I guess she had to do it. She didn’t know any other way of making the separation happen. The separation is supposed to happen, when a child grows up. For some reason it didn’t happen with her, not the way it is supposed to. Like when you’re 12 and you inch away from your dad because you don’t want anyone to see you with him. You love him, and you know you couldn’t live without him, but you just don’t want anyone else to know it. Or when you’re 15 and you sneak out to smoke cigarettes and curse with your friends and you know your mom would kill you if she found out and that’s why you’re doing it.
She never did those things, and I think she got stuck. And she had to do something about that but she didn’t know what do to do, so in a moment of desperation and super human adrenaline strength, she picked up a big boulder and lodged it firmly between her and me. The boulder is high and wide and deep and neither one of us can see past it or around it and it is too high to climb over. And we are separated now. Not much to be done about that. But I supposed it needed to happen. Just not like this.
And so she’s not stuck anymore but I am. It’s on the holidays that it seems to matter most. She’s not here, and not just in a physical sense, but in an emotional sense. And she keeps going further away and there’s nothing I can do. I don’t know whether it’s intentional or not, but the way the boulder landed made it so that there’s nothing left for us to talk about. And on days like today I miss her the most. And I’m stuck like Bruce Willis in the Sixth Sense. Like he didn’t know he was dead, I keep forgetting that she’s not mine anymore.
Am I the only one who gets so deeply impacted by the cruel ironies of life like this? How cruel is it, God, that you give us children and ask us to pour into them our very life, and we are the most important thing in their lives, and you give it a good couple of decades to really sink in, and then you take them away? And we become irrelevant. I walk around looking into the eyes of others to see if I can see the pain.
My children have left….
I am divorced now….
My youth and my beauty have faded… no one sees me anymore…
Everyone I work with is younger than me and my ideas are boring…
My husband is dying…
This is my Memorial Day. I look into the eyes of my children, the ones I have left. I hold their hands, trying to memorize the softness. I look into their eyes and see the trust and love. I try to carve an indelible memory but I know it will fade like the others. All the other thousands of moments… the first step, the first time she read to me, learning to drive… it all fades into a hazy blur and all I have, once again, is this moment.. no this one… no, this one.
Today I will probably get irritated with my kids and tell them to leave me alone.
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