hold on

my friend and blogger facebook-"liked" an article on Slate magazine yesterday, and i read it with that gasping feeling that someone has snuck into my head and stolen out my words. i love/hate it when that happens.

it was an article about mother's day from a writer who had lost her mom two years ago. it is a great piece, and you can read it in its entirity here: http://www.slate.com/id/2253115/pagenum/2

she also wrote a beautiful and raw series about her grieving. that series sliced close to the bone for me, but also helped me to know that someone else had the guts to say things that i still just cried silently to myself. like the author, my mom died from metastisized colorectal cancer less than two years after diagnosis. and like her, i watched helplessly as my mother breathed in and out in unfathomable pain for the last two weeks of her life. i read her words. i felt them. i had lived them. i know it is not exactly the same story, particularly because the Slate author is not a believer, but i resisted the urge to email all my friends with the link to her series and say "THIS! this is what it is like. THIS is how i feel. this is what it feels like to lose your mom."

there were so many sentences in the mother's day article to which my brain screamed "YES!!!". here is one particularly resonant paragraph:

the mother-child bond can be so strong, so unlike any other, that it is categorically irreplaceable. "unmothered" is not a word in the dictionary, but, i often find myself thinking that it should be. the "real" word most like it - it never escapes me - is "unmoored". the irreplaceability is what becomes stronger - and stranger - as the months pass: am i really she who has woken up again without a mother? yes, i am.

yep. that's me. no mother. and, extra-suckily, no father.

i'm not really feeling superbleak or sorry for myself or anything. i'm not. i've just been thinking a whole lot about my mom this week. every day for almost a year, but even more this week. i miss my dad too, but it has been almost 9 years. most of my missing dad was tangled up in my mom's grief for him. and when i remember that, i remember that they are together again, and well, and painfree. it's a meandering path, but missing both of them is more comforting than missing one of them at a time.

mother's day puts the spotlight on mom. and she deserves it. i'll let myself sit in that pain for a while. i've been running around so much lately, it has been easy to just slap on a band aid of busy-ness and keep moving. slowing down to really grieve could be a healthy thing. i'm ok with it. i just need to make some time.