Friday, February 22, 2013

Twelve

 
My mom died in the early hours of February 22, 2001. I thought I was okay this year, and then I happened to look out the window. The skyline is different. There are trees that weren't there when I looked up on that afternoon, long after the hospice workers had collected her body. Heck, I'm in a whole other city in a whole other country, and yet I know that this is the same gray that the sky was back then.

Suddenly, I realize that my tattoo analogy is still correct: I'm used to the loss, to living in a world where my parents aren't, but every once in awhile, something happens and I feel that needle hit too close to a bone. It's never stopped hurting. I've only learned to live around it.

I've learned other things, too; not enough to apply Wordsworth's line that "for such loss, I would believe, abundant recompense," but enough to feel some sort of understanding. I am sad, but surely this grief is better than the alternative of having parents not worth missing.

I have learned to see the preciousness of things - of people - with a clarity that I didn't have when I believed I could never, ever lose to anyone, much less anything.

Life is still worth living.

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