05/10/23

A year ago today, I visited you in the hospital. It was my first time checking in – I was lost as I navigated lines and forms and guest passes. Soon, I would learn the system. Soon, that hospital would become my second home. There are more of my tears soaked into that ICU floor than there are anywhere on this earth.

May used to be my favorite month. Mother’s Day, my birthday, the sun poking its way through formerly cloudy skies. Now May represents decay, trauma, loss. May will always be the month that destroyed our lives.

This is horrendous.

Your words. Words that captured what this month was, is, perhaps forever shall be.

It is horrendous, Mom. A year later and I’m still here but I don’t know how. It’s been one excruciating day at a time. Days that can be beautiful but are never without pain.

Life will never be without pain, not fully, and I guess I should be grateful for the decades of innocence. That sheltered time where I thought the world held a certain sort of logic. This was the month that showed me I knew nothing. That a thriving, healthy, young woman could walk into a hospital and never walk out. That a cancer you didn’t even know about could take a life in 21 days. That the best medical care could make things infinitely worse, not better.

You died of pneumonia. Pneumonia after a tube was accidentally yanked out of your body by doctors who refused to fess up. A tube that had been surgically implanted to keep your lungs functioning, lungs that could not survive the infection that medical error inflicted on your ailing body.

A year ago, I had hope. A year ago, I was wiping my tears on your blanketed legs because I was worried we only had years left.

We barely had weeks.

You were hopeful. I can still feel your hope, can taste it without trying.

As each year goes by, will I lose sight of what that hope looked like? Will the memory of your optimism, your life, your faith… will it fade?

The sadness, it permeates everything. It haunts even my smiles. It’s hard to commit to the living when so much of me belongs to the dead.

Amidst all the sadness, there is something else, too.

It hurts to write, hurts to think, hurts to admit the mystifying truth.

There is a gift that accompanies your beautiful mother dying tragically young, and that gift is being able to appreciate the magic of the universe, the magic you previously didn’t stop to notice, magic now the only language at said mother’s disposal.

The way you communicate with me, Mom, it’s stunning. The myriad of methods you employ to get across hidden messages or make physical contact or even just say hi are enough to make me believe in everything your death made me lose faith in.

Sometimes I believe it’s you writing these letters, pushing my pen across the page, typing each word up. Sharing them with the world, to be read one day, or not. To do whatever the magic of the universe you are now embedded in has in store for them.

Happy May Mom. I will keep stumbling through each day for you.