We situate ourselves around
the living room, comfy in our niches, lunches in our laps, while I hit “play”
and start a movie on the DVD player. For several years now this has been a
daily ritual for Mom and I and whoever is home to join us. Although I’ve got
the back speakers playing next to Mom’s favorite chair, I haven’t turned on the
English subtitles because she is no longer there to need them. Her empty chair
isn’t normal, but nothing is since she died.
Our year of “firsts” has
officially begun. The first time I set the table without her place, the first
time I didn’t get up two hours early to help her get ready for church, the
first time we ate at our favorite Mexican restaurant and didn’t order her pork
burrito with rice and beans, the first time Ellie slept by herself in Mom’s empty
room. The big things are still to come, like her birthday and holidays, but
it’s the little things that creep up unexpectedly to lay us low, to start the
tears. Her cup of pencils, pens, and lipstick by her chair, the half-dozen
bottles of scented hand creams scattered around the house that I don’t use, the
appointment reminders I forgot to cancel, her sunglasses waiting for her in the
pocket of the car door. Of course, those are objects that I can sort through
and put away, but the random habits and memories are different.
“You won’t know what to do
with yourself when you no longer have to get me in and out of the car,” she
said. That’s true. It’s much easier now to jump in and take off for the park or
run into the grocery store for a couple things, but it’s also lonelier. I can
substitute teach as much as I want, take classes guilt-free, come and go when I
want for as long as I want, and hibernate for hours in my scrapbooking room,
but Mom will never again be within my sight when I need her. I don’t have to
include special foods in our meals, make conversation when I’m tired, empty the
commode in the morning, or sleep with one ear on the monitor, but those things
had become normal and I am feeling lost without them. Or is it lost without
her?
Yet, my heart knows, despite
the emptiness, that although the monitor to her room is turned off, she is not
far away and we are not separated permanently. At the last she was suffering
and tired and weak and ready to “go home to Aunt Blanche.” I told her to go; I
whispered, “It’s ok. It’s time. Go home and dance,” and she did so now I just
have to find a new sense of normal. I have to go on and live my life the way
she went on and lived hers right to the end. A new normal. Not without her,
exactly, but with her imprint woven in a new context within the fibers of our
lives.