Ain't no sunshine when she's gone

In a whispered, self-help rhetoric that Dr. Phil would be proud of, my audience, my reflection in our overly-lit bathroom mirror stared back at me, red and teary and mascara blackened around the eyes. She is the stronger one, the better one. She's the me I'm supposed to be, positive and focussed and not falling apart at the seams. She's pissed that I ruined our eye make-up.

I'm a mess.

It amazes me sometimes how well I hide it. To look at me, I honestly don't think you'd know what kind of storm is going on inside me. You wouldn't see the electrical currents of an anger that is misplaced in a relatively gentle soul, sparking and volatile. You might mistake the gleam in my eyes for brightness or a good daydream, but it's the gloss of hours-old tears. I am proud of this front I can put on, proud that I can still function and hold off this saddness and not let it take over me. But in the quiet, when I'm alone, it deafens me, and I don't know how to let it manifest in a "healthy" way.

My mom sits in bed, gauze in her mouth from dental surgery, a multiple tooth extraction procedure. I stroke her hand, bruised from an i.v. insertion. She snores a little. I am still shaking with overly strong palpitations of my heart, my father and I have thrashed each other verbally again, and I feel like he doesn't actually like me. I long for my mother's intervention, that tenuous tightrope walk she used to perform so effortlessly, running interference between two warring factions of the same tribe without ever picking sides.

And I try, once again, to look at pictures of her, scattered around the bedroom, beautiful, like Jean Seburg in "Breathless" beautiful, and remember the sound of her voice, fragments of conversations we used to have. I try to remember her laugh, unguarded and pretty, and the way it would elate my sister and me to make that sound come out of her. I try to remember what she would say to me when I was upset, or jokes we used to have between us. But I'm coming up short. I can't recall that information. I am emotionally impotent, and it scares me. Where did she go? She was supposed to live on as usual inside my head, that was how I was going to deal with her illness, and now, I can't even keep her there!

There are so many important things she will never see. She will probably never meet the man I will fall in love with. Nor will she meet her grandkids, not at the rate I'm going at falling in love. She won't see the house I one day will own from the money I secure being a successful journalist. She won't see me, the product of all her hard work and her labour of love, and how I turned out. She won't have that moment where she can breathe sweet relief, because she will know I can take care of myself, that I'm okay.

I have no one to really talk to about this. A lifetime of shrinks, and I trust no one to tell me what I don't know about myself. I have no pills this time to anaesthetize myself. I have only a bit of common sense, the kind that tells me I'll get through this, and that I cannot use it as an excuse to fall apart. It's funny, tragically so, that things like this are supposed to bring your family closer together. And yet I feel like the three of us, myself, my sister, and my father, are all finding quiet corners of different rooms to make our own kind of peace with this, and I don't know how we'll find our way back together.

I just hope that one day, the shock of this slow, steady decline will wear off, and I will be flooded with memories, like confetti thrown in front of a fan. I won't feel so alone anymore, because I'll remember her as she was. And that glorious rememberance will be the very antidote to this devastating loss.

And life will go on.