Too Soon

Three months after my mother's passing.

The box of my mother’s ashes currently resides on a bookshelf in our living room. I haven’t yet thought of an outdoor place to scatter them. Mom wasn’t really into the outdoors. Bunny was a house cat.

I keep almost bursting into tears. Watching a just-okay suspense series on Netflix. Eating a sandwich. During Zoom meetings. Almost crying. I rarely make it all the way to sobbing. I haven’t, actually, since I sat alone in a Chicago hotel room on the day after she died. Even then, I quickly caught myself: as if the tears, the sadness, sought to hide in a place deep in the center of me. I guess my mourning for Mom doesn’t want to go outside either.

Once when I was little I got chicken pox and my mom spread calamine lotion on my back, to soothe the itching. The lotion went on cold but then quickly turned warm with the heat of her hand. Afterwards I lay on the couch and she read to me from the complete collection of Sherlock Holmes adventures that her boyfriend at the time, Ralph No. 1 (so nicknamed in retrospect, after she later had another boyfriend named Ralph), had given to me as a gift. Mom rarely hugged me — rarely, in fact, expressed much overt affection towards me — which is why, I think, I keep returning to this memory.

One of her books that I inherited.

Why didn’t she love me more? I wondered that my whole life — until her later years, when, after her second husband, Frank, died, she seemed to soften. Once, when my chronic tinnitus had pushed me into a depression, she wrote to me, in an email, “Why is this happening to your beautiful, perfect body?” I stared and stared at that sentence. Towards the end, the Alzheimer’s seemed to release her even more into open, unreserved joy at my existence. Released me, too: I’d spent my adult life in a state of emotional perplexity, afraid that my crabbed and distant relationship with my mother was my fault somehow. But at her bedside at the Selfhelp Home, an aging man beside his dying mother, I felt only affection and gratitude. Nothing was her fault or my fault. Thank you, Alzheimer’s. Thank you, Time.