It's September. For most, this is a difficult month. And this year, as the 10th Anniversary of September 11th approaches, it's gonna be even more unbearable. But for me, September not only represents our national tragedy and remembering my brother's best friend who lost his young life on that day, but it also reminds me of the end of summer. Not just the season itself, but what that season has always represented in literature. Summer is youth, innocence, and folly. After Summer comes Fall, a season that lingers blithely between youth and age. The healthy and the infirmed. Life and Death. Me without Mommy. Fall, the end of September, pushes on relentlessly to October. The month that I lost my anchor. When I lost Mommy.
It'll be two years this October 15th. It seems so unreal and yet, it is unflinchingly so. I've found a normal rhythm now to my life that I didn't think I would. More importantly (and honestly), one I didn't want. In the beginning, I didn't want to accept life without her. It was too painful to touch that thought, too painful to actually deal with. So I didn't really. I managed to immobilize myself with endless hours of TV watching, some drinking and socializing, watching lots and lots of Football (this is amazing cause even though it's my default sport cause I was kinda raised on it, virtually every man in my family--including my father--played the sport, I was always kinda disinterested in it), and making and maintaining friendships. I seemed alright on the outside, and I think to everyone else, myself especially, I believed that meant I was. I could go for days without crying and that was a pretty good gauge of how I was doing. 'You saw something or someone that reminded you of Mommy and you didn't lose it, good. You're getting better.' But that wasn't true. It always came apart when I least expected it. In the shower. In bed at night. The wheels eventually fell off the bus when there was no one there to help put them back on.
Those initial days, months, hours, breaths...without her were unquantifiably brutal. And I think my brain saved me by placing her somewhere else. She's in the hospital again. She's on another cruise. Wherever. Anywhere but here. And anything but dead. We spent a lot of time together, but we also spent heaps of time apart, as is natural and normal. So I was used to her not being around. And I was comforted by that. And then I felt guilty because I felt so normal about her not being here. And then as if on cue, without much practice or coercion from me, my mind would hone in on where she really was. Images of her in her casket would flood my memory. I'd recall kneeling/collapsing before the white casket she was lying in, holding onto it and crying so hard my head hurt, not wanting the cemetery workers waiting solemnly behind me to lower her into the open grave below. I didn't wanna leave her there. Alone. She's claustrophobic after all and doesn't do well in enclosed spaces. How can I leave her there like that?
And everyone kept telling me from day one that she's in a better place, and she doesn't feel any pain now. 'She's still with you. You can still talk to her'. Look folks, I don't wanna hear that shit. Cast no aspersions on my Christianity, but that doesn't comfort me. I don't wanna talk to her ephemerally and I don't wanna imagine her laugh or have a sense memory recall of her hugging me. I wanna feel her arms around me. I wanna hear her laugh. I want her to really be here, not her spirit. Though I understood why they were saying these things, it really was all I could do not to curse some good hearted Christian person out or punch 'em in the fuckin face. Leave me alone with that bullshit. Sell it to someone who's interested in buyin it, cause it ain't me.
But at night, I would want to feel her around me. I was angry, but I wanted those people to be right. I wanted to feel her spirit around me. Something to let me know she wasn't really gone. But I felt nothing. She wasn't here. And I thought, 'how could she ignore me like this? She knows I miss her. She knows how hard I'm struggling. She knows I put on a brave face for everyone else so they don't feel awkward around me, but alone in my shower or in my bed, she sees me fall apart. Doesn't she?' She knows how much I wanna be alright but can also see how clearly not alright I am. So why won't she come?
And I think now I know. It's been something I've been kicking around in my head, first as a new play idea. As a component of a new play idea I should say. But it kinda came to me. Maybe it's me. Maybe I'm the reason she can't come. Maybe I've blocked her out unconsciously. And as a story convention, that sounds lame. But I think because I'd become so disconnected with the thing I love to do, the thing I was put on this Earth to do, I became disconnected from her. Because I was so sad and broken, she wasn't able to come to me. I wasn't at peace. And now, I think I'm on my way there. Finally. I just got a new job teaching theater at my Alma mater. And from my inside out, I feel the joy seeping out. I don't know if this is real or imagined on my part, but I do know this. Ever since I got this job, Mommy's been showing up in my dreams. Even the mini naps I take now in front of the television (I feel like my grandparents now. They're always dozing off in front of the boob tube). And when she comes, she's always laughing. Even in the dreams about nothing. Like last night, she showed up and we went to Chik-Fil-A. She said she hadn't been in awhile and wanted to go, so we went. And she was smiling and laughing. And it felt so real that when I woke up, it didn't feel like I'd be asleep. It felt more like a memory.
So I think this means I'm doing better. I feel better. All I really wanted was for her to come back to me. And knowing that she didn't leave me, that she can come now, has given me such peace that I can't fully describe it in detail. It won't make sense if I tried. But more than that, I see that what I was really searching for, was a way to make peace with her death. And that's infinitely so difficult, but something that's supremely important. Something that has to happen. I see that now. I had to make peace with moving on. And I think that journey has now, finally begun. Thank you Mommy. You always seem to know what I need way before I do. And more than that, you always manage to give it to me. Still taking care of me. I'm still your baby.
I love you.
