remember remember the twenty-fifth of november...

eleven years ago today, my mother was in a hospital room. she had slipped into a coma and everyone knew it was only a matter of time. i sat alone in my dorm room at notre dame, staring at the phone. i made my father promise me that i would be the first person he called when the time came.

"when the time came".

what a pisspoor and ugly euphemism for that moment of death, that inevitability that had hit me only one day prior. i was a sophomore in college, had gone home for thanksgiving that year unexpectedly, due to the anonymous generosity of a member of my parents' church, who offered to finance my airfare so i could be with my family. i was home that tuesday through friday. mom died on a saturday. saturday, november 25th. just like today -- saturday.

i came back on friday instead of staying through the weekend because i had schoolwork to do, because i had tickets to see urge overkill in chicago that friday night, because i had no idea that she would pass so quickly. it took me years to make peace with what for a long time felt like bailing on my family. for a concert? for schoolwork??? but the reality is that there was nothing i could have done had i been there. and that friday morning before i left i experienced what is probably the most beautifully sad and gorgeous moment of my life, i got to say goodbye to my mother. i've written about it in this blog, in journals, in e-mails. i remember it like it was yesterday -- the way the room smelled (like prescription bottles and medication), the way her voice sounded, the way the air felt as i lied on her bed next to her. the most precious seconds of my life. and i remember how after we said all we could manage to say, i let her rest and i went into the bathroom near my brother's and sister's and my rooms, to wash the tears off my face. i had left the door open a bit, my dad knocked on the door to make sure i was okay, i opened the door and fell into my dad's chest, literally needing him to hold me up under the weight of the reality of what had just happened, what was happening. there was such a sadness, such a horrible, yet oddly graceful sadness. what do you do with that? what do you do when you know -- after years of prayers and hopes and doctors and procedures and treatments and odds -- you finally know what the result will be? she was going to die. the fight was over. for years when she was sick i imagined that if the cancer won that meant that my mother had lost. the truth is that what she learned and saw and gained as she wrestled with that disease made her the victor. made her stronger than she had ever been. forced her to find peace. that was tremendously comforting for me.

eleven years is a long time. the way i situate my feelings of grief and loss now is vastly different than the way i did eleven or ten or six years ago. i had just turned nineteen two months before she died, my brother was fifteen, my sister was seven, and my father was forty-five. my mother was forty-three.

what a goddamn shame is loss. i wish she could see me now. i wish she knew i was about to graduate from law school. i wish she knew the people in my life right now. i wish she knew the things that make me excited. maybe she does, but i'm not sure if i believe in all that...

no matter, though. i suppose what does matter is what i do, what i've done with my grief, my loss, my memories. i think about my mother every day, even if only in passing. she is as much a part of me now as she was when she was alive, perhaps now more intimately so. i want to be like her -- she was a good person, in the truest sense of goodness. she was a mirror though which the people who knew her could see the best parts of themselves. that was her greatest gift -- her ability to allow others to be beautiful. i am overwhelmingly fortunate to have been her daughter.

last weekend, while cleaning my apartment, i listened to an episode of the NPR program "this american life" entitled "last words". one of the segments was about a married couple so deeply in love that they died within hours of each other. they were cremated together, and the final resting place for their ashes was marked by a stone. the inscription on the stone gives me chills -- it is so simple, so elegant, so heartbreaking, so human:

"it is a fearful thing to love what death can touch"

fearful, indeed, and yet it's what allows us to live.

i miss you, mom. thank you for your life, thank you for my life.