One of Those Things

I have something to tell you... all the time. I know this is going to crack you up and we will laugh about it for years to come... Only YOU would appreciate this... So, remember that time?

Quite honestly, this happens at least 30 times a day. I go to talk to you, to call you, to email you. I push aside little thoughts and observations to tell you later. I know exactly how you'll respond, what you will say... how you will feel.

And then there comes that hollow again. It's like an echo in an empty house, a drop-in-the-bucket kind of sensation that feels just as unreal as it did five months ago.

Those moments are the absolute worst of it, Mom. They don't always last long but they are always the same size. They hit with the same force. And suddenly what all of those people kept saying makes sense... It doesn't get easier it just gets different.

I'm amazed by how much I hurt. And the irony in what I want most makes the hurt like a cut that won't heal, because it's you I need to tell and it's you I want to know.

You would be so sad for me, Mom. You would hurt for me just as you have always done. And we would slowly start to hurt less as we carried the pain together. For some reason, it's always been easier to let go when I see you try to carry the weight... Only then do I understand that it cannot be carried by either of us and so we must put it down together.

Mom, I'm not quite sure what I'm doing a lot of the time. I'm still doing it, though, just like I know you would want. Sometimes I think about those old women who never learn to drive or balance a checkbook until they are left stranded when their husbands die. I always thought to myself that I'd learn to do everything I could along the way so that would never happen to me. And then I lost my best friend. Suddenly learning to balance a checkbook at the age of 85 doesn't seem half-bad.

Some days I'm like a fish on a bicycle. And I have to remind myself that a whole is more the sum of all of its parts. I can be whole no matter where you are.