So hard to write, even harder to read

I found this while cleaning out some files, and it just seemed like something that shouldn’t be  deleted or forgotten.

Sunday, 8^th July, 2012

I’ve spent the entire day in a drowsy state, moving slowly and deliberately through the motions of domestic necessity. I’ve tried to clear my mind and focus on anything and everything besides the thought that beats behind all others – the thought that has been scraping against the back of my brain for the past four days: My mother is dying. My mother. Is dying. Mymotherisdyingmymotherisdyingmymother is dying.

I want to fall apart completely – cry for days, curl up in my bed and shut out the world and scream I DON’T KNOW HOW TO DEAL WITH THIS I WAS NOT READY FOR THIS. I want strong arms around me, a soothing touch, a calming voice whispering out you’llbeokayyou’llbeokay to the rhythm of my heartbeat. I want to relinquish control and I want to abandon all rational thought and just ride along the deep rivers of feelings which are churning just beneath the surface. I want to not worry and not care and not feel the weight of everything on my shoulders.

I know that I can’t allow myself to be that weak. I already know that I’ll bite the pain into small, bitter pieces, chew them slowly and deliberately, force them down to live in the hollow place where I put all my hurt feelings. Deep in my heart, I know this isn’t a sustainable solution and that one day – and probably one day soon – everything I’ve shoved down below is going to come pouring out of me in a volcanic eruption. But I can’t think about that now. I won’t think about it, because that’s just one more problem that wants solving and I don’t have the energy for anything else right now.

Death is inevitable. It’s the one absolute in this world, and so I suppose it is unfair to say that I didn’t expect this. I spent years expecting to get a phone call to tell me that my mother was dead from some sort of alcohol-related incident – alcohol poisoning, liver failure, attacked in an alley wandering home from a bar somewhere, and so on. I thought I had steeled myself to the idea of her death. I realise now that I was only kidding myself.

I had become accustomed to the idea in its abstract format, but I see now that a part – a large part – of myself never truly believed it would happen.  I know that now, because I don’t think I had ever faced the larger idea – the idea that when she dies, she’s gone. Not just distanced from me, or not talking to me, but gone for good. Even typing this now, I’m filled with a horrible pain that burns deep inside me just at the finality of this concept. No more emails. No more random reconciliations. No more chances. No more time.

This is so hard to write.