Life after death

Boredom really does yield fruit. Being stuck in the house for a few days and not being able to start a solid read, I think I finally found an answer to what I am meant to write next. I've had the title for a few days but I had no idea what it would be about. I knew it would be fiction. It will not be about my life after his death, but about his life after my death. It will be the novel he wanted to write. It will be the life he should have lived.

Après moi, le déluge

I so wish this could be the end of the world. Then it would have all worked out for the best.

survival

"All the time that I’d been thinking, I cannot continue to live, I’d also had the opposite thought, which was by far the more unbearable: that I would continue to live, and that every day for the rest of my life I would have to live without my mother. Sometimes I forgot this, like a trick of the brain, a primitive survival mechanism." 
The Love Of My Life
Cheryl Strayed

That piece of writing touches on almost everything I have experienced with grief.  Except the acting out.  I haven't been bad.  Not in any recognizable way anyway.  I have stuck to duty.  I have been mean maybe, impatient, but not self-indulgent.  Do 2-3 cigarettes a day count?  In the magnitude of my loss - hardly.

So is this it?  Have I overcome?  Have I healed?

"Healing is a small and ordinary and very burnt thing. And it’s one thing and one thing only: it’s doing what you have to do."

Done.  But it doesn't feel done.  It feels like everything might still fall apart at any minute - my carefully constructed ordinariness.  My body that feels as strong and fit as ever, with hardly a wrinkle marring my brow.  Surely this can't go on.  I will wake up one morning and not recognize myself in the mirror.

"Somewhere, floating on the surface of my subconscious, I believed — I still believe — that if I endured without her for one year, or five years, or ten years, or twenty, she would be given back to me; that her absence was a ruse, a darkly comic literary device, a terrible and surreal dream."

A surreal dream made all the more terrible by the lack of outward change.  I want to see the monster in the mirror.  

birthday

27 years ago today I didn't sleep, because I was becoming a mother.  Typically, I tried to cheat and dozed off between contractions.  But you were coming fast and I had to rouse the snoring nurse next to me to tell her it was getting serious. 

You were so big, they had to cut me, but you came out perfect - round-headed - a little white bunny as the nurse called you.

Last night I slept, but in my dream I worried that you had dropped out of school, and about what were the options to remedy that.  Then I woke up and realized I needn't worry about you anymore.  I miss the worry.  That was my gift.  I'll take it.