I don’t know if I can go about actually describing the moments, the reminders, the trails that lead to my sorrow these days of mourning my mother. Mourning, grieving, grieving is better-- mourning gives an illusion that there is an end, “a period of mourning”. I don’t believe there is an end. I believe I am in, or am entering into, my first real period of understanding of what my life is to be like without her. How many instincts, moments, there are that I didn’t recognize before; of thinking of her, bonding with her. How much of my life was lived for her approval--not approval, but in order to join her more. Joining her in her past was the only way I knew to get to her, it was there that she seemed the most content, the most “in life”. I suppose that’s why I am writing the story that I am.
Her living brought me great comfort, there were only a handful of months put together that brought me great stress. But I’ll admit the best of her evaporated when she left her home. That’s the real reason of the story isn’t it? My dream fulfillment of bringing her home again somehow.
Sorrow, real sorrow, it is a verb, it is a place, a plane of being. It can’t be explained, there are triggers that pull you there in a moment, but to try and capture them and hold them out for Chris to understand how I came there; it’s futile, pointless, because it’s not the moments that ferry me there that matter--to speak of them feels a distraction. How can you explain to someone who hasn’t been there? It is a place that will always exist on some level within me--because my mother will never be a voice I can speak to, a conversation, a story told, a question answered, an existence to be comforted by, eyes to see the pictures of my life. Part of me is now gone, half of my history swallowed up, dissipated, scattered. My favorite half by far.
How ironic the things you can’t understand about your mother until she is gone, I could never understand, truly, how she felt about losing her mother, such a huge loss for her, until I lost her. So many stories have come forward to me that I can’t query her about because she is gone, gone from me in the way I needed her.
I could curl up in this sorrow for a year and not be done with it. With work and babies and love and life, it sits below the surface waiting for the moments in a day to pulse out. It strikes now, blows to my heart and stomach, surprising me. It’s becoming familiar and I’m sure that the sharpness, the acute blunt force will dull with time, but the striking will not. Writing is my only hope of resurrection.
