Sorry for Your Loss

I lost my mother on Christmas Eve. Colored lights twinkled up and down the block as I arrived but her window was dark. A pile of mail in the hall. Television on, cold coffee in her mug. The radiator banging away. The tree was half trimmed and the cats were prowling around the apartment crying, unfed. Overflowing ashtray. Cat toys and dust balls, empty bottles of bourbon.

She was dead on the floor. I could tell she’d been wrapping presents. The scarf in the box on the table was for me, she always gave me blue. I pretended not to see her while I waited for the ambulance, unnecessary siren speeding closer.

That bone-cold black afternoon lasted weeks into the new year. She was everywhere and nowhere. Sorry for your loss, they all said, even people I didn’t know, as if she’d dropped off the face of the earth. Which in a way she had. I kept just missing her in places I expected to find her. Been and gone, shadow slipping around a corner. A trace of Shalimar in that old fisherman’s cardigan she left on the sofa. I slept with it until it frayed and she faded. Then there she was again, in boxes of snapshots, homemade Mother’s Day cards, locks of baby hair.

Wanting to help, people asked how I was doing, did they mean feeling? But they never knew where to look, kept looking in places where they’d lost someone. I knew they’d never find her. They were trying to be nice and I was relieved when they gave up. So were they. I pretended to live my normal life, went to work,
talked about the weather, shopped, slept badly. Always gazing into that hole.

After six months, I began to think she’d be in a different form. On her birthday a seagull circled above me, calling to me as I stood by the ocean. Reincarnation suddenly believable. The grief hit again but felt good and I clung to it to keep her close. The seagull and I watched the fog sneak in and then she was gone. I shouldn’t have taken my eyes off her.
James, James, Morrison, Morrison, Weatherby George DuPree
...took his eyes off his mother and look what happened.

After that first year, I forgot her completely once in a while, now and then. But then with a sharp reminder she found me. A dusty can of hash deep in my cupboard, some old-fashioned profanity escaping my mouth, my sister’s knees. There she’d be. I’d cry and cry, washing the pain to a hard little nugget, a permanent part of me now, like my hair, changing over time but still attached. Truth inside truth. If she had stayed, I might still be trying to hide from her as she looked in vain for her own lost mother. And if I hadn’t been searching, I wouldn’t
have found anything at all and might still be angry.

Years have passed by now and my mother’s moved farther away. I’ve outlived her by twenty years. Sometimes she surprises me, a dimmer gentler reminder, most often as the seasons change. The first snow, lilacs, any and all versions of “You are My Sunshine.” Anyone napping on the couch. She supervises me ironing leaves in wax paper. My hands are her hands rolling out cookie dough. So sad to lose Christmas too, they said at the time, all-knowing. It will never be the same. Not true. There were many Christmas’ before that one and many more after. She gave us Christmas and left it with us. We wrap and sing and bake. Make those awful cocktail franks in her fancy chafing dish. And we toast her with glasses high so even the little ones can always find her.

-Wendy Palmer

Wendy Palmer is an ex-social worker who lives on an island. Her work has appeared in Rosebud, New Millennium, Nimrod, Confluence, Sixfold, Lunch Ticket, Spillwords, Martha’s Vineyard Magazine, Sad Girl Diaries and various anthologies.