April 27, 2010.

My mom died a year ago today. I have officially lived an entire year of my life without once having seen her face or heard her voice. Yesterday would have been her forty-eighth birthday, but instead of having a party, instead of eating breakfast in bed and smiling while reading construction paper birthday cards hand-made by my little siblings, she is now nothing more than to a wooden box of ashes resting on a high shelf in her closet, above the space where her dresses and skirts once hung.

This time last year was like some sort of strange and terrible dream sequence. It has taken me twelve months to finally allow myself to look back on those few weeks leading up to her death and to process fully what I saw, what I said and did, what happened to her. I can now feel sorrow in a way I wasn’t able to feel sorrow while it was happening, while I was solely concentrating on surviving the horror, while my mom and her comfort were all that concerned me. I wish I could shove this feeling back into its box, into that space inside of me where I have somehow managed to store it and keep it dormant for all this time. I would give anything to still be in survival mode, instead of here, a normal human again, with nerve endings and a heart and a memory and a true consciousness. I would choose that beautiful numb over this gnawing pain any day of the week.

Lying next to a person who hasn’t woken up in days because they are dying kind of sucks your life out of you as well, taking you maybe to wherever it is that they are, to some sort of in-between, still, peaceful space. You fall into a haze, listening to them breathe and going in and out of sleep. This is what I did with my mom, whenever I had the chance to be alone with her. I would simply fall asleep next to her on my stepfather’s side of the bed, no matter the time of day, no matter for how long. I would doze, feeling the spring sun streaming in through those big windows in her bedroom and onto her white sheets, hearing the wind and the birds outside, touching her hand, her arm, her back.

During my mom’s final week, family members made their way in and out of her bedroom in waves. I was always there. We talked softly with one another and with my mom, even when, towards the end, she couldn’t respond. We took turns sitting next to her, holding onto her hands or massaging her feet. On the night of her birthday, a year ago yesterday, something amazing happened. We had a kind of impromptu celebration, a vigil, without planning of any kind and without discussing it with one another. Long candles were lit and brought into her bedroom, along with pillows and chairs for people to sit on, encircling her. We drank glasses of red wine and laughed softly. Trevor disappeared and returned with his guitar, and the two of us sang songs. She loved to hear us sing together. There was a sort of magic to that night, and for me the term “send-off” took on a new and more profound meaning. It was an unthinkably sad birthday, but magical nonetheless. At one point I whispered to her, “You can go now, Mom. What are you waiting for? We’re ready, we promise.” It was a joke, of course. I would have given anything to keep her with me forever, even if she could only lie there sleeping. “Just kidding,” I then added, after a pause. “You take as much time as you need.” I kissed her forehead.

When she died, I was holding my mom’s hands. While everyone around me cried, I kept holding her hands and looking at her face and thinking about how strange it was that she was gone, but not gone. How strange it was that everyone was crying and I wasn’t crying. How strange it was that she had actually finally done it. That next breath just never came. I looked at the clock: 11:55 AM. I looked up at Roie.
“She’s gone, isn’t she?” I asked.
“She’s gone,” Roie mouthed.

Where did she go, I wonder? In that second, in that very first moment after one ceases to breathe, where do they go exactly? Where are they? Where is she today, one year later? She is gone. She is nowhere. She is nowhere, but even so, she is everywhere. To me she is everywhere and everything. She was everything to me when I could see her freckled face, when I could hear her happy voice, a voice that made me feel at home no matter where we were, when I could dial her cell phone number, a number I will never forget, and hear her on the other end, when I could smell her minty, soapy scent, and hug her body, a body I never fathomed I would one day not be allowed to hug, when I could touch her hair, that long, thick, brown hair, much like mine but shinier and straighter, beautiful hair that she didn’t need in order to be beautiful, because she looked just as beautiful after she’d shaved it all off of her head. She was everything to me then, but still now, though I can’t do any of these things anymore, still now she is everything to me. Still now she is everywhere. She is in every motion that I make, every time that I laugh, every time that I cry, every word that I speak, every image that I see, every new friend that I meet, every frustration, every triumph, every gain, every loss, every thought, every feeling, and certainly every memory. She is still my everything.

Sometimes I wish she wasn’t. Sometimes I wish that at that exact moment when she left me behind a year ago, I could have erased her completely from my memory, right then and there. Because carrying her around with me can sometimes feel heavy. I’d like to lighten this load. I’d like not to think about her all day and every day, I’d like not to dream about her and then wake up with the sinking realization that a dream is just a dream. I’d like not to be one of those people constantly shouldering something so massive. Sometimes I think maybe you can pick those people out in a crowd, people like me, wounded people, people with burdens that they just can’t seem to shake. I’d like to live my life without this cloud above my head, without these pangs of sadness, the pangs that come inexplicably out of nowhere, and those that accompany each rush of happiness. I’d like not to dread graduations and holidays and getting married and having children because the unavoidable pain of her absence from these momentous occasions seems so unbearable that I’d just as soon fast forward through or bypass such milestones altogether.

But then again, I’ll take what I can get. If this is the only way that I can keep her with me, then so be it. Perhaps it will get easier. Perhaps the load will get lighter. Perhaps my life after Mom will turn out, in the end, to be more happiness than sadness, more fond recollections than sorrows that manifest themselves in the pit of my stomach, forcing me to keel over.

That night, a year ago tonight, the death night, we ate and drank, and after dark we played a big game of soccer outside in the yard. She would have liked that. Soccer games always make me think of her, as she was my soccer coach each fall, for so many years of my life. I’ll never forget how bossy and intense she was from the sidelines. I’ll never forget her throwing her minivan keys on the ground in frustration every time a referee made a bad off-sides call. Or running up and down alongside the field, screaming her head off for the defenders to push up, a Baby Bjorn with one of my siblings strapped to the front of her body, her hand pushing another baby in the stroller in front of her.

At one point during the game that night, I stopped running around and looked up into the window of my mom’s bedroom. Her light was on, and I wondered if she could see us playing from her bed. That’s when I remembered, for the first time, that she was dead. It hit me like a sledgehammer. She wasn’t in her bed anymore. She wasn’t her anymore. She was just ashes. I would never see her again. Weeks later, I was running into the office next to her bedroom to get something out of a desk drawer, and I automatically slowed and softened my steps, so as not to wake her. And then I remembered. For a while I’d reach for my phone to call her. And then I’d remember. I’d often call anyway, just to hear her say, “Hi, please leave me a message after the beep.” Once, I saw a woman with long brown hair pulled halfway back into a barrette, and I thought it was her. I was at my little sister’s soccer game, and the woman came walking up a dirt path, emerging out of the woods. I lifted my hand to wave, opened my mouth to yell, “Hey Mom!’ And then I remembered. At times, I’d walk downstairs to the kitchen in the morning, groggy and in need of caffeine, and rounding the corner of the refrigerator, I’d expect to see her standing there, baking blueberry muffins or adding milk to her granola or making lunches for my little siblings. And then I’d remember. Sometimes I still forget. Sometimes I think I see her when I’m walking around on the street. Sometimes I think I hear her saying my name. And each time, I feel as though I can’t breathe. The wind gets completely knocked out of me. Each time, I wish I could just know it for sure. I wish I could finally understand, inside every cell of my being, that she will never again be looking out of her bedroom window, or lying in her bed, or picking up her phone, or walking out of the woods, or standing in the kitchen before everyone else in the house has woken up. The forgetting and remembering, these moments of awful clarity, they have been the worst part of this past year.

So why am I writing this? I don’t know, I think I’m just trying to decide how I am now, today, a year later. I’m trying to decide how I’m feeling. What I’m thinking. What I know. Well, if I know anything, what I know can be summed up in an excerpt from the tribute that I gave at Mom’s memorial service. Everything that I wrote about her, everything that I said that day was important, but throughout this past year, whenever I’ve felt particularly lost and hopeless, I’ve gone back and read this particular part over to myself, to be reminded of the one undeniable truth about losing her and missing her that I can never allow myself to forget:

“I guess the bright side of this dark and sad time is that she was my mother. I was fortunate enough to have her as a mother, even though it is unfortunate that she was taken away from my siblings and me so soon. I know with complete certainty that I would rather have had her for twenty-one years than any other woman on earth for eighty. Though this is a tremendous loss for everyone, I believe we should feel just so thankful to have known her at all, and to have been able to be touched by her and loved by her, and to have learned from her, as everyone here today has.”

Everything I learned I learned from her. And possibly one of the most valuable lessons she taught me was the need to get on with it, the need to move forward with your life no matter what types of terrible shit gets thrown at you, because she was certainly thrown more than her fair share during the forty-seven years she lived on this planet. “Chris, get out of bed,” she’d say to me today. “Move on.” I can hear her now. “Chrissy!” she used to call up the stairs to my bedroom on a Saturday morning. “It’s eleven o’clock, get out of bed. You can’t sleep the whole day away!” Her nauseatingly chipper tone, that Midwestern accent, they always annoyed me to no end when all I wanted to do was sleep. Today all I want to do is sleep. To sleep and to wake up eventually, through some miracle, in a parallel universe where she can still yell up my bedroom stairs, where she can still annoy me. Where she can still force me to throw the covers off of my body, and get out of bed already.

Rest in peace, Mom. You are with me everywhere, always and forever.
(Kate, April 26, 1962- April 27, 2009)