Life is like this, I've found. A series of moments that divide things into "before" and "after." Before I could drive. After I graduated high school. Before I got married. After I had my first child. These individual events that together create a timeline to understanding what it means to just live every day. Death and life and everything in between. And mom's death was all those things.
Today, a few days before the official death-iversary, my thoughts are full of the last twenty years. The time after mom died, rather than before. I don't think this is a commentary on my mom, the life she lived, the relationship we had.... I'm just nearly overwhelmed by the fact that twenty years have gone by. I've been busy. And each day closes, and another week begins, and then the next month is here, and now a year has gone, and so on and so on. Until. 20 years.
It's such a weighty number. Somehow, it feels so much more than 19. A lifetime more than 10.
Or maybe it's me that has changed so much.
Over the years, I've written some sentences about all the things my mother has missed. Meeting my spouse. Loving my children. Visiting my home. Stepping back and seeing me as an adult. In the midst of it, I have missed her. I have longed for her presence. I have ached for a relationship. And all for naught, because death is stagnation.
Oh, I've learned some important lessons.
I've learned that I'm comfortable wearing pants to a funeral now. When Mom died, I irrationally knew that I had to wear a skirt for her funeral proceedings. I only owned one black skirt, so I wore it two days in a row. Thankfully, I didn't spill anything on it during day one. I had to go to a funeral a few months ago, and I wore pants. Black ones. But pants anyway. And no one noticed, or cared, though I may have heard my mother sigh a little in the back of my mind.
I've learned that I can be an amazing mother. My mom wasn't perfect, and I've never tried to make her so in my memories. One lesson that she tried to give me was to be a powerful and capable woman, able to stand independently. The best way she could say this was "Don't grow up to be like me." And in some ways, I did grow up to be like her; in many ways, I am the better version of her. And now, I tell my children "grow up and be you, capable and competent, compassionate and a good human being." Then I teach them the skills they need to achieve this goal.
I've learned that I can keep stepping forward into the future, even when the future is painfully uncertain, and that I will be OK. Because when my mother died, I was crushed by the loss and cast adrift. And yet here I am, 20 years later. A (mostly) functioning adult.
That's how 20 years go by. One foot in front of the other.
For a long time, when I thought about mom, I thought I might drown. I was a legal adult but an emotional child when Mom died. She was the glue in my universe. Losing her shifted everything I knew; the world became a dark nighttime bedroom without a comforting nightlight glow. Familiar, but full of frightening shadows shaped like monsters. Twenty years, though. You learn the shape of the shadows in twenty years, you make peace with the monsters. After twenty years, I've come to accept that I'm not going to drown.
Though sometimes, her absence hurts like a pain I can't describe.
Mostly, I've come to some terms with not having a Mom.
It's terrible, really, to say or think that I've come to terms with the whole, raw deal. I still hate that she suffered so much before her death. Mom died with cancer, but the cancer ruined her digestion and slow starvation killed her. I hate that we bore witness to this decline, the slow march of disease through her body.
Yes, there are still things I hate.
And yet. I can't carry the pain of it all forever. So as the days have gone by, I have set down a little bit of it along the way. I've left it behind me like mythical breadcrumbs and the birds have stolen it away so that I can't make my way back there, to that place of crushing loss. I don't miss her more than ever but rather, I miss her a little less.
This is a different experience for everyone, I know, the loss of someone you love. There's no right or wrong way, it is the way that destroys you or doesn't. Holding on to what could have been, holding on to what was - these things would have destroyed me. I don't think Mom wouldn't have wanted that.. and I know now, that I don't want that, either.
On July 16, 2017, I'm going to sit down with my siblings and father and we're going to mark the date. I don't know what this means, to memorialize the dead so long after. For each of us, I'm sure it will be something different because though we all lost the same person we all experience that loss uniquely. It's odd, how this common thread is woven into our separate lives. But I can't begin, yet, to understand what this means to me.
Twenty years is a long time. I've made friends of the monsters, or kicked some of them out, or simple learned to ignore their monstrosity. I look like an adult version of my teenaged self but I'm so much more than most people would guess. To date, my life has been full of growing and learning and adapting and getting better and better and better so I can't self-destruct. I'm surrounded by people who love me, and that's the best part of the whole thing. For twenty years, my mom hasn't been here. Not to love me, support me, be angry with me, play cards with me, bake cookies in my kitchen, sing out loud with the Christmas music, laugh with her head thrown back at on my jokes, or drive me crazy with the bells in her earrings. And in those years, other people have come into my life. None of them are her, none of them replace her. And all of them make it easier to miss her a little less.
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