27 years ago, today
That year, I must have broken some kind of record for holding my breath. There were moments of numbness, days spent on autopilot, when just getting through the next hour was all I could manage.
You don’t know what you have until you lose it. Those words haunted me, becoming the nightmares that waited when sleep finally dragged me away from the horrors of the day.
She wasn’t gone yet. But she was close.
The air was still and heavy, broken only by the yelling that seemed to slice through the few breaths I could manage. Anger was always there, lurking in the background. Even in those moments when we should have been holding on to one another, we were tangled up with the doctor, shouting at him for lying to us, only to learn that he wasn’t the one keeping the truth from us.
Always a shit show in this house.
And through it all, I was trying to hold myself together for my second child, almost ready to be born, still cozy and safe and wonderful inside my womb. The way I must have once been inside my mommy’s. Before I knew there was a world where she couldn’t always protect me.
The day it happened, I could almost feel the hands that had held me my entire life beginning to loosen. The shoulder I had leaned on for strength was weakening. The one place I had always known I could fall and be caught was slipping away.
And then she was gone.
I free-fell into a dark void where up was down and nothing made sense anymore.
The yelling was different now. The air was gone. And the pain I had pushed aside for so long, determined to be strong, erupted like volcanic lava, swallowing my heart and consuming every thought. The fear I had carried for so long, of losing my beacon, my safe place, the one person whose love I never had to question, had become my reality.
My mommy was gone.
I swore then that my own children would never have to question whether they were loved. That they would know the kind of unconditional love my mother had given me. But I wanted something more for them, too. I wanted them to know that even when life takes away the person you believe you cannot live without, there is still a place beyond the pain. A place where happiness and joy can find their way back in. Where loving someone doesn’t end because their life does.
I didn’t know then how long it would take me to believe that myself.
Twenty-seven years later, I look at the love that surrounds me. My sister and two brothers, who lived through that same unbearable loss. My husband, my children, and now my beautiful granddaughter. All these people I get to love, all the moments I might never have known.
And I cherish the greatest gift I was given. The gift of still being here to love them all.
Because after my mother’s death, when I was lost in that darkness and could no longer find my own way out, she called to me.
And she saved my life.
