A letter to my mother

Dear Mom

I love you. I will miss you every day of my life. I hadn't appreciated how central you were to my life. I'm not sure how I'm going to manage without you. I know I will, eventually, but for now I just cannot see it. I feel lost and empty and homeless.

People loved you, probably more than you realized. I am so glad that you had time to enjoy having friends and doing things with them. I am so glad that you and I had time alone.


I realized the other day that my mind had been playing a bit of a trick on me. How could I not be feeling grief about losing you? I mean, here I am, living in your house and you are not here. Then I realized that in some corner of my mind I considered you on vacation and me housesitting.

Now that I am alone in the house, my grief is coming through. If you can see me, I'm sure you saw me sobbing in the kitchen, clinging to the countertop. Everything around me is about you, and I want that.

My heart is broken. This huge hole inside of me aches. I'm recording your voice from your voicemails and I'm digitizing photos of you and those things are all I have left of you that is tangible.

Most of the things in this house do not matter to me; I have no emotional attachment to them. But I just realized yesterday that I do have an attachment to the house. I don't want to sell it, and not just because of where it is. I don't want to sell it because it is yours. I could keep it, refurnish it, repaint, and make it mine, but it would always feel like you are here. Not in some creepy, not-getting-over-my-grief-Norman-Bates sort of way. But in a comforting way. It was only this summer that it came to feel like home, that I became completely comfortable in your house. And now I have to give it up.

I'm so angry with you, too. You were so generous to Rod's daughters that you gave them more than was truly their share and you diminished what should have gone to me. Rod brought so little in to the marriage; virtually everything that is in here — including the house — came from you, or from you and Dad. By splitting your estate three ways, you did me a disservice. By not making a provision for me for all that I gave up to come here — which I would do again! — you hurt me. I know that you didn't mean to do that, but it hurts anyway. And there is nothing I can do about this because I am the executor and what you wrote is the law.

Crying sucks. Sobbing is like drowning. I hate the noises I make. I prefer to be quiet in my pain rather than howling and moaning like a lunatic. Does grief make a person crazy? I don't know. In the times of great grief that I remember — losing Dad, then Jim — I was so stoic and compressed and repressed that I barely shed a tear. I was too busy comforting everyone and trying to refrain from making others uncomfortable or from adding to others' grief and burden. Well, and no one offered to comfort *me*. It wasn't until a few summers ago that I actually cried over them. It's almost unbearable to open myself up to that pain again.

While my heart feels like I will never recover, never be happy, possibly even die, my mind knows better. It knows I've been here before and lived. I infer from experience that I will be happy again. But my family is gone, it is dead. I have good friends, and some of them may even invite me to family things from time to time. But I don't know that they will ever open their lives and families to me completely. Maybe it's just me. But no one can ever replace you, Mom. And now I have no one of my own. I'm all on my own.

Who do I call now when I feel lonely? Who do I call with something new in my life, something interesting? Who do I talk to about Project Runway or Castle? Who will believe in me so completely and thoroughly ever again?

I was the luckiest girl on the planet to have had you for my mom. There were ways that you and Dad failed me as a child, because I was completely out of your experience. But I never, ever doubted that you and Dad loved me with all your heart. While it took you awhile to get used to having a daughter who was nothing like what you expected a daughter to be, and while I frequently surprised you and crashed through your world view, you always, eventually, took it in stride.

You made me be independent; you saw through my temporary despairs to the future and, while I'm sure it broke your heart, you remained firm and stern and required me to stand up on my own feet. And you supported me and encouraged me and somehow helped me believe that I could do so. I don't know anyone who has such a fine and loving and fun and thoroughly honest relationship with their mother as I had with you. It was so difficult to get there and so worth it.

I may not have what I think I should have of your estate. But I had you to myself all summer, the closest and most open time of our lives together. And I was there, alone with you except for the nurse, as you died. And you knew I was there. I had that too — I am such a greedy and selfish brat that I will always treasure having you to myself at that time and that no one else arrived until after. Because you were and are my mom. And I was and always will belong to you, your one and only daughter. No one else will ever have that.

I love you. I miss you.

Skye