Thursday, June 26, 2014

Because...

The thing they don't tell you about death is that when it's not happening to you it's not your whole life that flashes before your eyes; it's your whole life, plus your whole future without that person that flashes before you in a moment of crippling worry and regret. It's a terrifying realization of what everyone's life looks like the day after.

It's the piece of birthday cake that will be left over every year. It's the inside jokes your boyfriend didn't get to hear. It's the things your grandma can't reach in the cabinets, and your mother's bated breath when she checks the mail every day. It's the cereal you never want to eat again. It's the pictures we didn't know would be the last. It's the words you can't remember if you said, or if you said them how you meant to. It's the weddings, and the graduations, and the visits home that were too late. It's all the things you never thought you should remember flooding your brain in the last torturous moments before sleep every night. It's the distance. It's the immeasurable distance you can never bridge. It's that there can never be a real good-bye, and you didn't want to say it anyway.

I said a lot of words last week. I said a lot of things that might have helped, that made people stop crying. I said things that I knew I was supposed to say. I forced out some optimism and spirituality buried deep down somewhere, but the truth is I said a lot of things I can't stand by. I feel like a big fake, a liar. Because for all the things I said convincingly I'm not convinced.

I'm heartbroken, and angry, and scared.

I feel like there's a torn seam in whatever fabric that I consist of. I feel a surge of pressure to hold everyone in the arc of my small hands; hold them all close before the flood of mortality washes us all away. I feel like I need to say, do, be more. I feel like I can never be enough. I can't keep them all safe.

Every night I go to sleep replaying the way my mother sounded, and I wake up wondering when the next call will be.

I know it'll all get easier, or vaguer, or buried under the inconsequential things we all revert back to. But the reality is this is not the first, or the last time. This will happen again and again until mercifully I might go before I have to endure another one of these things. That's the hardest thing I guess, knowing that no matter how much I convince myself there's peace, and "it was meant to be" and all the bullshit we hear in the movies, it'll come again. Another phone call, another last minute trip, another week of staring off into darkness hoping ghosts are real and being haunted by their absence.


http://obits.dignitymemorial.com/dignity-memorial/obituary.aspx?n=Cletus-Harris&lc=2241&pid=171465535&mid=6020307