Today marks 18 months without my mother. I think that's the number where months stop counting. Just like sobriety, they are all big in the beginning. 24 hours. 30 days. 60 days. 90 days. Six months. Nine months. One year. Then 18-months seems like the last stop before it's just years.
I talked to my mom all the time so at first, it was shocking to me when I went a whole week without hearing her voice. I thought I couldn't bear it. But I did. Since she lived far away, it was not unusual to go a few months without seeing each other. But after four months, five, six... I survived that too. Sometimes it's stunningly painful to me that not only does the world go on so simply after her death, but I seem to as well.
Numbers have always had a hold on me. When on vacation, I like to think how many hours we still have left and usually know the halfway point exactly. I'm revealing what a complete weirdo I am here, but that's okay. After mom died, I found a website that calculated how many days she was alive. So dates are kind of a big deal to me.
But back to absence. I'm reading Joan Didion's "The Year of Magical Thinking" this week. It's about the sudden loss of her husband and the year following that. Sometimes I feel like the world's biggest baby; after all, everyone loses their parents. Why did this rock me so deeply? It's not my husband, or a child. It's the natural order of events. I don't know why. Maybe because she was really the only parent I had. Maybe because of how she died, in an entirely preventable accident. Or maybe just because she was my mom and I loved her and relied on her and feel so lonely and scared. Because I know how pissed off she would be that she's not here to manage things and watch us all and play and laugh and.... live a while longer.
Joan Didion though... I get distracted so easily. It's a very good read and her words on grief and the confusion and craziness it brings are far superior to my own. There was a passage that struck me on absence. Elizabeth Edwards also talked about absence in her book "Resilience" while writing about her son Wade. Mourning is one thing, navigating the absence is worse.
I have the sense that we've all suffered her absence enough and it's time to have her back. Is this really the price she has to pay forever? That we have to pay? Please don't tell me it was her time. I really hate that. That sort of thinking is crippling to me. I read once that in an airplane crash, at least three things must go wrong for it to happen. I have a mental list of at least six things that went wrong that morning and they are all so trivial. This is the worst kind of non-acceptance, but it is where I sit, still. Her permanent absence in my life is like a yawning, dark chasm that is always just to the side of what I'm doing. Kind of like that scary drop-off in Grand Cayman when we were down in the submarine. Absence is the emptiness that is never filled. Though I know my mom would be proud of my sobriety, for example, or happy about my sister's wedding, that's just not enough. "Would Be" doesn't help a whole lot when you're staring at an empty chair. Just ask Clint Eastwood... but I digress.
Mom, I miss you. All the time. Tomorrow is the second back-to-school day she won't see. As the kids start to remember less, and other people start to feel better, I'm a little more alone in the sad place.
If you know the sad place well, I hope it helps you to know some people wander there longer than others too. It's time to turn back to the room with the ones who aren't absent and love them while they're here. I mean that literally - they're in the room watching "Sponge Bob" and we need to pick out first day outfits, load the backpacks, find the bus passes, and all the other exciting things that make up Day One of the new school year. But it's not a bad way to go, figuratively speaking either.
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