When she died, something changed, but maybe it was for the better. Maybe I would have been a mama's girl otherwise. Even though sometimes the thought of her absence wells up in me like a wooden door swollen with humidity, and I feel like my heart won't fit in my body, most of the time it's okay.
Today I'm thinking about when we rescued my dad in Puerto Vallarta. He had been drinking heavily just a few months after major surgery, and he came unstitched. That sounds like a metaphor, but it's not. We had all been down there as a family, had a somewhat anxious treacherous vacation, but also with beautiful moments of grace, waking up before breakfast with a snack bar to swim in the big empty shaded pool, going for a run along the malecón. We went home on March 6. Four days later we got the call that he was in the ICU in a Mexican hospital, that he intestine had perforated. He had two emergency surgeries and we flew back down to see what was what. He was there for 5 weeks.
My mom dying changed me, it forced me to grow up. It made me bitter in some ways and (more) judgmental about the way other people acted. It ached when I got engaged, when I got married, bought my own condo, bought my own house, took care of my dad. But it didn't take something essential and buoyant away from me the way that trip did. The not sleeping for days on end, the not knowing what was going on, having one remaining parent in a hospital in a foreign country. It wore away at me and my brother, not knowing what we would do, how we would get him home. My brother wet the bed. I held myself together filling out insurance forms and sending them from my romantic vacation in the Bahamas. We couldn't get doctors to speak with us, there was a language barrier. Eventually we found out, miracle of miracles, that he'd gotten travel insurance and that it would cover an air ambulance, but not until we've researched a bunch of air ambulances, since he never bothered to tell us.
My mom was the center of my life, the thing that made the earth turn. Yet she was nothing compared to this.
