Attempt at Life ...and loss.

I thought I did it. I didn’t fall apart during Christmas. I got through my mother’s Christmas Eve birthday. I dug deep for the type of joy she brought everywhere and tried to spread it at the various family Christmas gatherings. And I succeeded. We had a nice Christmas. We laughed. Almost magically. We bathed in the suspended relief of laughter.

It's a few days later and tonight, after singing along to music, I cooked an excellent risotto. The type I would have sent her a photo of. And when I sat down and took the first bite, out of nowhere, I dissolved into the guttural despair I thought I had tricked myself into bypassing. 

First comes the panic.
How can she be gone?
Like, really? How?
And why?
Why her? 

And then comes the cruel flash of those last days and moments hitting me like bullets. Fast. But the type of bullets that don’t kill, they just leave gaping wounds. Remembering the way I hid in that bright, sunny hospital corridor and begged every angel to take her. To take her. And how odd those words tasted in my mouth. How opposite. The mercy of telling the universe it’s not right for someone to suffer that way. That I’d rather pay by suffering without her because she is everything and she was being reduced to the unimaginable.

And then they did. They took her. 

I remember how after she was gone and I got home from the hospital, I looked around and was startled by the cold reality. The milk I bought before she went to the hospital outlived her. The bag of dried bay leaves she gave me to cook with outlived her. She wasn't coming back. Was she? Please?

Technology becomes a daily Russian roulette with your feelings. The cheerful voicemails that live on my phone that say, “Hi honey! It’s Mommy. I just wanted you to know I’m ok today. Love you, call me back.” And for a second, I believe that I can. The photos and videos of before she died - the way every time I look at them I do this morbid math of how it’s ‘this many days before she would be gone’. If only I knew. But then what? What would it change?

Nothing.

The part about grief nobody tells you is that it’s this horribly lonely club of nothingness. You belong to it, but you don’t congregate with any of the recent members. They’re all feeling it at different times and in different ways. And your reminiscing triggers them and their bringing it up can feel like a slap out of the blue. Nobody teaches you how to walk through it. And it feels like there’s a universally allotted amount of time the non-grievers give you before they expect you to move on and not get heavy. That silent message is quick to receive. 

But the grief veterans somehow know when you’re having a bad day. They know to reach out and say, "Hey I'm thinking about you." or "Look this is going to be hard today, be gentle with yourself." Those messages are lifelines. They're a hand reaching out to help lift you from this crater that is constantly trying to swallow you. 

Losing my mom has not shown me the fragility or poetry of life. It has shown me the emptiness of it. The never-coming-back of it. I wasn't expecting that, I think. I thought I'd feel her everywhere. I thought - I don't know what I thought. 

This isn't a cry for help. It's just truth. And sometimes truth is painful.

I know I’ll be ok.
Because I have been.
It’s crazy how that happens.
Since she's died, I have laughed. I’ve sung. I’ve danced.
And even felt joy. 
But tonight, I needed to let it out. 
That she was here. She was everything.
Now she's not.

And I just miss her.