Sixty-eight years ago yesterday, my mother was born.
One year ago tomorrow, she died.
There is still so much that remains unprocessed in my head. So much that I will never know about her and so much that I’ve forgotten. I was thinking the other day about how I don’t have very many happy memories of her. I know that they existed, but the specifics are buried somewhere. Mostly I remember fighting and exasperation and having to be her parent in ways I shouldn’t have been asked to do.
I wish I remembered more happy memories.
I sometimes feel that I don’t know the woman she was, but rather the woman she became as a result of illness and disease. Like I don’t actually know the woman my dad married. Or the woman my aunts and uncles remember as a sister. I’m the youngest in my family, so I don’t even know the mom my brother knew, not really.
Life is not a novel. There are no guaranteed denouements in real life, only what we tell ourselves. What closure we can make. Weaving the random happenings of a lifetime into a story that makes sense is a work, and not likely to hew to truth.