She was my mother

She was my mother. Honey colored eyes, warm caramel skin, and

fading dark blonde hair. I leaned in closer to say thank you and planted a

kiss on her forehead, the last one I would give her, as she lay on her

hospital bed bidding farewell to this world. In that fleeting

instant the memories arrived without warning, flooding my

frazzled mind simultaneously. As soon as my lips touched her

forehead I remembered the kiss on the cheek I had denied her

before heading to school. I was in third grade but I felt like

an absolute grown-up, and surely little adult girls did not give

their mothers a farewell kiss before leaving for school every

morning. Of all the memories that arrived in that instant that

one was the one that made the most noise in my heart. I looked

at her once more, but she was no longer there. I was

dazed and stunned. It was surreal. All that was left on that

bed was an inanimate shell. I walked out of the hospital with

the cold clinging on my back and thinking that perhaps this was all a dream.

Yes the machines had been disconnected, but maybe she would

still be there tomorrow still fighting. I was in denial, my mind still struggling

to catch up with reality.

Now that she was no longer a part of my world, and despite my

forty years of age, I felt unprotected and vulnerable in some

ways. The next day my body seemed to weigh a ton, and every bone in my

body felt like it had been crushed. But life doesn’t stop for the

rest of us does it. There were funeral preparations to arrange,

and visits to host from relatives I would never see again. Death

is one of the few guarantees we have in life yet it is so

difficult to deal with when those that mean so much to us have

to leave.

After her passing the only thing left to do was remember who she

had been, through pictures mostly. A lot of these surfaced as my

sisters and I cleaned out her drawers, some were dated years

before I was born. It was there that I realized that for a good

part of our lives my mother and I had been strangers. She had a life before

my siblings and I were born. The stories she had told me about

her youth were pale recollections against the evidence in front

of me. She had not just been my mother. She had been a child and

a daughter just like me. Before she was my mother she had been a

happy teenager full of dreams. She traveled a lot, and had

boyfriends whom she loved and who loved her just as much. Her

roles as a wife and a mother were only a part of the puzzle that

comprised the story of her life. She left behind a husband who

relied on her for so many things. They went everywhere together.

His lifelong confidante and accomplice was now gone forever. Who

would’ve thought the ivory tower that was my father would topple

as he grieved the loss of his partner in life.

I didn’t carry her absence with me everywhere I went but there

were moments where it hit me that she was no longer here and the

tears would start to flow. They did not last long though. I am a

very pragmatic person, and reason would always win over feeling.

Despite all my reasoning I kept waiting for that breaking point

where all those repressed feelings would come to the surface and then

I wouldn’t know what to do with myself. A lot of people say you

have to talk about it, find an outlet for all that grief. But I

tend to think ‘tough shit, life goes on’. The world does not

stop over your grief or your pain.

The void that the absence my mother leaves in my life is probably not the

same one she leaves in the lives of my brother or sisters. As the

eldest daughter I perceived her one way, and they each have

their own memories of her. It’s not right or wrong, it is just

each sibling's personal experience. What our group of five

unquestionably agrees on was her blind kindness and her infinite

strength. My first role model of a warrior queen. That was my

mother.