Warning: I cuss a lot in this, and I talk about death- neither of those should be surprising in the slightest, but consider yourself warned, I guess. You know, it’s funny. I’ve been planning to write something to post today for the past couple of months, and I kept starting things and reading them back and realizing how stupid, and insignificant it all seemed. How could a few typed words sum up an entire lifetime? But I’ve realized something, and it is a realization I wish I could un-realize, or whatever the technical term may be: these words are only 6,094 days’ worth. I had exactly 6,094 days with my mom, from my birth to her death. 16 years, 8 months, 6 days. Hardly the lifetime I had been worried about fitting into whatever I wrote. The other glaring problem with this plan is that I don’t know what to say about it, honestly. I just felt like I needed to say something, or else I was going to lose my mind. It’s true what they say, you can only internalize things for so long before they suddenly make their own way out of you, out of your soul, and leave their horrible mark on everything in their path. I guess, in a way, this is me trying to avoid that- hoping that if I sit down and pretend this is all some creative writing assignment that I’ll probably turn in late because we have ‘soft deadlines’ (Sorry, Hodgson), and listen to an iTunes play list that definitely is definitely is not titled ‘Mom’ (now playing: Keep Breathing by Ingrid Michaelson- I’ll try, Ingrid, but no promises), I’ll be able to somehow control or minimize the damage that is sure to come when a person who’s been desperately trying to keep it together for so long finally stops trying. As you may have noticed, another side effect of coming unraveled is that the ability to not write in run-on sentences becomes as lost to you as anything. All I can think to say is that I’m sad. I’m just so unbearably sad, and I don’t now how to go on like this. It all hurts so badly. And I know I can do it, I know I can get through it, because that’s all I’ve been doing for the last two years of my life but Jesus freaking Christ I really don’t know how. I, and everyone I’ve every met in this position, always say it hurts, but that’s not even the right way to phrase it. It aches- physically, emotionally, mentally. It’s this dulled, all encompassing, never-ending ache that reminds you that you’ll never be whole again, and though dull might seem like a good thing at first, I assure you that it is not. When you get a jerk in your neck, or you stub your toe, there is this big moment of “oh, shit, that really hurt”, and then, eventually, you feel fine again. You get to a point where you can’t quite remember how the pain burned in your neck and down your back, or how you could feel your pulse throbbing in your big toe. I don’t get that. I don’t get that feeling. I don’t get that relief. I don’t get that feeling of being fine again. I don’t feel fine. I haven’t felt fine since, at the very latest, March 26th, 2012 on the drive to school when Donna’s phone rang and I just knew. I knew she was gone. 16 years. 6,094 days. That’s what I got with her. And then I wasn’t going to school anymore, I was going to the hospice house, and isn’t that just the story of it all? Everyone off worrying about their ACT scores, and me worrying about where I’d end up once my mother- the doctor, the protégé of medicine amongst her peers, eventually succumbed to a disease I am sure she once learned about as she sat at her desk in Kabul. That’s not to say anything against the trials and tribulations of the ‘average’ (whatever that means) high school students because fuck they expect a lot from kids at that age, but it’s such a heavy thing to lose your mom. Nothing should be that heavy at 16. And then, before I could make sense of it, I was the one picking up the pieces and reminding people how to keep their shit together. Reminding everyone, as I stepped into the role of bearer of the worst possible kind of news, over and over and over again until I was sure that my heart would break under the heaviness of peoples’ reactions weighing it down. And then I was back in that god forsaken hospice room, surrounded by so many of the things that had been staples and constants in the many houses I had grown up in, saying goodbye to a woman with a corpse small enough to be mistaken for a child’s and a face that was hardly comparable to the one I had grown up with. I told myself I would give myself five seconds of weakness, because I had heard Jack Shepherd say it worked in LOST. I started to cry, and it was immediately clear that five seconds wouldn’t be enough. Five minutes wouldn’t be enough, nor would five hours, or five weeks, months, years… lifetimes. I remember collapsing onto the bed, so sure that if I apologized enough she would come back. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for not making my bed every day. I’m sorry for always having enough shoes next to the door for an octopus. I’m sorry I didn’t want to learn Farsi when I was little. I’m sorry for every moment of dramatics and teen angst that led me to lie and say I hated you. I’m sorry I wasn’t a good enough daughter to keep you here with me. I still find myself thinking of more apologies. I’m sorry I prioritize FCLA over homework. I’m sorry I don’t have a major. I’m sorry I wasn’t good enough to stay pre-med. I’m sorry, mommabear. I’m so sorry. Eventually I got up, stopped crying (no, I don’t know how), and left the room, adamantly refusing to look at the collage of pictures I’d made her. Those were pictures of a different time. A time when she was so big, and I was little, when she was invincible, and I was naïve. A time when, above all else, she was alive, and I didn’t feel dead. And then they took her body. They took it- they took her body, and I was so completely in shock that I didn’t cry. The funeral home loaded my newly deceased mother into the back of a white van, drove off, and I didn’t shed a tear. I think I turned to Natasha and asked if Katie had replied yet, or if she was thirsty, or something as equally ridiculous in retrospect. And then I was at the high school, and the place that had so often been my safe haven was now the scariest place in the whole world, despite the huge amount of love that I was sure to receive upon my arrival at – of course – Mawhiney’s desk. And then Hodgson, ever the hero, called me over to his desk because I looked like I ‘wanted to get out of there’, and that understanding was almost enough to make me break all over again. My armor cracked. My eyes started to sting as they tried valiantly to resist crying. Hodgson saw it, and the genuine concern written across his face was just barely enough to pull me back together. How could I fall apart in front of anyone when they all looked at me like my tears had the power to take the world off its axis? And then it was the funeral. It was an uncommonly hot day for the end of March in Nebraska, especially when I was wearing all black and a hijab. There were more Afghans there than I knew existed in the greater Omaha area, and certainly far more than I’d ever met, but much more important were the innumerable faces I did recognize- friends, family, teachers, counselors, friends’ family, family friends, and everything in between. Someone I didn’t know did the speaking. (I didn’t really cry then either.) And then I was in Rome; a city where people walking past me didn’t know my mom had just died. Still, even with the promise of fresh starts and at least ten other clichés, most of that trip was me trying to avoid having a panic attack in a foreign country because how would I explain to our extremely good-looking tour guide that, No, I’ve never had a panic attack before, but it’s nothing to worry about, I hear they’re relatively normal after your mom dies of pancreatic cancer and less than a week later you’re walking the streets of Italy. And then there was a lot of life that happened but wasn’t truly lived. I went to Nationals for DECA, and I started my senior year of high school, and I went to prom, and I graduated, and I started college, and I turned 17, then 18, and soon 19, and I tried to try my best the whole time, and now I’m here. Here, sitting in the basement of a house much nicer than anything my mom and I could have dreamed of, typing on a laptop I can’t bring myself to change the desktop from the one it had when she was alive, crying and missing her so badly that it feels like I can’t breathe. And I’m okay. Nothing I said in this is meant to be a red flag for a psych evaluation or anything equally appropriate for people who are seriously not okay. I’m okay. I will be okay. But right now I just don’t quite see how I’m going to manage it. Right now all I have is this gaping wound in my chest and it’s like a black hole, slowly pulling in everything good, and right, and happy, leaving me only the pain and grief and despair to feel, until eventually it will swallow me up, too. And then I’ll be that black hole; void, dark, missing my mom, dreading every day that comes but none more so than my 33rd birthday because at that point I will have lived more life without my mom than with her. And yeah that’s all really fucking dramatic, but after the shit-show that has been my life for the past few years, I deserve dramatic. I had 6,094 days with her. According to [my guess at] the average life expectancy for a woman in the United States and the age at which she had me, I should have had something more like 19,000. But 6,094 was where the universe, or the higher power you believe in, or random chance decided I’d had enough, and didn’t get to have my mom anymore (no offense intended, religious folk). She wasn’t at my prom, or my high school graduation, and she didn’t get to help me move into my college dorm. She won’t be at my college graduation, or my wedding. She’ll never meet my husband, or my children, or the friends that I’ve made and will continue to make since her passing. 6,094 days, done, and over, and gone. And I’m sad. I don’t have some uplifting message to end this on, to make you feel better after reading what was probably pretty depressing. That’s it. That’s all there is. I’m sad. Now you’re sad too. Sorry about that. xoxo, Leemah “Every morning, I wake up and forget just for a second that it happened. But once my eyes open, it buries me like a landslide of sharp, sad rocks. Once my eyes open, I'm heavy, like there's too much gravity on my heart.” ― Sarah Ockler, Twenty Boy Summer "There's a fine edge to new grief, it severs nerves, disconnects reality--there's mercy in a sharp blade. Only with time, as the edge wears, does the real ache begin." -- Christopher Moore
