Ten

Ten years ago today I was in the attic of my mom and stepfather’s house, sorting through boxes and trying to decide what to bring back to New York City with me.

It was early afternoon, a bleak, gray Memorial day, drizzly and unseasonably cool. Crouched down amidst the boxes and old furniture, I had a thought: I should go downstairs. My mother could die at any minute.

So I went downstairs. And less than an hour later, she was gone.

The week I was home with my mother I filled her room with flowers. It was that May I discovered peonies. I mean, before that I knew they existed, they just seemed extra beautiful and special that year. And my mom delighted so much in those wildflower bouquets I bought her, at least in the beginning of the week, before things got really bad.

To this day, I can’t look at a peony and not think of my mom. It’s not a bad thing. It’s comforting, really. Peonies are extraordinarily difficult to grow (for me anyway) and they have a very short season. It makes me appreciate them that much more. They’re not around for long, you have to hoard them while they’re here.

Peonies for me (no, not from my garden!), May, 2009

There’s not much else to say really. I thought ten years gone would be more dramatic or momentous somehow—years ago I remember thinking In four or three or two years she will have been gone for ten years…then what?

Every year that passes it feels twofold: more and more surreal that my mom is gone and more and more surreal that she was ever even here.

I came across this passage about death from a book excerpt in the New Yorker a few years ago. I thought it was spot on.

“What to make of it? Why can't everybody just get used to it? People are born and they just can't go on and on, and if they can't go on and on, then they must go, but it is so hard, so hard for the people left behind; it's so hard to see them go, as if it had never happened before, and so hard it could not happen to anyone else, no one but you can survive this kind of loss, seeing someone go, seeing them leave you behind; you don't want to go with them, you only don't want them to go.”
--From My Brother, by Jamaica Kincaid