To my littlest mama,
Eleven years of ashes. Eleven years of you missing from me,
and me overthinking you, and beautiful heart-searing grief, the kind that
generates those hot tears from the core of who you are, and breaks you open so
new parts of you can grow, and stupid cardboard-flavored senseless grief that
just whittles away at you, and all along a tapioca-pale absence, a memory bland
and bleary like a grey morning without coffee, and the odd moments, the odd
dreams where I am a wooden skiff on the lonely sea and I don't think I can take it anymore. My mother, the grammarian. She never liked a run-on
sentence.
I wonder do people lie to you when they tell you it will get
easier, or do they lie to themselves? Maybe they don't understand what we
understand. I'm the daughter, I’m the woman she'll never be, and I’m the woman
I'll never be because she's gone from me.
There are light bulbs lined up on the counter, and they look
like hard boiled eggs, like all the road trips we will never take together, salt
leveled into sandwich bags. Who do I grieve for most? I guess it's always me,
but I want for you the lives you never had. The cool piney Maine summers,
violet-blue days of porches and cocktail hours and otherworldly perfection. The
walks down historic Charleston streets when dusk is turning to night, the heat
that never breaks but gets beaten back into submission. We survive. But we’re
never going to be the same without you. What would you have done with all those
lives? Would you have run to the edge of the crystal sea and started over
again, sea captain's telescope in hand? What would you have said to me?
I wish I could return to an unnamed place, and find her and
check her out like a well-worn library book. Death is not permanent; she is on
leave, on one of those government-imposed vacations where they have a budget
crisis so they cut your pay and send you home to roost. Somewhere she's there,
on a concrete windowsill, looking in. A passenger pigeon, a place in the
Smithsonian. Is it too much for the human mind to compute? All the things we'll
miss? Longing is the thing that never takes shape and never fades. It softens
and then comes back like a banshee calling. And you are helpless and restless
and turn back and forth from a fortress of forged iron to a delicate vase, and
you are never certain. Am I doing this right? This thing called life?
What is longing? Is it really fear? That I can’t do this
without you, that I’ll break down one day like an antique Chevy shifting gears
on a hill, and that will be it, I’ll be reduced to a useless paste? That I'll
never be enough without you? That pushing back against you being gone will
finally exhaust me? Or do I just miss having you there around the corner,
calling on the phone, coming to stay with me if we have a baby, popping into
the city for a weekend of shopping. If you were here, I never would have known
this feeling. I don’t even know who I’d be.
I drown and learn to breathe again. I’m tired of it, the
ordinary agony of missing her, the chokehold of my other life, the one not
lived because she went. The tiny seeping pain behind my eyes that whispers
maybe this life, the her-gone-life, is the better, braver one. The truer one.
Because she went. As she was meant to? And I am grateful for this life. The
things I’ve learned. The back-breaking inner strength I’ve earned (that I
exhibit when I’m not walking around feeling like a mud puddle). The
insight. And I wouldn't risk having the her-here life. That’s
one of the truths darker than truth, that I wouldn't trade in
this life even if it meant her being alive again. But still I
want her back. Against fight against reason against fate. What if longing were
strong enough to shift time and space? To cut through the sturdy yellow foam of
your absence, churn back and de-worm and de-tangle all the living that has been
stacked on top of you? What if I wanted it badly enough, and wished it solemnly
enough, and desired it with my soul so pure like new ice, and the universe
heard me and heard me and heard me and onedayyoucameback
After you, a sandstorm. Casual days coming home from work
and crumpling on the floor of my bedroom, leaning up against the cherry-colored
bedframe we bought together at that hospital charity shop. Everything is still
like snow because the world has stopped, and I’m praying to you through the
dark ceiling: please come back. Take this piano key caught in my throat and
bury it in the garden and grow me a new home. Or grow me a piano tree, and
sharpen this dull blade of silence within me. Send word for me when you’re
settled. Me me me me. When you're the one whose life is gone. Me again, not
understanding the peculiar relentlessness of death, the hands on the edge of
the cheap sink bleakness of it. Looking at my eyes, asking who will we belong
to now? The damp reality of splashing water on the last simple irrefutable
statement about you, that soon there will be none.
The few short days after they took you away, my heart filled
up at the champagne relief of your freedom. No more pain, no more trying, no
more living, no more dying. Family flooded in, tread home from nearby bars in
laughing packs, faced things with equanimity. Ashes were dispersed; thanks were
given, compliments for the deceased. Then everyone left, and we were alone with
the goneness of you. Mama to the leaves fat and waxy and still. Mama to the sky
bloated and hazy and still. Mama to the driveway, jagged grey pebbles, jagged
grey shadows. Mama mama mama mama. An unwillingness to move. Your purse: I.D.,
Virgin Mary pendant, receipts. Your car in the driveway, half a tank of gas.
The stain next to where your hospital bed had been, your pajamas, your
red-framed reading glasses, your blue bin for being sick, your cheap sheets,
your half-eaten graham cracker, your morphine, your serum, your breaking the
long night into halves and quarters calling us your hair black on the pillow
then not your ring on your hand then nestled in a ziploc bag with your name
marked on it in black sharpie your ashes your ashes your ashes you’re lost and
here we are, still living, still left behind, your dust
Open the box check the eggs remember you were loved remember
you are dead
At first, I was miserable in the way you can only be when
you have socked feet and your sock gets wet because someone dropped an ice cube
and you’re in someone else’s house and you can’t change them, so you have to go
around with a wet sock pressing up against your foot. My heart was a raisin.
Other people made me cringe until everyone else got older and suffered more and
all their hearts started pruning up too. I wanted someone to notice me, scoop
me up, tell me I looked sadder and more real than anyone else. Tell me pain was
not unending, but died or wore away with many washings like a stiff cotton
t-shirt or a pair of new jeans. But now all the jeans are pre-softened and
pre-stressed and it's too easy. Tell me I am worthy, that my pain is honorable,
that I will inspire monuments and treaties and anthems because I’ve born
it. Tell me I can bear it. But would being special have made a difference?
Longing eats steadily away at my foundation, turning concrete to a fine gritty
powder, the kind that cakes pockets and gets wedged in electronics. All I want
is a wing, a big soft one to hide under, a motherless daughter. To bury myself
in tiny down fluffs, a white cave of contentedness to put my cheek on. Absolve
me and end me. Forgive me. I am marked by sadness. No one will ever notice. My
life is an alleyway. No, my life is a cul-de-sac.
The questions spring out of the ground every year like tiny
whips of trees, acorning out of me with nowhere to go. What did you want? How
did you feel? Why did you…. When did you…. A whole life I want to know. I want
what’s mine. But would I have ever really gotten it? Who is the her that left
me behind? No, really? Since we’re into facing truths, why not answer this
question: Who is the you that is real and imperfect? Sometimes cruel or just
uptight or blind? A byproduct of a different generation, of too much religion.
Who were you, Human? And who did I make you in my heart, carefully crafting you
over the years into a tiny sweet bird of hope, feeding you with little
fragments ripped off of myself, crumbs I gave you to create you so that I could
believe that if you’d been here, I’d have felt wanted again; I’d be
whole.
You were not the perfect mother. Maybe all mothers murder
their children as much as they nurture them. You were stupid. You were selfish.
You weren’t selfish enough. You lived for us. You didn’t live enough. I loved you
too much. I love you too much. I love you all wrong. You were wrong and you
were wronged. You damaged us. You burned us to the ground. You
were an accomplice. You were too weak. You gave us a con, and then left us to
take care of a fragile monster. We never knew until later. We never knew until
later. All these years longing for you, tiny bird, and you’re not even what I
want.
All those years and all these nows, I’m crying for someone
who never existed. Someone who might never have been able to offer me what I
needed. The great friend and confidante and philosopher once we were safe,
adult, done growing— what kind of there was she until she was dying? An optical
illusion. She bound me to her but was so scared of her own life that she ran
off trying to fill every moment of it until we were left with our arms open and
empty. She was too Catholic or too exhausted or hopeless or confused to unmake
the bed of her life’s mess, so she pushed hard into her career and her
extracurriculars, charity and church and work and work, until the incessant
buzz must have started to sound like the regular rhythms of the tide, rather
than the asymmetrical whine of a life coming unraveled, a saw skittering off
its axis to sever you into ruin.
And before I give the child I was a good smack and a shot of
espresso, and send her off into the world, I need to grieve not only for you,
but also for the girl I never got to be because of the unformed man you raised
us with and kept us with and then left us alone to take care of, but also
because you were my mother, but only sometimes. A lot of the time, you were
hiding, or you were entrenched in self-imposed busy-ness. You could have been
braver. You could have protected yourself. You could have tried to protect us.
I need to sit down and see all of it and allow it to be trite and pathetic and
boring before I can tear it up and tear it down and bulldoze myself into a new
life.
Your friend once said that I was not like you. I have hated
her ever since because that’s all I wanted to be. You were my hero. I thought
you made something of yourself, that people looked up to you, and they did. You
were kind, you were ambitious, worthy of respect and admiration. You loved big.
But the older I get, the more I realize that you were so great for other
people, but you weren’t great for yourself. You didn’t see yourself. You didn’t
watch out for yourself. None of us got what we wanted, but you suffered
worst of all. After all, we’re still here; we’ll recover. You could have grasped
the life you wanted, come crashing out of that one and started over. You could
have gone to the doctor. I regret that for you, that you never gave yourself
that chance. If you’d taken off your blinders and looked around, you might have
taken care of yourself. But I guess I have the benefit of seeing through you
what you failed to see. So maybe that’s your final gift to me; the gift of a
life, lost translated to a life, saved.
I was your daughter. I wish you could have loved me longer,
but I thank you for what you gave me. Thank you for trying even when you were a
dumbass. Thank you for letting me be me, and for telling me, over and over,
that I was capable of anything. That I was bright and beautiful and going
places. Thank you for loving me even if you didn’t give me everything I needed.
I guess the only thing left to do now is forgive you. I’m not saying I’m there
yet, but I will be. I think I found you, I really do—I imagine you in your
parent’s place on Long Island (the recently-deceased kitty is there too).
You’re sitting there on the patio with the mossed bricks and the deep blue
pool, and the iced tea (make it bourbon) is sweating in your hand. Grandfather
is looking stern and wry, about to make a pun for which your mother, looking on
from underneath a floppy hat, will roll her eyes and laugh indulgently.
I don’t
know why, but I feel like you’re okay, I feel like you’re happy. So I’ll leave
you there and say thank you to the universe that I am where I am now, that I
never have to be that little girl again. Because I'm not like you, I don’t have
to be like you. I can make my own path. I'll always miss you, always, even when
I'm twenty years older than you ever got to be. I'll try not to forget your
soft voice and kind heart, how spirited and mischievous and full of gumption
you were. That ache will never heal. But as much as I miss you, I plan to keep
you waiting. You can bet I'll be fighting the good fight. I’ll fight it for
both of us. So if you’re watching, I want you to know: I'm okay too, mama. I’ll be okay. You don't have to worry about me. I'm alive!
