Yesterday I decided to tackle my moms office and throw away that which no longer has a place in this house and begin to make the space mine. I was full of energy and gratitude as I looked at some of the work she had done in her years as a human, but it wasn't long before I fell into a crumpled mess of tears on the ground, asking the extended family across the street to come over and soak in the sadness with me.
Finding journals and notes, some from only days before she passed sent me into a frenzy of "give up on love, back away slowly, and jet set across the planet and refuse to ever commit your heart to any one person". I am not sure that anything but heart break is inevitable and in the moments of reflection I have had in the past few days I am beginning to understand on a different level that either way we will lose the ones we love. Whether it be through the diminishing of a relationship or the ultimate end... death. All love stories will end with a great amount of sadness. Hopefully somewhere in there is more celebration than heartache.
I hate this.
I shared this grief with a few friends, and they lovingly asked me why I opened her personal journals and read her thoughts. "Why would you do that to yourself?". Hahaha funny question, so excuse my honest and somewhat frustrated retort. You know why I do it? Because I miss her. I do not have the option to call my mom and hear her heartbreaks or laughter, share our stories, watch her write notes, and listen to her laugh or cry. So if you think that I can not be the cat that gets killed by curiousity reading through years of her personal thoughts please remember that you can do these things with your mom. I can only get to know my mom deeper by reading her journals. I am not so enlightened or strong that I can simply dump them in the trash, because seeing her handwriting is a way of connecting to her.
But that rant isn't even the whole purpose of this post. It is about love and inevitability of loss. I don't mean just intimate sexual relationships and marriages, but friendships, partnerships, family. We must learn to do the work on ourselves and tend to our needs so that when we are gone our friends and family do not riffle through our things and discover the unbelieveable heartbreak we inflicted on ourselves.
Worse than this is that I am frsutrated that the woman I idolize was not perfect, because in her wake I would like to believe that she was, that she was a hero that went down fighting, and now I am faced with the truth that she went down tired, fatigued, exhausted by the effort required to maintain connection. In her passing I created an idol of her, believing in her perfection above and beyond anything else.
My belief system about relationships crumbled yesterday, along with the remaining pieces of my heart. And I am left to know that we as humans continually struggle with the same things, that love is not eternal and perfect but messy and destructive, and yet we still choose it. Unless we choose plane tickets to far off places and random sexual partners in place of long term monogamous relationships. I wonder which i s more or less fillin than the other.
If I could have with a clear conscious and a controlled manner I would toss a match in the room and burned it all to the fucking ground. I didn't want to know some of these things that I now know. Curiousity killed the cat, and though the brazilian and a sister advised me to not be that cat, I still was. Because it is easy to say "don't give in" when you have a mom that you can call, who you can still memorize her movements when you see her, commit her to your memory in this way... but when she is dead and gone and starts to fade from your memory her smell, her facial expressions, and her handwriting begins to look foreign, her voice is hard to access then the strength it takes to not be that cat is impossible for me to imagine.
In the midst of everything that I am saying I can recognize the drama of it. I still believe in love. I still think of my mom as an incredibly strong and powerful woman that laid down her life for me over and over again. I will still commit to people and connection, and to monogamy and the work it takes. I will still open her journals and read them. I am not seeking sympathy or to pull at your heart strings, I am writing to remind you to engage in your life, to do the work, make the changes, create the shifts, and take charge of you. Be happy. Create happiness.
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