Alone, and Together

In nearly every memory from my childhood, my mother is surrounded by children. I am the youngest of eight, and by the time I’d arrived on the scene, it was crowded. A kitchen table for ten, assigned seats in the station wagon, side-by-side-by-side twin beds — glorious chaos with no room for solitude.

Our mother was always the center of our universe, and we, eight tiny planets orbiting her sun.

From the moment she stepped out of the shower every morning, she had an audience. When my sister convinced my brother to be her pretend patient in her pretend dentist office using real tools she’d gotten from the basement, five of us went along to the ER.

But there is one moment — a sepia-toned sliver of time — that is just mine.

I was four or five. My mother was slight, her hair was dark, and she was young…younger than I am now. Breakfast was over, the brown-bagged lunches were claimed, and all seven of the older kids were on their way to a school I hadn’t yet started. We snuck back into her bed and snuggled together under layers of blankets and still unfolded laundry. I felt safe in a way that a child can only feel in her mother’s arms.

“I love you,” she said through a delicate smile, her eyes closed and her words softly filling the quiet room.

“I love you around the whole block,” I replied — and they remain the truest words I’ve ever spoken.

She smiled and brushed back my hair: “I love you around the big and little block.”

We laughed and continued on until we loved each other up to the Concord Mall, past the Pathmark and drive-through carwash, around the moon and all of the planets, and eventually, into infinity.

The next year, I went to school, and she went back to work, and life changed for the both of us.

As I grew older, I am certain that there were brief moments when we were alone and together, but by the grace of God, a fourteen-year-old kid doesn’t quite grasp the rarity and magic of a solo drive to the orthodontist because she can’t yet understand the fragile and fleeting nature of time.

My father died when I was thirty-seven and pregnant with my youngest son. One year later, a neighbor knocked on my mother’s front door and noticed that she looked confused and was slurring her words. Her first stroke was the first step on a hard and crooked path that ended fifteen years later when she left this world, unable to speak or feed herself.

In the months since she’s been gone, I have become a reluctant student of grief. I read about it. I chronicle it. I gravitate towards those who’ve been touched by it, and regrettably, I find myself holding back from those who can’t possibly understand my pain.

I have learned the hard way that grief isn’t just one thing. It’s not simply the sadness that comes when something is lost — it’s a parade of feelings that arrive unexpectedly, unbidden, unwanted. It’s anger and pride and love and gratitude, rage and regret, sometimes in rapid succession, sometimes all at once.

Grief wakes me up at 4 am to tell me that I am alone now, parentless. It waits for me in the parking lot of the grocery store. It sits beside me in carline. Grief pinches me when I momentarily forget myself, and it punches me when I open a drawer and see her grey cable knit sweater. Grief gives me nowhere to hide.

Perhaps what has surprised me the most is that recently, grief has begun to feel less like an affliction and more like invitation — a chance to create a new relationship with my mother — one that I never wanted, but maybe, the first time, one that is just ours.

So, I have learned to sit with my grief, to befriend it. Grief is where she now lives. Grief is where I feel closest to her. The door to our old life is shut — I heard the lock click as clearly as I hear these keys tapping out these words. Now, in this unfamiliar place, we must find our way. Just she and I.

“I miss you, mom,” I say aloud each morning as I open my eyes. I say these words as a plea, in prayer, and as a way to orient myself to my new reality.

Most days, there is only silence in return. The dull, desperate ache of a one-way relationship.

But every now and then, she whispers back, so softly that only my heart can hear it.

“I love you,” she says.

I smile, close my eyes, and tell her I love her too… around the big and little block, up to the Concord Mall, past the Pathmark and drive-through carwash, around the moon and all of the planets, and into infinity.

That’s where our love lives now.

That’s where she is.

And here… here is where we are. Alone, and together.

The writer lives in Wilmington, Delaware with her husband, two teenage sons, and their dog, Phil.