Today was the first day truly by myself that I felt the loss of my mother. I glanced at a porly printed picture of the two of us at my graduation, something I had glanced at many times before, and I suddenly felt it coming. The “it” of course is emotion, something I rarely get to experience, and I kept gazing. I serched the image to find what it was that had touched my heart, challenging myself to feel instead of continue as I had rather unscathed from the event. And suddenly I found it, it was her smile. The picture itself had alsways been a abhorent site to me, not a very flattering picture of my mother and nothing I would ever hold dear, but as I looked closer I could distinguish her smile.
That smile was the source of my suffering. In it’s totality and unequivocal weight I boiled over into tears. She was so proud of me that day and more importantly she was proud of herself. She knew then and there that she has produced a child that was beyond anyone’s expectations, even her’s I sometimes think. And that smile, that person, the unending source of love in my life is gone. In the end the greatest suffering comes from the loss of one’s most closest ally in life.
Now I look back and find all the mistakes and the regrets begin to build. I confuse the pain I can’t understand with self imposed punishment and disdain. I now know how my mother suffered in her final months while I was in Manhattan, having the best and worst times of my life. I could see she was failing but work kept coming and I couldn’t turn it down. In retrospect I realize that I did not incorporate my mother in my life the way I wish I had, the way a better son would have. Of course better only means “more” then what I had done.
This is my life now and I’ve been waiting for it to come. I am no longer the stoic young man I once was. The suffering has come and, in all honesty, I have been waiting for so long. I now have acquired my Achilles heal, that one point within me that will cause me to crumble at the slightest tug on these all to rigid heart strings. Worst of all, the only one who knows of my weakness is fate. Destiny will use this as a tool in my shaping and I will fall at the worst of times from something as simple as the smell of a pumpkin pie or the glimmer of a Christmas tree. My suffering will only be felt in times of joy and prosperity because those were the moments my mother was most visible in my life.
In truth, my happiest moments were never conceived in my life but our lives as mother and son. I will miss you so much. It hurts to know you can’t read these words. But please know that I love you and I am forever your indebted son. I have so much to live up to but even as I am crumbling now I promise to the best I can. Please remain in my lfe if only in dreams because I truly can not live without you. I love you mom.
