367 days and counting

365.366.367. Does it matter when that one year anniversary marks a day that put a scratch on your heart? What’s with the whole “year” thing anyway? Who decided that precisely 365 days constitutes a year composed into 12 sections called months and increments called days made of 24 hours made of 60 minutes made of 60 seconds and so on. BOOM. It’s been a year and 2 days since a piece of my heart seemed to vaporize and slip away to the other side with my Mom’s soul leaving a hollowness that will forever reside in me. I don’t like dates, months, and numbers anymore, never cared for them actually. I wish time could just be time, days could be days and we could all just live. If we’re all supposed to live for the day and live like it’s our last then what’s with all the counting and numbers and keeping track?

It was like March crept up like some impending doom this year. Knowing this was the month that was horrendous last year, I really wanted to just forward through the first couple weeks of this month because even though I know that 365 days doesn’t mean anything and time is irrelevant when it comes to matters of the heart, the calendar still told me that on THIS PARTICULAR DAY, March 12th, 365 days ago my Mom died. I couldn’t avoid it. Just when you think you’re at peace with everything and understand the who what when where and why the hell did that have to happen, you can’t help but think back on those moments last year and wonder “how the hell did I make it through all that?” and begin to unravel everything in your head and replay images, thoughts, words like some movie you need to watch 20 times just to understand the plot. I get it. It happened. I just wish I knew then what I know now because things may have been different. Or not. We’ll never know.

What I do know is this: The more life goes on the more I miss her because that time span between the last time we had an eye to eye conversation seems to stretch longer and longer apart. I yearn to see her to tell her about all these things in my life that I’m supposed to tell to a Mom. Since that won’t happen but in my dreams, of which I have had many conversations with her in the deep of nocturnal world and I believe them to be real, I also just talk out loud to her in my car. All the time. Like a lunatic. I can feel her in the passenger seat next to me and I talk to her out loud like she’s physically present. I always feel better after doing this. I ask her questions out loud and the answers seem to come to me, floating through my mind like snowflakes and suddenly certain ones stick and I know that’s her.

I ask for signs from her incessantly, acting as if she’s some genie in a bottle and the world is this crystal ball she now has the power to manipulate and mold in my favor. I imagine her as this angelic guide who follows me around and puts a protective bubble of mystical good fortune over my life. She’s my secret miracle maker and I feel like this invisible chain of love and understanding forever links us.

It’s been a year if you want to count about it. One whole year. I don’t know what I expected to happen on the anniversary of her death. It’s not like the sky would open up and this ray of light would shoot down so I’d know she was happy or something. Oh wait, that did happen. That is the photo above. I stopped traffic to take it on the side of the highway with my hazards on but I never worry anymore about getting hit by passing cars since there’s an angel on the other side who has my back.

Anyhow, it’s not like 365 days would suddenly turn and I’d feel better.  I just got a flood of memories and images of her last days. Her lying in that bed in our living room watching her gasp for breath wondering if she felt the pain and knowing she did. Being powerless to stop it. Holding her hand that was so warm and swollen and stroking her fingernails that were positively perfect looking. Her hands always looked like she had a French manicure even though she has never had her nails done in her life. The whites of her nails were amazing. I have her pinkies. The look of their slender elongated grace and the personality of how they perk out when sipping on a cup of coffee. Every time I look at my hands I think of her and remember the beauty of her fingernails and the last time I held her hand.

I tried to focus on the normal things about her rather than the moan of her breathing and the vacant look in her eyes. I thought of the warmth of her hand in mine. I stared at her hand for what felt like hours when she was slipping away and remembered all the beautiful things those hands have done from cradling babies to planting flowers, wiping tears to peeling potatoes. Those hands must have applied over 100 band-aids, started hundreds of bubble baths, raked a million leaves, made a thousand braids of hair, and rolled out countless pounds of dough. Her delicate fingers held Danielle Steele novels, made the beds of far too many people, hung laundry with clothespins nearly every year of her life, and sewed with pride matching outfits for her daughters. Those hands never stopped. They decorated cookies, washed windows, placed the needle on record players, twirled baton, changed diapers, delivered Avon orders door to door, held countless nursery rhyme books, painted ceramics, decorated birthday cakes, tied shoelaces, wrapped scarves, tied ties, fastened necklaces, and put in her gas permeable contacts that she always said were “the only contacts she could ever wear.” That always made me giggle inside. Her hands were indicative to her soul and I felt lucky to be stroking her perfect fingers.

My Mom becomes more special to me as time goes on. The things she did for me hold a more powerful value than they used to. I delve deeper to find the meaning in things. I pick apart my childhood and sort happy memories into this imaginary scrapbook in my mind that I can page through at any moment and it exudes comfort and puts a happy bubble in my heart. She lived a beautiful life of wondrous moments. I was so lucky to have been given the gift of a delicate and sweet mother who was warm hearted, nurturing, and forgiving. Those are the things I like to hold in my mind. The good stuff is worth recapturing and meditating on and no matter how many days have passed and how many March 12ths I will see in this lifetime I can still feel her hand in mine like it was yesterday.