memory of my mother

Today is the anniversary of my mother's death. She died in 1978, 31 years ago. She was just 36 years old.  I spent years wondering if my mother's fate would be mine. Now I often wonder why I was so fortunate to be spared the legacy that ran through my family. One might think it easy to relinquish a mother who could never be a mother but I've spent my whole life exhuming fragments of her life hoping to inhabit her, possess her. This blog may turn out to be the ultimate archeological exercise, digging deeply to find what is left of her. There's too much to recount all at once, and too little of it coherent and whole. Today I hope to reign in these unwieldy memories and bring forth only what I can of our last minutes together before her death.

I find that when I delve into my lost world, I write as if the events are happening now and I am still that girl desperate for my mother's hand, her mind, her soul. I guess I still am that girl, so perhaps in the end, this approach seems fitting. When I sit in front of my computer and line up the words in this small box, I feel that I should write my story in the past because it is, in fact, past. This is what I have forced myself to do over the last weeks since publishing my first post. But for me what has already occurred is ever present. I prefer to write in the first person, present tense, this is how I always tend to free write. This stylistic choice does not work for all readers so I adopted the past tense.

Today I am struggling with myself, trying to decide how to translate the memories as they come. Does a shift in language ground me more in the now, showing myself and my readers how far I have come from that point in time? But if I am to find the things nearly forgotten, perhaps I need to just be there and see it all again. For this entry, I will just allow myself to share some of the details of my mother scattered inside me however they make themselves known.

My mother is like an Asiatic Lily, red hair, green eyes, cool white skin, perfumed because my grandmother dabbed on a lilac scent to disguise the smell of death. It is Memorial Day. I stare at the flag blowing outside her window instead of my mother dying in her bed. The flag curls into itself like a fist then opens with a snap. I mimic the motion with my own hand. It reminds me of jazz hands--neutral, fist, jazz, neutral, fist, jazz--which I learned at the Carol Butler's School of Dance when I was just 3 years old. My grandmother pushes between my shoulder blades, inching me closer and closer to my mother.

"Take her hand. Show her you love her. She loves you. Look at her."

My mother's hair is pulled back, one strand falls across her face as she jerks. I stare at her for a moment, hoping to find a way to know her better. I yearn to break through to her, to have just one minute where I am certain she knows that I am her daughter. My grandmother nudges me forward once again. I turn to my grandmother and look at her face, grief stricken, her lips wet with it. It's all she can taste, feel, understand. Her hands are so sure, pushing me closer and closer to death. Though I dig my heels into the floor, I am not strong enough to hold still. Soon I am right beside the bed, my cheek pressed against my mother's mouth. I whisper to her. "I am your daughter." She coughs, then spits up on me.

This would be the day my mother died, though I don't realize this then, not fully anyway. For me she had always meant death, at least for as long as she lay trapped in her tortured body, strapped not only in the white restraints but also tied to her bed in one institution or another. She was not my mother. She was a flower picked too soon. For her there would be no buds left to open. We'd seen the last one.

I inhale her scent once more, then run out the door, out of the hospital, past the flag where I fall into the grass and smell something I hope is summer.