her end.

By the time of the second eclipse, my younger cousin, the one named as power of attorney, sent me all the documents she had. It was then that I read the words above.

I have not spoken with my mother since.

I wonder what she was thinking when she wrote that, but then I remind myself that trying to logic out meaning from someone as damaged as she is, well, is something that defies logic.

I am sure there are people in my family who believe or will believe that her choices were a reaction to the decisions my sister and I made to distance and protect ourselves from her. They will never understand that the words in that will are not a consequence of the actions the two of us took but a demonstration of why we would choose to take actions like that in the first place. Her sadistic fantasy that we would read those words only after she died is haunting to me as are the many moments from my past where she derived pleasure from witnessing my pain either by her hands or another.

I received word this week from my cousin that my mother was moved to a memory care facility. My mother and I have not spoken since I read her will three years ago. I’ve been paralyzed since by grief and anger and wounds not yet healed, wounds that she rips open again and again and again every time I am within her reach, every time I let her back in, every time I forget who it is that lurks beneath the exterior of her mask.

The information my sister and I have is incomplete at best and being hidden from us at worst. We do not know where our mother is and the phone number given to us goes to a recording telling us the line is disconnected.

To find out that she has already been moved and to be the last ones to know about this is par for the course in our family dynamic. My sister and I are always last, the last to know, and the last on our mother’s list.

I will no longer bear this weight.

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