You see, sometimes it seems that you can just sail through bad times. You can work on being present and grateful, and you can say prayers and keep reminding yourself of how wonderful it is that things aren’t actually WORSE than they are ( “Wow, wouldn’t it have been truly terrible if I’d had a broken leg while all this was going on!”)…and somehow you’ll slip through unscathed.

And then you don’t.

It turns out that my mother died after five weeks of knowing she had cancer, and I talked to her on the phone every day of that five weeks, and then sat by her bedside all through her last hours–and you would have thought I had explained it all to myself enough times so that I really knew it was true, and yet still twice this weekend I have started toward the phone to call her up and tell her something, and been blind-sided by the realization that I couldn’t.

First I wanted to tell her about the snake skin that has recently appeared on the porch ledge RIGHT NEAR THE SPOT WHERE I USUALLY SIT TO WORK ON MY LAPTOP (okay, it’s on the other side of the screen, but still). She hated snakes as much as I do, but somehow, in her later years she had become sort of blase about them, even “live-and-let-live” about them, and I needed to hear her try to reassure me that a garter snake skin doesn’t mean my life is in mortal danger, and that I shouldn’t put the house on the market.

Then later I wanted to make banana pudding–the kind she loved, with the layers of vanilla wafers and bananas and meringue–and I wondered why the pudding doesn’t melt and turn to liquid again when you put the it in the oven to brown the meringue. So maybe you don’t brown the meringue? Or maybe it was whipped cream that goes on the top and not meringue after all? Why wasn’t I paying attention to these things?  

Both times this happened I felt almost a dizzying feeling of grief, of the OH MY GOD, I DON’T HAVE MY MOTHER ANYMORE variety. And yet…and yet…most of the days I feel fine, perfectly fine. My mother was 76 years old, after all. She’d had a full, fun life, she never worried about anything, and then for five weeks this spring she was ill and she died the way she wanted to, and she did not suffer, and people who loved her were with her…and what could be so truly terrible about that? I talk about her easily with other people. I can even talk about her final days and final hours. I describe the funny/sad things that happened. I tell people about the trip I made to her old home town after she died, the way I found the house where she grew up and stood outside on the lawn, looking at it and remembering being there when I was a small child.

It’s only later, when I’m alone, that I’m consumed with wishing that I had thought to make that trip to Starke when she was still alive, with her by my side. Wouldn’t that have been something, walking down those little streets and seeing places I’d not seen in so many years, and hearing her tell me about the people who lived in those houses? Maybe she could have answered some questions, like who WAS Aunt Piney, anyway? And Aunt Scooty? And who gives people names like Piney and Scooty? I know they weren’t really relatives, so why do I have these names engraved in my brain pan?

It’s as if my mind is constantly whirring in the background, filing its memories with this new knowledge that she’s gone. It’s work, this grieving and sorting and reassessing and rethinking.

It will recede, I know that. I have had many losses, and I know how they become background noise after a while. I know how the sadness is sharp for a long time, and then takes its place as a dull ache that lives just underneath your main thoughts. I know that I will be okay, that I AM okay.

This weekend my children all came home, and we sat and looked at the old photographs and told stories. People have sent us flowers and brought dinners over, and we sat on the back porch in the candlelight and laughed and ate banana pudding and key lime pie that tasted like shaving cream, and pizza that tasted like garlic and olive oil. I didn’t point out the snake skin on the other side of the screen. I didn’t point out that the pudding should have had meringue.

I just smiled at them in the candlelight and loved hearing their memories of their grandmother, before those memories fade away, too. And I thought about how much she would have wanted us to laugh. And to forgive ourselves for anything we didn’t get to do while she was still alive. She didn’t believe in worrying about the past.