My Mommy

I'm starting to forget her.  I mean, I know what she looks like and everything, but I can't remember what her voice sounded like and I can't remember how she used to talk to me.  It's depressing, really.  In April, I will have spent half my life without her.  That's a really long time to not interact in any way at all with your own biological mother.

I really regret not being there when she died.  I went on an overnight with my best friend at the time.  I remember that I caught my finger in the car door handle as I was getting out and it was bleeding and my dad was sitting on the front porch steps, under the camelia tree that was in full bloom.  He told me she had died and he held me and I cried.  The last memory I have of her is having to duck out from underneath her outstretched arms, still in the process of wrapping themselves around me in a hug after I was finished hugging her.  I don't even remember the last words she said to me.  I like to think she said "goodnight," but that was me talking to her.  I'm pretty sure she was too weak to respond.

In some ways, I feel like a part of me left with her.  I had to go from 7 years old to 17 years old in under a year.  I didn't get a full childhood.  I've lost friends because they don't understand what it's like and they're so afraid that something they say will offend me that they just stop talking to me.  They don't understand that I don't take offense to questions about my mom or how I feel and that I'm not going to be emotionally scarred because they ask me something.  In fact, I like answering questions about my mom.  It helps me remember her, and the things that I don't know or don't remember, I can discover and see how she and I compare with each other.

I always say that I've moved on, but people never really do.  I still haven't come to terms with the fact that she's gone and I'll never see her again, and it's been almost 7 years.

She would have been 45 years old today.  I wish she could have been there to see me grow up.  I wish she could have been there to see me off to my first day of middle school and my first day of high school.  I wish she just could have been there.  Cancer is a dastardly being, and it needs to be extinguished, not that extinguishing it will undo the damage it's already done.  I'm afraid every day that I'll get cancer and die or that my dad or my brother will get cancer and die, but even worse that my stepmom will get cancer and die because that'll just be a repeat of what's already happened and if it happens again, I fear for the sanity of myself and my family.

We had ice cream, strawberries, and this really nasty, cheap, heart-shaped chocolate cake.  We then sat down and watched her memorial video.  I used up a fistful of tissues and saw my dad, a 6'4", grown man cry.  And as always, my brother was not present for any of this.


That's all I have to say at the moment.