Today is a day that I should cry for you. I should mourn the
passage of time since that day, a year ago when I saw my mother motionless and
alone, lifeless… and lacking a soul. I suppose some would say the same of me,
soulless perhaps, after reading this. I do however want to clarify the no one
on this earth could tell me that I don’t miss you, that I didn’t in some
unrecognizable way die much in the same way you did… The only difference is
that I am still here, trapped in some hellish scenario where I feel almost
nothing, I feel nothing on the one year anniversary of the day you died.
I admit that I cringe at the mention of your name and that I
am hesitant to provoke the memories from what feels now like a lifetime ago.
Still, on this day, regardless of the countless times your memory has flooded
my brain, I feel…. indifferent. I have no intolerable pressure in my chest that
steals the breath from my lungs when I see you sitting in your chair smiling. I
have no overwhelming wave of emotion when I remember the sparkle of excitement
in your eyes when you knew I was accepted into college… I am left with nothing but
the knowledge of how much I miss you and the question of why I just can’t seem
to “feel” it.
I sit here remembering my mother… someone who was my savior,
my heartache, and my hell… someone who was everything to me, and I come to the
same realization that I have a thousand times before, I should be devastated,
and I was… for a very little while. What I repetitively contemplate every
single miserable day is how I simply don’t feel the emotions everyone routinely
expects me to feel. Perhaps I am broken in some way, and I suppose the
likeliness of that is much more feasible than a young girl feeling nearly
nothing a year after her mother passed so unexpectedly… But here I sit in some
desolate, uncharted stage of grief that apparently no one has found the need to
document. Some, maybe even most, may call me lost. With that said, I can’t and
will not argue that I fully disagree with their assumptions, however I am not
lost within my grief.
I believe I am lost within my own inferno, one so hot it
forces me to doubt my own sanity, my normality, and my ability to deal with
such a loss. I do not want to believe in the rightness of my own conclusion and
I certainly don’t want to admit that how I am feeling is wrong or
dispassionate, but I am willing to declare a certain ambiguity to my state of
heart. I want to believe in the diversity of loss. I want to believe in a grief
that is uncharacterizeable, a freedom of love and loss without a defined
reaction… I want to believe that my grief is okay in all its entirety,
regardless how dysfunctional … and that I, among others, are perfectly normal
in our own desolate hell.