The wheel turns and the seasons change again. The trees are
bare and the moon clatters through the branches to pour cool light into the living
room. I watch the frozen mist roll in from the valleys beyond the town.
Something in me shifts slightly.
----
I know when she is going to appear in my dreams because I
feel her, see her, remember her just before I go to sleep. I fear that because
she is always dying in my dreams. But this time she is not dying.
My mother
stands beside me, her hair still that tell-tale grey, but her eyes are clear
and her body surprisingly strong. Yes, for once she is not dying—but the woman
lying on the bed in the room next to us is. She has been dying for weeks and
there is no end in sight. We keep a tired vigil.
“I wish that we could do something to end this,” my mother
says sadly, “school starts soon, and we don’t have the money to keep this up.
It’s torture.”
She turns and looks at me with understanding eyes.
“I would not want this for myself,” she says, “I would not
want to die this way.”
And that is the truth of it, I realize as I wake up.
----
For months now, I have quietly been blaming myself for my
mother’s death, wondering if there was something I should have done, some
medical decision I should have made, to put it off just another week…the pain
in her eyes in those last moments…I kept asking myself if it was the sort of
death she wanted or if I had managed to mess that up too. But it isn’t a matter
of the death my mother would have wanted—it is a matter of the death she did
not want. She did not want it to drag out for weeks or months. She did not want
to put that burden on us. Painful or not, she preferred the quick death to the
long one.
I have been waiting a long time to be free from that burden
of guilt. I have been waiting a long time to be able to accept my mother fully
as one of the dead, to stop always envisioning her as one of the dying. I start
to remember little things from when she was alive. Her laugh, her eyes in
happier times, her singing voice…I remember. I think of how she would be proud
of my aspirations to be a conjurer of the stage—to see me use the performing skills
she imparted to me as a child to make others smile and leave them with a sense
of wonder.
I wish I could talk to her about the stage. I wish I could perform
for her. At the same time, I know she watches me practice every move and every
illusion, as I sit across the living room from the ancestor shrine. I know she
hears me as I tell my father about it on the phone. She is here, different, but
here. I miss her, but the world without her is feeling more and more like
normalcy. Now it is thinking back on times with her that feels like going to another
land. It’s such a strange shift—one I
didn’t see coming.
The days stretch out long before me and life goes back to
being almost too much time, when just yesterday, it felt short. I focus in on
the day to day moments again as a new hope flutters in me. I do not know where
any of these new things in my life will take me, but I am well with that. I
think in some ways, so is she. I think she watches, and she is content to watch
and protect. If there were moments in life when I doubted if she could ever see
the true worth and beauty in me, I don’t doubt that she can see them now. That
is peace for both of us.
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