08/21/22

I want my mom back. A refrain I keep chanting in my head, aware of how ridiculous I would sound if I said it out loud. You can never come back. I will never see you again, never touch you again, and that is a reality so cruel it makes me want to tear each strand of hair out of my head.

The only way to have you back without running into oncoming traffic, an option I spent the first month seriously considering, the only way to keep both you and I alive is to find you inside of me. A task that feels close to impossible when I’m so inundated by grief I’ve forgotten how to breathe.

And yet, there is no way forward but this one. Fashioning your life into a string of words I can only hope do you some sort of justice. Even when writing those words feels akin to setting my flesh on fire, forced to confront your death over and over again as I pull each word from the air, words now the only way to share the phenomenon that is my mother.

Writing this is to live inside the excruciating ache that has become my life. The ache I use friends and midnight runs and Survivor to escape, but that I have to confront to survive this. The ache I need to dive into to feel close to you, the person who taught me how to love and be loved. A gift your parents seldom gave you, but one you made sure to give us, pouring your love into the pores of our skin until there was little love left for you. So I learned to pour that love back into the twenty-two-year-old who mothered me exactly the way I needed.

It was a constant flow that defined me for twenty-nine years, and now that flow has been cut off without any warning. I was born two weeks late, unwilling to leave the home you provided with your body. It didn’t occur to me when we were spreading your mother’s ashes that your ashes would be sitting in a funeral home four months later, waiting for me to get up the nerve to pick them up. To pick you up.

I want nothing more than to bring you home, but that requires strength I’m not sure any of us possess. We are using up all our strength every day simply by breathing.

You’ve been there for almost three months, living at some funeral home we’d never heard of in the magical innocence that was before.

What the fuck.