My mom died five years ago today. In the past, I've indirectly referenced the occasion on TOA, usually sneaking an acknowledgement of the day into a seemingly unrelated post. I started working on something similar earlier this week but it wasn't really clicking, so I gave up and decided on a more direct approach. I guess I envisioned something like a tribute, a process of fully explaining what I heard when people told me: sorry for your loss.
Unfortunately, I don't think this is going to work, either. I've lost something, but I don't know what. Or maybe I should say, I don't know who I've lost; I'm lost. It's like I've finally envisioned someone asking me - can you describe your loss? - and in the process of writing down my answer, I've realized I can't do it.
That's not to say I have no sense of who she was, or that I sleepwalked through twenty-seven and a half years. I have a great memory, and many great memories. Minutes before my last high school basketball game, the seniors exchanged warm hugs and kisses with their mothers and gave them flowers as part of a long 'Senior Day' tradition; mine punched me in the shoulder, and brandished her bouquet in my direction like a samurai warlord threatening to attack - I scored twenty points in the first half. What I've retained about her mannerisms speaks to my retention; the rare impressions I do of her have been described as 'spot on', and this feedback validates both my exhilaration and exhaustion from the exertion of resurrection. It's my inheritance, this wealth of recognition, a priceless treasure that winks without warning from the burial ground within me. I often suspect her ghost is in the vicinity whenever I see her living on in the way I do things - how I run two miles more than I should, or express my aversion to categorization, or derive great pleasure from teaching. There is music living in me, and I know why. I still have so much that I feel weird wondering about what I've lost.
I suspect I'm in a pretty common conundrum, one that's almost inevitable whenever someone dies before old age; what I've lost is hard to explain because I never had it. Finishing school, finding work, moving out and starting my adult life - when I completed the process of growing up, always under my mom's watchful eye, I could finally get to know her as a person outside the identity of 'my mom'. I remember meeting my parents a few months after I moved out for a drink in The Prudential Tower. We were three adults on top of the world with no clue how to speak to each other, but willing to learn, looking forward to learning, and looking forward to the future - that's what I lost.
