I close my eyes every night and talk to you. Most of the time I can hear your voice, familiar sayings, your laughter. And I can always see your face and all of the expressions I somehow memorized through my thirty years with you. Sometimes... every once in a great while, it's enough.
I can remember when you were diagnosed with cancer, when we found out just how bad it was; how I could not fathom how something so vibrant, so powerful, so incredibly loving and loved might ever die or just not be one day.
People tell you so many things when someone you love passes away. It's hard to believe or even hold onto when all you want is what you've had. In time, many of these things come true. I learned how to talk to you without touching you, seeing you, or hearing your voice. I found joy again in life and discover you often in my dreams and always in my memories. And now I find you constantly as I prepare to be a mother to my own child.
I try not to get lost in the overwhelming sadness of not having my own mother to share in all of this joy, this fear, this anticipation... to not wonder or imagine how incredible it would be to tell you how this feels, to ask you what it felt like for you, to hear your worries, your excitement, your own experience. And I try not to want you, to need you all of the time.
There are moments in which I take great delight in knowing this little one inside of me already has so much of you and there are times I realize in desperation that he or she will only know you through pictures and stories. I hope that every year, not just on your birthday, we are able to find you through our memories and stories and to celebrate you in a way that your grand-baby knows just how incredibly fortunate he or she is to have such a legend for a grandmother.
In many ways, the advice of my friends and family was right... "you will find this love again when you have your own children". And I will have to walk with them through my memories, through our traditions, trace the lines of your face and the sounds of your laughter as well as I can. I will sing your lullabies about horses and your silly songs about dogs, tell your jokes about the mailman, and call my children by crazy names only a mother could use with love. I will show them how to delight in the simplest of things, like the way warm pavement on a summer evening feels on your bare feet, or how being in the presence of the people you love must be taken in like a deep breath in the moment, or how to love with reckless abandon even when you know that nothing lasts forever.
Happy Birthday, Mom.
