The Maggot

Emerging Writer Series

Every two weeks or so I am publishing an essay from an emerging writer. This week, we are publishing “The Maggot” by Emese Ilyés. Emese recently discovered her mother's poem, written on the back of a psychiatric institution schedule, describing Emese as someone "hard to wrap in words" yet carrying pieces of her mother that allowed her mom to approach her own self more tenderly. Years after arriving as a refugee and witnessing her family disintegrate in America, eventually leading to her mom's institutionalization, Emese became a critical social psychologist whose work examines systems that categorize and label minds and bodies. Through participatory methodologies honoring non-textual ways of knowing, she collaborates with communities who understand structural violence intimately. Her mother once wrote that Emese is "esö után szívárvány"—rainbow following the downpour—and today, she strives to celebrate her ancestors with everything she does, teaching as worldbuilding, working alongside those most impacted by injustice to imagine radical possibilities. Like her mother before her, she weaves worlds with words as an act of resistance and survival.

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“I’m sorry,” my mom said in a steady voice while her pajama pants slouched at her ankles in front of the toilet.

With the diabetes gnawing away at her nerves, she has not been able to hear for over a year now, yet somehow she knew that in the living room, my father had called me a maggot and threatened to throw me out. I could spit on you and nothing but trash, he said. All his words were wrapped in the smell of alcohol and laced together with the stench of cigarettes, as most words I’ve been given by my father, throughout my life, have been. I sat defiantly in the rocking chair by the hospital bed the hospice had dropped off for my mom. I met every one of his words with a sardonic smile. My quiet demeanor was just as violent, just as intent on gutting him. I leaned back a little further and let out a small laugh that bounced against the laminate floor around us.

Even now, nearly a year after he attacked me, I cannot understand why. My visit was unremarkable. I packed a small bag in New York as I had done many times before. I boarded a plane with other quiet passengers who, like me, might have also carried unspeakable wounds through the vastness of the sky. I arrived in Portland as I had done many times before. I once again walked into the duplex I rented for my parents.

“Édi!” I would sing, the nickname I have for my mom, as I had done countless times before.

“Eme!” She’d be roused from even the deepest morphine-induced sleep, and with a smile as wide as the universe itself, her love would swallow me up.

My mother’s death approached. I heard its breath getting closer and closer as my mother’s grew more and more raspy. These visits became more beautiful, more precious as my mother began to fade. Awareness of a beyond outside of our contained now intruded in our mundane sense of the everyday.

“The best thing about your mother’s death will be that I will never have to see you again,” said my father, three steps away from me. His time-textured face was contorted by a hardened, seething rage.

Without flinching or letting my gaze flutter away, I just sneered back. “Does this make you feel like a man – yelling at your daughter, who makes it possible for you to live here?” I said. The acidic words burned through my lungs.

I knew this tone. I know this tone. I have never heard it from my own body, but I know it intimately. It is the tone with which my mother armored herself during decades of violent abuse. Until I was nearly ten, my mother raised my sister, my brother, and I on her own across the ocean, beyond several mountain ranges in the valley of the Carpathian Mountains. My father had escaped communism, but sometimes I think we escaped him during those years apart. Because of Ceausescu’s inhumane policies, we never quite had enough food and no one ever felt safe, but my mother took us hiking with her students, she found a way to build a library from smuggled books, she could make countless different meals from nothing but potatoes and onions.

I did not know that tone until we reunited with my father in the U.S. in the mid 90s. Isolated, alienated, working third-shift jobs at factories, my father’s alcoholism consumed him, and my mother fell into a deep depression that festered into paranoid schizophrenia. She was grieving her lost selves; she was grieving her children whose tongues and roots merged with a land that was not known to her, with a land that rejected her. Through her grief, she never accepted the everyday rage that hardened my father. He yelled and cursed and tore her apart with his cruel words, yet she smiled, and spat, and laughed.

My mother was a revolutionary witch, dying slowly.

I have learned a lot of magic from my mom. I’ve learned to write, to find my way home through books. I learned to express myself with food. At that moment, as I recognized my tone, I realized I also learned the witchy art of armoring myself with laughter to dismantle cowardly men who try to rob me of my power.

With the cigarette already in his hands and a can of beer bulging from his jacket pocket, my father stumbled outside to the metal patio chair that was his throne. On that black metal chair, leaning against the panels of the house on the front lawn, my father felt the safest. Despite the eyes of strangers, despite the rain in the Pacific Northwest soaking his clothes, my father felt protected with his jacket hood pulled over his head and slumped in the metal chair with a can of beer balancing on his arthritic knees. Maybe the rain-softened ground beneath his tattered shoes in the front yard absorbed his regrets in a way the walls inside never could. Walls tend to echo while the soil absorbs.

It was as if the force from the slamming of the door had punctured the fragile container holding my tears back. I howled without a sound. I howled for the decades my mother had to endure this pain. I howled as abuse from my childhood bled through these fresh cuts. I howled that I could not save my mother. I howled that her armor eventually destroyed her, eventually metastasized into rectal cancer, eventually will kill her. I howled in silence next to her bed while she sat on the toilet.

“Eme?” she called from the bathroom. Quickly drying my eyes, shaking to dislodge the impossible grief from my chest so I could breathe again, I stood up to walk the few steps toward her.

“I’m sorry I made the wrong choice and married the wrong man,” she said, her thin arms open and stretched out toward me. I slumped on the edge of the tub and collapsed into her chest, pressing my forehead against the gash where the chemotherapy once trickled into her and soaking her pajama with my hot tears.

“I’m sorry,” She repeated gently and caressed my hair with her soft, trembling fingers. I could not find words in the flood of my pain, only sobs which moved in waves through my body.

“Don’t let anyone hurt your soul,” my mom said with a clarity that only comes from having survived hell over and over again. “Promise me you’ll protect your soul.”

I cried at her words. I tried to hide it, but I wondered if she felt my tears against her shoulders as I buried my face in her chest.

I lifted her and had her wrap her arms around me so I could pull her adult diaper and pajama pants up before pivoting her back into her wheelchair. It is moments like that that I can now feel in my body. Her thin, wispy hair tickling my cheeks, and my feet firmly pressed against the tile to support the fullness of her weight melting into me. Time is different in my cells. I still feel the pressure of her weight. I still brace my body to carry her safely where she needs to go.

I went back to New York for a few days, a few weeks but once again, I packed my small bag. Once again, I boarded a plane with others whose worlds were ending. Once again, I opened the door and fell into the warm abyss of my mom’s endless love.

Each time I opened the door of the duplex on those visits, I was engulfed in steamy swirls of sauerkraut and dill. She had lost the ability to eat, but on the rare occasion when the desire to hold memories on her tongue arose, my father had a pot of stuffed cabbage ready to warm up. Wrapping a stained dishcloth around her neck, he’d lift a forkful of food toward her lips with his swollen, shaking hands, letting the aroma of food they ate at their own wedding—the food that would be served at my mother’s funeral—caress her nostrils. He would coax her to take a bite with jokes and rhymes from another time and another place. It was a secret language I could not have imagined between them.

My mother and I exchanged fewer and fewer words between us; she spent more and more time in other worlds. As I sat next to her bed, I imagined her slipping into an opening in space and time to once again find herself in the little Hungarian village in the Carpathian Mountains. Instead of the metal bars of the bed, next to her would be the tall poplar trees that line the roads home. I imagined her strolling, limbs free and light, down the road that winds past the old Catholic Church with the white steeple, past the school she attended as a child, and in front of the blue stucco house my grandpa built. I imagined the softness of her smile as she made it home after so many years away.

“Where were you?” I would smile at her and ask her during fleeting moments of consciousness. Sometimes she'd tell me about the pet chicken she had when she was a child that used to walk her to school, wait for her to finish, and walk back with her every day. I imagined that they were together again in those moments.

Again, I boarded a plane, and came home to New York. Only to pack my bags once again. Again. And again. And again. I joined the strangers who accompanied me on this impossible journey. Until May.

She took her last breaths as I was making my partner’s birthday cake. My bags were packed, and I had intended to fly at 6 a.m. the next morning when I got the call from my father.

“The time of death is 2:30 p.m.,” he said. His voice was shocked and distant.

I’m still getting calls from him. I still pick up. A month after I flew my mom’s ashes back to her village, back to my grandma, my father stopped drinking. His voice is unlike anything I have ever heard before. It is a little scared and sometimes vulnerable, like a child waking up from a bad dream.

That’s the thing about choices: they can be so much bigger than awareness itself. My mother, the beautiful teacher from the village in the mountains, fell in love with my father, the rebellious history teacher from the mining town. He was nothing that she had ever seen. Volatile. Brilliant. Dangerous. Crazy enough and strong enough to swim across a frozen river toward the possibility of a better life for his family. Her willingness to fall for him gave me my first breath. Choices are complicated.

Over the last year of her life, as I saw their relationship transform into an impossible love story, I’ve tried to write it down. Each time I would start, I felt like I couldn’t finish, it was not yet the end. Now, after my mom’s last breaths, now that he remains, I see that it is me. I am the love story. It is my life; I am writing it.