I wrote my Mom an email today.

Yeah, you read that right. It just felt like something I needed to do.* I'm one of those grievers who doesn't care what the experts say is the normal time frame to grieve. And if someone tells me that it's been four years and that I should just get over it already, well, fuck 'em. If I need to spend a day talking to my mom out loud, I'll damn well do it. I'm not ashamed of looking like a crazy lady.

Only now do I realize what my Nina told me in the days after my mom's death is true--that grief never really goes away. At the time she told me that, I thought, Well that sucks. My second thought was, That can't be true. All the books clearly state that grief has a one-year average shelf life. Four years out now, and I can attest to the fact that my Nina was right all along. It never really goes away, does it? It just burrows in deeper, settling into your heart like a kitten in a bed of newspapers. There are certainly days when I don't notice it as much--when the sun seems to shine brighter, when I can laugh easily, when I can't recall all the details of an earlier life. And then there are the days like today, when I can hear her voice again just on the edge of my dreams, when memories of a day we spent together or a conversation we had come back with ringing clarity. Those clear memories are both a blessing and a curse. So I toss aside the books on grieving, and I stop listening to the experts, and I just go with that shit. I cry all day if I feel like it, and I talk to her, and turn up her favorite music and I write her an email. It hurts on a level I never could have imagined, but it feels a little like healing.

* No, I didn't get a response. Can you imagine if I did? That would have made the papers. Instead, though, a dragonfly whipped by my face about seven times, the most insistent, persistent, consistent dragonfly I've ever seen. He was all up in my grill. I'll take it.

Comments

GZ said…
So glad I logged on to your blog as it's been a while. But I read this and I think it's so cool you did that!! That dragonfly...hmm...