Mom

Today I received the layout for my mom's grave marker. I don't think I really thought about the loss much until now. I've been on auto-drive and not thinking about it much. Now that the weather is warming up, it's much harder to deny. I see her in the sunlight, the flowers, the birds that she faithfully fed, especially humming birds. I cried a little when I hung the hummingbird feeder.

Beloved Mother, her name, dates of birth and death... and a stain glass hummingbird in the top right corner. I stared at it, completely unprepared for the forced memory from this inane piece of paper, condensing her memory down to a few lines of text... It's funny... I did it all alone, caring for her, year after year, buying her home, surrounded by her things we'd indirectly inherited before her death... even sleeping in her bed. I handled her finances, her doctors, her Medicaid and Social Security... but in that moment that I sat by her bed awaiting the inevitable slipping away, I was a little girl again, scared of the dark, afraid of being the woman that I would have to be once I lost her. A mom. A wife. I wasn't fully those things when she was with me. I was still "daughter." There's a difference now. A solitude I've been forced into. Staring at the layout mailed to me, so kindly, so I could review it for mistakes, I thought, "It's all a mistake. A horrible, horrible mistake. She should have lived to be a vibrant 90."

Sitting out on the porch swing my mom would have loved, waiting for the humming birds to find my feeder, watching my son play in his sand box, I was completely overwhelmed by the idea that I'm my mom's immortality. I'm it. My son will be mine, but if I don't have a daughter, then it will be different. It just is. There's something so powerful about same sex kin. Father and son. Mother and daughter.

I looked over the paper and wanted that grave marker to contain ten thousand words. It still wouldn't have come close to capturing who she was, to me, to everyone who knew her. So, it will have to suffice: Beloved Mother