It's a Monday night. The kitchen is clean, the dishwasher has finished running. For the first time today, the washer and dryer are still. The kids are in bed, with - more or less - clean faces and full bellies. Everything, it seems is as it should be, but my heart is restless. I feel off-balance. After running all day, the sudden quiet is unsettling.
More and more, these days, I feel as if I am chasing after nothing, but I am chasing it with all the intensity of a greyhound for a rabbit.
There's a part of me that knows I'm running from a few things, too. When I ask my mother how she's doing these days, she responds with something like, "I'm here!" or, "I'm alive!" And we all sigh a little bit, and cringe, too. Because the day is coming, and it is not likely too far off that she won't be.
I've never been very good at knowing how to respond to people in distress. I'm uncomfortable and awkward. I do alright with my own children, most of the time. But children are easy to comfort. It's been another matter altogether to see my mother's face crumple with vulnerability, and fear. We are all vulnerable in the face of death.
I watch my grandma, my mother's mother, and I am helplessly jealous that they had so much time together, mother and daughter. I grew up knowing my grandparents. I still enjoy seeing them frequently. Eli won't remember my mother, not really. He will have vague recollections of the way she is now. He won't remember how stunningly beautiful she was, or how full of life and energy. He will remember a swollen, broken shell of who she has always been to me.
I wrote the above post some time before my mom died. Not too long. The anticipation of losing her was horrible.
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