Dear Mom

Sometime last month, shortly after our first snowfall, I found you again. For the first time in so long I was able to close my eyes and not see you dying... I could settle into bed without feeling the searing pain and desperation. And I began to feel you everywhere.

It took a few weeks for me to realize that the flashbacks and the trauma of the last year had begun to fade. I had grown accustomed to the ever-present emptiness during the daytime, only to be replaced with terror and sadness waiting on my pillow at night. The release was not anything I expected or have felt before. And there have even been moments since in which I have felt so filled up with you that my loneliness and my doubts seemed suddenly weightless.

When I think back on these moments there is a peace that I feel, no matter how frightening and heartbroken the hours before might seem. And I know that you are real and forever in a way I could not have imagined. It is not what I thought and it is not what I had wanted, but it is right and it is real in itself.

I've been sketching my memory of you every day since and there are times I want to write it all down in case it takes on the fade of an old photograph over time. I know that it's not possible to do, but there are things I cannot bear to lose and I refuse to believe that my children will not see them as vividly as I. Your voice, your laughter, the feel of your smile all around... the way you seem to almost bounce instead of walk through many memories. Of course I remember the other parts too... anger in your eyes, desperation in your words, fear that shook you to the core at times; but now I can remember beyond the sick and terrifying days of last year and that is a gift in itself.

Somehow, we survived Christmas. Taking out the boxes of ornaments, artifacts from Jeff's and my childhood you'd kept, and everything wrapped and marked with your writing made your absence so real all over again. I remember coming home from the hospital that Saturday last November when you were diagnosed, feeling so exhausted from sobbing and holding onto you so hard. I went to lie down on your side of the bed and I thought I might go crazy right then and there. The thought that our house would not be our house without you, your bed would not be your bed... how could I continue to be alive if you would not? My life exists because of you and your life... so how, how could it be that I might go on if you had to stop? Decorating the house for Christmas this year was like lying in your bed that day, except I couldn't do what I did last November. I couldn't get in the car and drive right back to you and hold on for dear life. Instead I grabbed onto what I have of you now and promised you that I would hold on anyway for you and for me, for Dad, and for Jeff.

I like to think of what you might say to me in any given moment. Most days, I believe that I know exactly what it would be and just how you might say it. That keeps me going, Mama. There are things that I can only do for you when I can't do them for myself and they always end up being the right things. No matter how difficult that is some days, I know that I can do it for you, just as you did it for me for 29 years.