I have to keep reminding myself, I am more than this moment. I am more than my grief. I hate Easter. I hate that for a week every year I turn into some odd emotional zombie who walks around trying not to feed off of negative energy. I hate how my Papa pretends he doesn’t hurt because she’s gone. I hate how Herbie acts like he can fix us all with his loud advice and temper tantrums. I hate how Gran can’t remember her anymore. I hate how I try to fix everyone but myself, going to the point of total exhaustion so I don’t think. Holidays mutated in my family after she died…especially this one. This year is it is on the very day…the very same day. I can see the day to the letter, the policeman at the door and the look on my Papa’s face, the way my Gran just stared at him crying in silence, and the way I ran away from the table to hide from the words. I remember the hour drive to the hospital going 55 miles an hour, where some man in pale blue scrubs who smelled like all those worms students dissect in Biology asked me if she had any birthmarks, scars, jewelry, or anything else to identify her by. I remember telling him about the tattoo of my name on her left ankle. The man giving me her purse and a Ziploc bag with her jewelry and knowing at last that this was not some strange dream…but I did not cry…not then…not at the funeral…not at my first HS play…or prom…no, I did not cry…she was coming back. She’d run off before, leaving me behind, but she always came back…I had just seen her, less than 24 hours before…she couldn’t really be gone. I finally realized, some random day at 19 that she was indeed not coming home, she was not going to show up like always with some excuse for being gone for so long, a whole bunch of presents from her adventure so we’d forgive her for all the trouble she’d caused again. My last words to her still ring in my head, “Meggie come on, it’s just for a while, I’ll be good I promise and Ely will take you home for church tomorrow.” “I HATE YOU! Do you hear me? If you leave me with him and go I HATE YOU!” as she pushed me away from the door to go to the bar. She left me…and once a year I become that 11 year old girl sitting on my Papa’s bed while everyone else mourned looking out his window at all the cars out front, waiting for her to walk in the door. I never seem to grow up, every year I become that girl, lost in emotions I don’t understand, not really believing that yet another year has passed. I want to close the process, to finally start to be able to see past this one day every year, over and over again. To finally forgive myself for what I said to her and to forgive her for leaving me and never coming back. Everyone else has had 11 years this Easter Sunday; I’ve only really had 3.
I regret not knowing her, what her favorite color was, the way she smelled, her favorite book, what she liked to eat, how she said goodnight, what color her eyes were, any snippet of information. She loved me, I know that. I realize now that my mom was always running from life, looking for someone to save her from some dark shadow chasing her. She couldn’t handle it, so she would drink…her poetry, her journal like doodles spread randomly through her things; all of it tells the story of a woman who was looking for life, sanity, to feel loved. She wrote that I was her reason for existence, that God had placed her on this earth just for me…but I was not enough in the end I guess.
Nothing has been the same since she left us. I have faith that she is at peace, finally. Just as I have faith that someday I’ll have peace too…until then I will sit on my Papa’s bed and wait.