dead mom fragments
Being traumatized and never shutting the f up about it is literally embarrassing.
Woke up at 1 am so this is what I wrote instead of being mentally healthy, enjoy:
I don’t think the hardest thing about losing my mother was her death. I didn’t know her as well as most people who knew her. I could not, for practical reasons—I knew her for nine years, the way a child knows a person. My sister and I were much of the focus of the moment of her death. How will the girls cope, and so on, but honestly, her friends, her husband, her siblings, her parents, my older brother: I can assume, to these people, that the moment of her death hit harder than it did to me, for purely mathematical reasons. Years spent watching her laugh, and hearing her swear, and helping her pay parking tickets. Eating her food, and all that.
I know that she was a Buddhist, and that she was odd and wild and freaky and an artist, had high standards and made reckless choices, worried often, had a temper I admire. I remember her grieving herself, but I also know she had an intellectual and spiritual understanding of her own mortality that served her well. She returned to be a part of everything. That’s what happens. I don’t know if I think anything wrong happened, in the strictest sense. Children, speaking in broad generalizations, have parents. Girls are usually shepherded, in some way, by their mothers. I was not.