Missing Mom

 There are days when grief is a bit like a frozen lake. Some days it's protected by a layer of ice that's thick enough to build roads over. Thick enough to travel across and live on. Other days the very air of an exhaled breath will shatter the delicate layers and the grief turns into waves that destroy every semblage of okayness you thought you had built. Suddenly you're back to Day 2. You feel as though you're back to surviving on coffee and Tylenol for crying induced headaches. You're not sure how to sleep or what to do next. Sometimes that feeling lasts for mere moments. Sometimes it's hours. Then just as suddenly your ice is intact again. You can still feel it but it's a little more distant.

Those moments are always worse for me in the mornings or at night. It's always the calm moments, the alone moments. Especially the times I would normally reach out to her.  It's dangerous to let my mind wander; that's when I'm transported to the land of memory. It's when I relive the Last Day or Day 2. When I found her glasses and knew, for absolute certainty, this was not an awful mistake. 

I always picture my grief as a nature scene for some reason. Put it into some sort of tangible place. Maybe to make it easier to set aside in my mind for those times when I absolutely must deal with the tasks at hand and CANNOT be a mess. She would have been miserable at my frozen lake. She would have liked seeing the pictures I took there but she would never have wanted to visit with me. Her happy place was at the water too, but always at the beach. She wanted to feel the sea air, sit with a book under an umbrella and listen to the waves crash. Not be nervous about thin ice and bitter winds. But I've always found comfort in the cold. The ability to bundle up in my handmade woolens. And I adore the beauty and harshness of winter. 

Maybe that's part of why I picture winter and cold. Frozen and stark. It's the complete opposite of what she would love most. It's the very absence of her essence. 


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