I sat on the edge of her bed while she lay there struggling to breathe. Her body had been ravaged by lung cancer, emphysema, and the aftermath of her lung surgery six months earlier. She looked up at me and, without any warning, said in a labored voice, “Paul, I know…I’m dying…it’s okay.”

My family and I had been hiding from her the doctor’s terminal prognosis (we didn’t want to upset her), but she had obviously figured it out (she was NO dummy). With her words of defeat, I burst into an uncontrollable crying jag that cut through my attempt at being a stoic 18–year old boy about to lose his mother. She was suffering, and soon it would be time for her to leave us.

Underneath the unbearable strain of the impending loss of my mother was the presence of another set of emotions – the fear, doubt, and deeply embedded shame associated with my newly discovered certainty of being gay (see Are You a Friend of Dorothy?). I wanted so desperately to share with her that I’m gay; I wanted to be real with her; I wanted to be loved and accepted by her; but I also wanted to respect the fact that she deserved as much peace as possible during the remaining days or weeks of her life.

For better or worse, I chose to hide my personal revelation. A new, parallel sense of mourning emerged – that I would never have the opportunity to come out to her and she would never know (at least in an earthly way) this very important transition that I was making in my life. We were each making our own transitions and we didn’t have the opportunity to share them fully with each other. I was beginning one of my many transitions from invisible to visible (emotionally, psychologically, interpersonally) and she was beginning the transition from visible to invisible (in a physical or bodily sense).

I never did muster up the strength to come out to her that day. My internal story was that she was too sick to deal with such disappointing and controversial news. More so, I deeply feared that she may reject me outright, tell me to get out, or be so heart-broken that she would die on the spot. Whatever the outcome, I imagined it would be something horrible. 

The next morning I headed back to college, hopeful that I would return within a few weeks. I never saw her again. She died five weeks later, the day before Thanksgiving 1983, while I was making the 5–hour drive home from college. The coroner had removed her body from her bed about one hour before I arrived home. Once again, my mom and I were simultaneously in transition – she to her new home and me to my childhood home.

I suspect that if my mom had continued to live long enough for me to come out to her that she would have struggled, at first, but eventually embraced all of me, that she would have made the effort to understand.

What was a time in your life in which you chose to hide a part of yourself? What did you hide? How did it turn out? What opportunity did you abandon as a result of choosing/needing to hide?

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