September 2024

Starting anew…

I’m trying for the words to express the impossibility of the season I just entered from.

I held my mother while her heart stopped beating this month. I watched the life drain from her blue, brown speckled eyes. I asked her not to go and then decided to tell her that it was alright.. not to stay.. that she should go…. not that I could have turned back what already was.

I’ve been slowly saying goodbye to my mom for some time now. I believe that toward the end when she got real bad that it may have lessened the pain of saying goodbye… for she became uncommunicative … I couldn’t leave her side at all in the last weeks. But slowly I could no longer call her how I used to. I could no longer speak with her on anything I should ask her. She was here, without being here. It was a slow regression .. although it happened suddenly. I knew.. several times before.. if I needed to call and talk with her, I could not anymore.

In some way I never understood that my mom was never going to get better. I wanted to write about my anger a little bit.. of the way she was taken from me.. I have so much anguish toward it all that I thought to tell why. Then I also recall holding my mom’s frail bones and in desperation to wake her up, even though her eyes were wide awake.. stopping myself, because I realized, it was so unkind to keep her here. I held her then, letting her know that I loved her, to go to chicken chicken. Chicken chicken was what she called our red hen. She saw chicken chicken in the end. She’d asked me in the morning if she could go to chicken chicken. I told her that when she got ready, she could definitely go to chicken chicken.

I was a child when my mother became ill. She was the mother and I the child. She was who I turned to for each and every inconvenient life circumstance. I was in my thirties, but my mom would tell me how to take care of these things countless times before it one day in what seemed like an instance, I would become the mother and her, the child.

It took no time at all. But in the beginning, my mother and I were naive. I only know this now looking back. How stupid I would feel.. to be so desperate and hopeful of the outcome. As a believer I all but expected my mom to be well.

I believe that when hands are laid on you, you can immediately receive miracles.