Family

I want to talk about my family. Can I do that? Is it safe now? My mom died about a month ago. In the middle of our closing on the house. I didn’t want to be sad. There has been so much sadness surrounding my mother, I just didn’t want to go there at all. I hardly told a soul. Besides Tom, I think only one other friend knows, and that’s only because she asked. My mother and I hadn’t spoken in about 15 years. I didn’t cut off our relationship out of anger, I did it out of a desire for self preservation, and fear too. I was afraid of how miserable I felt around her, how self destructive I became. I was afraid of not being able to get her out of my life again, if I ever let her back in. I didn’t want to watch her slowly kill herself. I wanted to heal and I felt like I couldn’t do it as long as she was in my life. It’s taken years to heal, I don’t know if you ever do completely. It was a decision I renewed regularly. I was always much more afraid of seeing her again than I was of not having her in my life. I knew she would die some day, she was always dieing. I had made my peace and I continued to feel right about my decision to keep her out of my life. I wish I could have told her I wasn’t angry, but I didn’t think she’d ever understand that.

I guess there is a wake happening soon, I might have missed it already. Part of me wanted to go, but part of me doesn’t understand what I’d be going to. I had so little interaction with my mother’s family. I feel like I could count on one hand all the times I’ve spent with them, maybe two hands. I spend more time with my grocer. I don’t know them, they don’t know me. I’m also afraid they’d never understand my decision. And it’s all too heavy and too sad. Just too much sorrow. I’m tired of the sorrow.

Several years ago, the second fish, of a pair of fish I’d had for years, up and died on me. They lived in a fish tank that I’d given to my dad when he was going through chemotherapy for lung cancer back in 1990. The tank had algae eaters, plecostomus and catfish. My dad said when he did chemo treatments, that he would imagine the chemo was eating out all the cancerous cells, like the sucker fish cleaned up all the algae. So when the last goldfish died, I decided it was time to get rid of the tank. I cried my eyes out as I was cleaning it out, thinking about all the stuff that’s left behind when people die. What do you do with it all? The crying got to be overwhelming. I grabbed my dad’s old coat from the closet and curled up into a little ball. It was only then that I’d realized it was my dad’s birthday. It had been something like 15 years since he’d died, and it was the first year I’d almost forgotten his birthday.

I felt like I couldn’t talk about any of this. Like I had to stay silent until my mother died. I’m tired of holding it all in. I want to be able to talk about my past. Let some sorrow out.

She wrote me a letter before she died. I was afraid to open it. Afraid it was another attempt at manipulation. I just couldn’t imagine what good could come from reading it. I finally just opened it and read it. It was just a nice letter, saying she loved me that that she was sorry that we could never have a good mother-daughter relationship. She said she thought she understood why I went away. It’s doesn’t really matter if she did or not. When I read the letter, it made me sad that maybe she’d never known that I didn’t leave out of anger. But maybe that doesn’t matter either. There isn’t a clean resolution with these kinds of things. You just have to move on and trust your decisions.