More

It is strange. There is a person that most people, from what I understand, are mourning. It’s not that I don’t miss that person—it’s that either I never had her, or realized over the years that I no longer had her. In any case—I know that I am, will be, managing some form of grief—I just don’t know what it looks like. It definitely doesn’t align with what most people connected to my mom are expressing, but that makes sense.

Right now there is part of me that wants her to be alive so I can keep asking more questions and getting angry with her again.

When she was diagnosed with leukemia in August I mourned (as I was able to) on the porch with a certain song, night after night. I wanted or needed to work with this in my own singular way. The song allowed me to imagine what she might be facing, to consider her death, and to move toward empathy rather than engagement or reconciliation.

But the big event—the dying mom, the people gathered ‘round—I felt like there was (literally) no room for me. I might write more about hospice later, about the hospital and being at their house. All of it was so brutal, and I could clearly not be a part of things.

My friend AB and I were talking and she brought up the identified patient, and we concluded I wasn’t that— I suggested was I was instead the identified murdered. (I’ve talked about this earlier—that if I was able to kill or save people I’d have done so.) But when my mom was about to die, and I was in her house, her daughter, and someone she didn’t want nearby—it was really….well, as you can guess.

I’m not going to proofread this. She died peacefully, in her way, surrounded exactly how she needed and in a way that made sense.

With all the love,

Me