Goodbye mommy
Today, I am twenty-five years old. My mother has been dead for nineteen days. She was sixty-five. I haven’t really thought about it since it happened — not openly, at least. I haven’t written about it, I guess I mean. It’s not as though I haven’t written at all — some fiction, the prayers for her service, her obituary — but I haven’t written openly about her death.
It doesn’t seem real, yet. It seems temporary, as though she’s on vacation somewhere, and some day she’ll come bursting through that door with a smile on her face and her forehead shining in the sun, but she won’t. It’s final.
The past is a necessary thing. It cannot be other than it was. Our unknowing of it aside, the known being of the past is always the same. What I mean is that the thing happened and it’s not gonna un-happen. Or un-happened. Or whatever, I dunno.
My mom always disliked that tick — my saying “I dunno” so much — I guess she thought I did know. I don’t know why she disliked it. Susan Miller said today, “I was afraid that I’d forget them — what they looked like, sounded like — but I didn’t. I still remember them. They’re part of me.”
Did I tell you the one about me at the orthodontist’s office where I fell asleep while the glue dried for my braces, and I dreamed that label floated above me (and baby bear was at my side — I remember hazily my own childhood through the blury film of the story I’m learning to tell about myself)? My mother, when I told her, called this “internalization”: “you’ve internalized them,” she said.
I used to ask her, “do you love me?” I don’t know why. It was agony on her. How dare I ask that? But I couldn’t stop — she’d always say yes and I wanted to hear her say it.
My mother spoke often about the experience of mourning my youth. As I grew up, the person-I-was was lost. When I became a toddler, I was no longer a baby; when I went to school, I was no longer an infant; when I grew up, I was no longer a child. My mother lost all of these children, over and over; and each was recompensed by another child, a new excellent child to love and get to know, always still her son.
Boy. She said, “I couldn’t handle it if you were trans.” I’m not trans. It’s still a fucked up thing to say. But she was cool with my sexuality, and with other trans and queer family and friends. She lived in New York during the AIDS epidemic and had friends who died.
What a generic and weak sentence — what a like-all-the-other-mommies mommy. I don’t know: they say you’re grown up when you realize your parents are people like anybody else.
Am I people like anybody else?
Everybody’s grief process is different.
T-40 years.
