Our Farewell

A year ago tonight was my mother's last night in this life.

Tomorrow marks the one year anniversary of her passing. "Dead Mom Day," I've taken to referring to it in my characteristically vulgar fashion, as if by putting it as baldly as possible, I will lessen the complicated sadness of this whole fucked-up experience.

In many ways, I was much more upset with Mom's initial cancer diagnosis, the surgery, the prognosis, than I was with her death. I certainly cried much more when faced with her possible demise than when faced with her actual demise. Yet, as the months go on, I find that grief presents itself in odd, yet sharply poignant, ways. An increasingly unbearable homesickness. A silly wish that one of my sisters decides to have children. The absurd desire to know what her young adulthood was like. A heaviness in my center that just feels like a melancholic, spiritual sadness.

We never said farewell. And if I don't tap into this well of muted sorrow that seems to grow deeper by the day, I don't know that we will ever say our farewell.

She and I, we weren't close in the traditional sense, particularly after I grew up. When I was ten, I went to go live with her parents, and at the time--for two decades--I didn't question it or feel it as a rejection. Only after her diagnosis, when certain truths could no longer be ignored, did I begin to see and feel things differently. I was her youngest daughter, and when she sent me to live with my grandparents, perhaps it was because I was the one who needed the most when she was able to give it the least. Because, you see, she was Elaine before she was my mother, and Elaine was troubled.

My sisters will be the first to tell you that their bonds with her, their knowledge of her, came at a steep price. It was all about Elaine, all the time, every day. I didn't grow up feeling her increasing demands upon me, so I never felt obligated to cede to them, the way that my sisters did. You want a piece of the Mom? You better be willing to give her a bigger piece of you.



Well, I suppose it's water under the bridge, or some other dismissive figure of speech. She's gone--or maybe not so much? When I was in Florida, my sisters and I went and visited a psychic medium in Cassadaga, and while the woman we saw certainly muttered a bit of balderdash, she said quite a few things that let us know that Mom was "there." It was an odd and emotional experience, but at the end, the lady said to us, "She visits you all the time."

At the time, I found that a bit hard to believe, seeing as how getting her to visit anyone or answer the phone was difficult enough when she was on this fucking plane of existence. I'm still not sure that I believe that she visits me. And yet...

Maybe she does. Maybe she does it when Hermione, her cat that I hauled back to California, who meows and mrrrrrps at the oddest times. Maybe she does it when I hear the folksy strains of Judy Collins or Peter, Paul, and Mary. Maybe she does it every time I utter a foul word, for who else did I learn my language from? Maybe she visits each time my sisters and I come together.

Or maybe she does it all the time, hanging out in my bedroom or my cubicle or hell, even in the shower, and I'm just as oblivious and estranged from her now as I was when she was alive.