This is probably not my best writing, because honestly, I have no idea where to start with something like this. Been poking at it for months and maybe only half of what I've been feeling and thinking has been articulated.


One year ago today, 2 weeks before her 45th birthday, my mother passed away.
It hardly feels like a year. It feels like a thousand years ago and just barely yesterday--eons, seconds--not a year.

I would love to tell you all about her--but the truth is, we knew very little. Maybe that’s a shame, I’m really not sure. But to dwell and linger on a thought like that only gathers up the dust of regret, and like her, I will not die covered in its stifling gray.

Instead I will show you a few of the things I found underneath the rubble.

Everyone must bury their parents sooner or later and maybe because it was ‘sooner’ for me, there was a kind of survivors guilt; a thought that colored every inane action. How am I sitting here, eating breakfast, when she’s not--shouldn’t the world have just stopped?
I realized then that, no, the world will never stop. It just keeps going and going and going. A million deaths every day and a billion others go about their day, eating their breakfast, crossing streets, making copies at the Kinko’s. The world pauses only briefly for the sake of grief, and only for those closest to it. The rest of it just keeps going. We are the living, and so we must live--though we are not unaffected.

Let’s say you find an elaborate pencil drawing of a living room scene. Who ever the artist was clearly loved details. You can almost feel the fabric of the sheer curtains, and the soft chenille of the overstuffed couches. The people in the scene are caught up in some daily routine, reading newspapers, playing with the cat, watching Saturday morning cartoons.
But you’ve only glanced at these things because your eye went immediately to a strange blank spot. The artist seems to have rubbed out a portion of the image. It was clearly a person, because not all of them has been erased. They missed a small portion of their left shoe--you can still see the laces.
You wonder why this person is gone, and not just why the artist took them out--but why did they not fill the space? Why leave such a great, white emptiness? It may grey-over with time and the transfer of graphite particles, and you may become used to it, enough to notice and appreciate the rest of the scene, but it will always be there--an empty space amongst all the brilliant detail.

This is the strangeness of loss.

Maybe it will always be weird, maybe grief decreases only by percentage. Smaller, and smaller still, but never gone completely. I know I still get that little pinch sensation just behind the base of my sternum when I find or see something I know she’d like. Or a hollowed-out sort of feeling during those hard times where anyone else could call up their folks and ask for a little advice or consolation. For weeks after, my brain would pick out all the little, old Asian-looking ladies in floral shirts and glasses in the corner of my eye, and give me a tiny heart-attack.

She hangs around sometimes, like a weird sort of after-image hovering over my reflection. I have her feet, and her scowl and a handful of unfortunate hereditary afflictions. And her morbid sense of humor.
I also retain her affection for turn-based RPGs, junk food and the ocean. And sometimes, she’s there in my dreams, acting as if nothing’s changed. More than that, though, sometimes she’s also just there. Like if you could turn the memory of the way someone sat or smiled or walked into a real, physical sensation.

So here I am, I guess--All alive and with the world still spinning on. How strange.