My mother died recently. 55 days ago to be exact.
45 more days before the official 100 days of mourning is over. But in a surreal way, she had never left at all and simultaneously gone for ages, long before she took her last breath. Her memory, her voice, her laughter, her hand gestures, her quick strides - all the vitality that defined her before it got sucked into the black hole of dementia and trapped in a bedridden body nourished through a feeding tube in the last months of her life.
My grief at her passing is indescribably stunted, for want of a better word. The emotional struggles during the early years of her illness and the inexplicable suspension of attachment towards the end of her decline spanning close to 10 years numbed me in an uncomfortable way. I did crumble sporadically, sleepless nights of tear-filled guilt traps, but that made me grief more for my filial failings than her absolute absence.
Some people can write such beautiful prose expressing all that they feel inside, like this one I read today on a facebook page. Assuredly, this feeling that I am feeling is not so alien after all. Someone, somewhere, had traveled down the same road. Kind of.
It was the longest goodbye. One that was, regrettably, robbed of sweet recognition of the daughter who held her hand last.
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I sit down every so often and decide to write about the summer that my mother died. She left, and it was much more like she moved out than like she died. Because I always thought that death would be sudden but this was slow and we saw parts of her leave and it was as if when she was gone maybe it wouldn’t change that much, like when you watch a child grow up. So that’s what happened, she faded and faded but when she was gone it was as if she hadn’t been fading at all. All that was left was a hole, a vast space, a catalyst filled with meaningless distractions that just made it that much bigger. I think now that maybe, just maybe if I write about everything else that happened that summer, the death of my mother will somehow become a part of the beauty of it all. The beaches, the lunches, the music and the drinking and the dancing will all fade into itself, into the space that she left. As she faded, the rest of our memories faded, until we were all driving away, not thinking to look back. We went to watch the stars and it was a car ride. It was a party, tequila laced conversations, a run, too many words. There was wine and cigarette smoke, music, unasked questions all fading into the thick trees, polluting the ocean, pushing the vast distances around us, between us, the dim circles, and our car, us, slowly fading into the dark dust. The summer that my mother died I learned that sickness is sometimes just another word for dying. And the fall after that, the winter after that, the spring after that, I would sit down and try to write." — submitted anonymously to berlin-artparasites
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