[evolveme]

Synchronistic, maybe, that I accidentally clicked the BFP thumbnail on Google Chrome and saw this thread had been started. I'd just completed an obituary and vital record search on my mother from one set of sites (something I do from time to time) and was about to try others, because I don't know where-or-if she is. (I've a feeling that she isn't.) And occasionally, like tonight, the thought of her rises up in me, and I feel an absence like a chasm. Like a space I cannot breach or bridge. That no kind of knowing will mend. It isn't that I wish to be in her life, or to have her in mine (I know that I cannot), but I suffer an ache at the idea of not knowing when she will die.

Here is something I've written about this process:

Already Haunted

I wonder when she dies
if I will know--
whether an absence will open in me,
a void shaped by her past or departing
energies--
or if anyone will know to write me.

Whether she will have left mad instructions
scrawled on a yellow legal pad
like the year of her other almost suicide:
36 hours before they found her,
naked,
unconscious,
the Comfort Inn.

How she'd signed over her car title to someone,
wanted me to have her antique pieces
and two framed and matted cross-stitched angels
(how she loved them),

but more likely now:
an angry, cursing letter,
a reminder how like my father I am--
a distortion: calling me his name, her mother's name,
someone else long dead--

or nothing at all

no phone call
no notice
no cold breath
no sense of her gone

only the still present question of her,
of whether and when
she'll finally and for the last time
just leave me.

jjordanavritt ©