It’s funny how it hits. You think you’re ok, but that insistent drum of anxiety plays in your stomach and gets louder and louder until it rings in your ears. And deafens you. I didn’t realize there was a scream in my throat. But there it lives. It just doesn’t have the courage to release itself. Is today the day? This life is not the way they sell it. Everyone is in crisis. Everyone. I don’t feel good. But somehow I feel it’s never my turn. Never my turn to say: hey, I’m struggling. Well, here I am. Struggling. In the airline safety videos they instruct to attach your air mask before you can help another person put theirs on. I think I don’t know how to do that. Since my mom was dying, I don’t know how to exist in that space. I don’t know how to help myself when another person is holding on for dear life. And watching it slip away. Helplessly. Did I think I wouldn’t be maimed by it? That it wouldn’t fundamentally change me? I’m strong, I said. It’s not happening t
It’s so hot on this Roman balcony that my tears evaporate as they hit my cheeks. I’m in Italy. Beautiful, stinking hot Italy. It’s dusk. It’s golden hour. It’s so perfect that it hurts. In the last month of her life, as if knowing the end was nigh, my mother handed me a 5x7 white envelope with a handwritten letter and a cheque. Telling me that “although she wishes with all my soul that I could have had another trip with you, life had other plans. Please use this money to spend on memories. Go to Italy, toast to me and I will be with you.” Cut to 1 year and two months after that letter was placed in my tear stained hands, and here I am - toasting her with prosecco, some fresh figs (which she adored) and listening to Renato Carosone. It’s a cheerful Italian song from the 50’s. I can hear her singing along off-key, like she did in the hospital those last days, when I played it for her on my phone speaker. We were outside on the cafeteria terrace in the sun and she was in a wheelchair