Barbara Boughton    Medical & Lifestyle Writer

I’ve always envied other mothers and daughters—women who shared confidences as well as a common history. My mother and I battled like prizefighters throughout my adolescence and adult life. For many years, our dissatisfaction with each other filled our Long Island home.

Now, at age 37, I was about to face the dual nature of our relationship—the hostility and the love—one more time. I was flying on a plane from San Francisco to New York because my 71-year-old mother, Anne, was dying. After struggling with breast cancer for two years, she had taken a final turn for the worse. Looking out the airplane window into the black sky, I wondered if I was too late. Could my mother have died already? And if she had, would I sense it?

Little did I know that the airplane flight from San Francisco to New York was the beginning of a long journey. Not only would I say goodbye to my mother in that last fateful week, but I would also embark on a journey of self-discovery that would last several years.

At the airport gate, my brother Michael had welcome information. My mother—who had always been determined to fight her cancer--had made it through the night. “Bobby,” she cried out in surprise, smiling, as we entered her room at the hospital. Her face was ashen as I hugged her.

During the next few days, the hospital staff kept my mother on large doses of morphine, a drug that seemed to help her see the world through a haze of good cheer. She occasionally talked of “when I become an angel” and kept a small gold angel pinned to the baseball cap she liked to wear. The angel would bring her luck, she said.

For us, the sight of the gold angel was a bit unsettling, just as it was uplifting. It was a reminder that my mother could die, and soon, from her disease. Yet we also joked about how the angel was a lucky charm. The sight of that angel united us—and made us able to laugh at the cancer, so it didn’t defeat us.

At the hospital I frequently felt a variety of emotions—anger at my mother for dying, anger at the doctors for failing to save her, sorrow, and guilt about our past relationship. There had long been resentment between my mother and I. She was frequently critical, expecting high achievement, at the same time she seemed to mistrust my choices. “I’m your best critic,” she would joke. But I didn’t laugh; I was trying too hard to meet her high expectations, at the same time I hated them.

Not that there weren’t good memories—memories of watching our favorite 1940s movies together, working on school projects, and celebrating family holidays. But for many years the memories of our frequent battles were more powerful. I particularly remember one clash over a planned high school trip: her quick dismissal of my burgeoning independence.

One evening, a few days before I left for my freshman year at the University of Virginia, I told my mother that a boy from a nearby town had asked me for a date. Even though I had been out on dates before, my mother was disapproving this time—mostly because I had met the boy at a neighborhood bar. “You’re not going out with him,” she said flatly, as she stared at me over a couch filled with neatly folded clothes. “You have to help me pack for your trip to Virginia.” I stomped away from her, hurt and raging inwardly. Not only was my mother angry about my proposed date, I sensed, but also that I was leaving her for college—trying out my wings as an adult.

As I grew older, my mother came to believe that I had betrayed her by moving clear across the country for a job and starting psychotherapy “to complain about your parents,” she once said. Sometimes these resentments would erupt into shouting matches on the phone.

After one such bitter, furious fight, my mother surprised me by announcing that she was coming down alone to meet me in Houston, Texas, where I then lived. When I got to the airport 10 minutes late, my mother was fuming. We were tense and quiet at first. But over the next few days we began to talk haltingly about our different values, our different lives. After she returned home, she started sending me Hallmark friendship cards. Our relationship was still not perfect—but now I knew she was trying to reach out as a friend.

During the last week of my mother’s life, I drew near to her hospital bed and took up her hand. There was no one else in the room. “Mom, I love you,” I said. She looked at me, her eyes clear behind her smudged glasses. “We’ve certainly had some hard times along the way, but we’ve made it, haven’t we? she said and smiled. “I love you too, Barbara.”

It was near the end of that week that my mother started becoming weaker. For several days, she drifted in a coma. The days were long and filled with waiting. One morning I was at my father’s house when the phone rang. “She’s gone,” my father said simply over the phone, his voice choking.

 Afterward would come the mourning. But now I was just stunned. I turned to my husband Gary, and hugged him wordlessly.

Weeks later, after the busyness and drama of my mother’s wake and funeral, came the mourning—my crying jags at night, my guilt, the anger. And even some depression. I began to have nightmares. I was floating in the air, then diving into a deep black abyss. My mother was fleeing a raging fire and she walked past me in my dream. I tried to catch her attention, but she couldn’t see I was there.

To me these dreams resonated with loss. I was diving into my feelings of grief, just as into a black abyss. The dream about the raging fire bolted me awake, reminding me that my mother could no longer protect me.  No matter how I tried, I couldn’t reach her anymore.

Sometimes I would cry after these dreams, and my husband would hold me gently. It took lots of time, many months, of crying--but eventually the ache began to slowly lessen.

Now years later, I’m no longer mourning. I try to remember the good times with my mother, and forgive the bad ones. Sometimes I miss my mother. She’s not there to answer the phone when I call or to share the good times, the career triumphs, of these last years. A friend of mine who’s also lost her mother to cancer agrees that she still feels the pain of her mother’s death—especially on holidays, particularly Mother’s Day.

At the same time, I know that I’ve come to an important turning point. I’ve started to understand my relationship with my mother, to see that in many ways we were the same—stubborn in our principles and unfailingly emotional, qualities that fueled our battles. Yet we could be empathetic and imaginative too. As it happened, the grief I felt after her death was a learning process. After I came out on the other side, I knew myself—and my mother—much better than ever before.

This essay appeared originally in In Touch magazine.