11/15/22

Dear Mommy,

I stopped writing you letters. A survival tactic, I suppose. I stopped journaling in general. It all feels like nonsense in a world where your body no longer exists.

You were taken from us. It is a cruelty that astonishes me, the cruelty of the universe. How could it show you so much hate and so much love in one lifetime?

I miss you. These are the truest words I will ever speak, yet they feel redundant. It is clear that I miss you, that we all miss you, so what’s the point of saying what we all know? It would be like saying the sky is blue or we breathe air, but if there are three words I could speak forever on a loop, it would be those. I miss you. I miss you. imissyou. Until the letters blend together and they lose all meaning.

Except they never will because those three words are the only words I can guarantee will remain true until the day I die.

When I sit with my pain, when I allow myself to acknowledge it, I want to scream.

It takes discipline not to scream every day. At movie theatres, in the grocery store, on airplanes, hanging out with friends.

Few know the true sound of my pain. It is the pain of losing the one person who was everything.

Those who knew you understand. They are shocked by how well I’m doing, stunned by my ability to sit through four hour plays or work for hours on end or even get out of bed.

You were the very best person. And you were mine.

Someone who loved you wailed but she was the only one who mattered after hearing about your death, and I’m inclined to agree.

I want you to be known. I want to share your magic, if magic can be shared.

I wanted to give you my organs, googling whether I could donate a lung to someone who had metastatic cancer as you napped. The internet unequivocally denied my request, but I still wanted to try. Would have brought the impossible idea up to your doctors once you were strong enough, even as I knew you never would be, your time on this earth diminishing at an alarming rate.

I would have given my life for yours without blinking. We were the same blood type. That used to reassure me, but it would prove meaningless. I could not save you. All I could do was bear witness. To grant you the permission you asked me for. The permission to die.

I hate that you felt you needed my permission. I hate that I gave it.

You were my most constant source of unconditional love.

The two of us were inseparable, and now we have been separated in the most brutal of ways.

There is so much I took for granted. I know you hated compliments. They made you uncomfortable, impossible to take in after a childhood of unrelenting abuse. But momma, I wish I had sat down and told you how amazing you are. That I had criticized you less, that I had appreciated the miracle of you more.

Because momma, you were a miracle.

I don’t know what tense you exist in, so I address you in both. A grammatical Spanglish of sorts.

I can’t abide silence. My airpods require daily charging. Podcasts and a playlist I titled Mom and the voices of those that loved you. Love you.

When there was silence, I would call you. And I can’t call you. I know that, but I don’t want to be reminded of it, so I’ve become addicted to sound. Sound that helps keep me alive.

It’s not that I want to die. It’s that it feels pathological to not be with you.

You spent the majority of your relatively short life with me. But eventually, I will spend the majority of my life without you. A betrayal I cannot avoid.

I dread turning 30. I dread each birthday that marks another year without you, the anniversary of your death just three days after the anniversary of my birth.

I am finding you inside me, can feel myself grasping at the miracle of you, your strength a thing I must have absorbed through osmosis during all those years when it was us against the world. But I’m tired of it. This growth and maturity that’s been forced upon all of us, because here we are, having to survive without you.

Can’t we just have you back instead?