In the Mourning

Traditionally, a period of mourning lasts one year. It is for that length of time that the family would wear black, mirrors would be covered, a widow or widower would be “off limits.” At the end of the year, life would go on, the deceased would no longer be mentioned, and that was that. The Chapter of Mourning would be closed and a new one could begin.
As the one-year mark since my mother’s death arrives tomorrow, I find that I am not ready to be finished mourning. I actually don’t know if I ever began mourning. I feel a great pressure suddenly, magically on the morning of June 19th, to wake up ready to move on, take off the black, and uncover the mirrors. But I am anything but ready. I haven’t had that yet! Not that I am completely incapacitated by grief. On the contrary, I think I am doing very well. I consider myself to be Highly-Functioning But Pretty Sad Sometimes If I Allow Myself To Think About It, So I Don’t. There is too much LIFE going on to dwell on things that can’t be changed. I have written before about how death becomes like an amputation… there are sometimes phantom pains, and in that shadowed area between reality and sleep, you forget that a part of you is gone. My mother is always there in my dreams. She stands guard, watching, silently, with that glint in her eye, as if to remind me that she is still there… in the dreams I usually refer to her as being gone when talking to people, yet then have to somehow explain to everyone else that she is still standing right there, as much a part of the scene as anyone. It makes perfect sense in my sleep-freed mind that, dead or alive, she is standing next to me.

In my attempts to understand and process things, I usually make mental “short films”—I create a scenario, (full of nuance and meaning, of course), then direct it, shoot it, and edit it in my mind. These movies don’t necessarily translate—they may be too figurative for actual film. Who knows. One day I may actually try making a movie. But in my secretly grief-bruised head, these are the two movies I have recently made:
I am wearing a white linen dress, and I have been given the task of going into a large, greenish-gold field and gathering a harvest of my emotions. But I haven’t been given any way to carry the harvest with me, and the field is so much bigger than I am. The shot shows me in this infinite field, with nothing but darkening sky behind. Waist deep in this barley-field of emotions, I can slowly pick them, one by one, and try to fill my pockets, then my clothes, anywhere that can hold them. I gather the feelings by the armful, trying to keep them from falling to the ground. The daylight is fading, and I have to gather all the emotions or they will be gone…I get more and more desperate to hold them all, that I run frantically, randomly grasping at anything I can hold onto, spilling what I had already gathered in, so that in the end, I am alone, silhouetted in the dusk, arms, hands, and heart empty, with nothing left to feel.

The next film is set in Ireland. Don’t ask why. I’ve never been there. But it is… with rolling green hills, a steel grey sky, and a small, whitewashed stone house. My task is to gather water to drink, to quench a never-ending thirst, but all I have been given is a basket, and my source is an angry, cold ocean. Each time water fills the basket, I feel it escaping the reservoir, so I rush faster and faster, spilling more than I keep in my hurrying. I have to double, triple, quadruple my work. I leave a trail of water-freckled dust as I pass down the empty road. In the end, finally home in the empty stone house, I sip to quench my thirst, and find that the meager liquid I have saved is bitter, saline, and tastes of infinite tears.

Those short films are the overly-dramatized version of what I am NOT feeling right now. What I am feeling is a sense of the surreal, an inability to process the fact that it has been a whole year since my mom died so suddenly. I am still not really able to comprehend life without the single most important person, from the moment of my birth to the phone call 20 minutes before she left this earth asking if she could bring me dinner at work… I miss her terribly, but I still can’t convince myself that she is gone. So my head and my heart have decided that I simply won’t feel anything, because it becomes too much.