After the Death of my Mother
The loss comes in four varieties so far: the permanent absence of the feel of her physical body near mine and possible-to-be-near mine, its smell and warmth and total symbiosis to mine, it as the most primal origin of my being and consciousness, its proof of me having a source.
Two, the loss of her yet becoming, and her future mind, the evolving of her intellect, abilities and exploration, her self-actualization and unfinished unfolding personhood, the remainder of her unlived path. The operas she had not read or seen or studied, the unknown biographies of favorite authors, the quest of her living thinking to grow and harvest and be in bloom all year.
Third the loss of the other person in our shared history and memories, the reference point for each moment in which we both were present, the emotional object to my own subjecthood.
The voracious reader who then gave me every book she loved and commanded me to read. The giver of lipstick appearing in my mailbox, wild oranges and hussy reds. The constant buyer of gifts for children, tractors for the Russian 6-year-old New Yorker from his birth; books books for every child. The buyer of my work dresses and shoes and lavender bath soap. The dog grandmother. Ad Infinitum.
The sharer and bearer of my decades-long personhood contained and embodied in billions of dual moments. She will never stock her bathroom with a fresh toothbrush for my visit or send me a quilt-destined postage square of material. She will write no more letters. She will tell me the proper butter position of the turkey on Thanksgiving morning no more.
There are no more repetitions on which to rely for me to, in time, absorb and inherit in her ways. I must summon all of them at once or lose them all with her, the sounds never echoing again from her room, the coffee never making, waiting for red Chimayo cup mornings.
I lose all of her at once and then over and over and over with each recalled memory I experience anew since her death. Each one suddenly loaded and recalibrated and tainted with her thereafter death. No memory is divorced now from the end of memory creation. They’ve all been edited, now aggrieved and seared and calcifying, glass broken and picture warped. Strawberry cake now grim, laughter a bait of fear: what will I forget or fail to remember next? Will joy be joy with only one of them? How to clean out her places without erasing her from the templates of her remaining in me?
As I try to retrieve my places we held together, there is only one of us now who can tell about what we saw and felt and said. There is no place left she can corroborate or disagree, no flowers left to plant to see whose will outlast the winter, hers or mine. There is no mother to show my home to with the gifts she bought for it. There is no drive in the car she bought me, telling me to get every safety upgrade in existence. She died in a car accident.
There is no record of the Christmas decorations and what year they came from or whom. I must lose her again and for the first time each new memory I recall her presence in, each new season a chill or rainstorm we do not greet across the counties, generations trained on droughts and heat, aching each thunderhead for a drop or a respite. No one is less pedestrian or more unique than a mother, more defined, crisp and singular. She was unmistakably mine and I her only. Even her name is mine. Her skin and cheekbones and thumbnail beds. What proof is there that she was who she lived as, that she even existed as who I knew? There is only absence, the spaces she walked, where there is nothing now. A life and its things as if placed there by invisible stage hands. She never comes back. Hollow. Only I have to keep turning the lights on and return to the emptiness the way she left it and make it emptier. Make her less there. Take what is left of her and take her away.
Fourth. The loss of being able to talk about losing her with her. That she lost her mother three years ago and I couldn’t understand the way I do now. The conversations we won’t have about how I see in every piece of paper how hard she tried. But for this death, I would never have learned her secrets and her dogged refusal to let them win. I thought she was the strongest person I knew but I only knew a sliver of her obstacles. I sit in them now, fading and molded and having outlived her. Doing what she couldn’t to meld them into manageable. I can finish what she needed help with. I can do this for her. I can tell the story of how we came to our Monday , that awful Monday when I could not get to her in time and they could not get her out of that car. We came to that Monday. I do what I did not know how to do. The sounds that come out of me when I break open for her sound like an animal, crawling and begging for mommie, mommie.
