In The Absence Of You
To those who understand the repeating cycle of love and loss. 06.22.2020. xo
A version of this piece was originally published in an issue of Quelle Presse literary magazine the year after my mom passed. I got the chance to read it to her in its earliest form just before she went into hospice. We were sitting cross-legged on her back porch in Northern California. It was early in the morning and there were many loving tears. This piece is for her — xo
When I looked down the beach I couldn’t see her. I’d been tracing her presence along the shoreline, her blue shirt a scattered piece of the Santa Cruz sky. But when I looked up from my book, scanning the white caps, sun hats, and broiled faces down the beach, she was not among them.
I shoot straight up, pages tumbling, craning my neck down the coast. My vision skips until it lands some forty feet away. There she stands, staring out into the crush of the waves. Her shoulders are set against the wind at her back. The corner of the kerchief wrapped around her head is beating back and forth, stuck in the breeze.
I watch as she turns and begins, with easy grace, to paint large sweeping spirals in the sand. My heart slows, and an idea begins to form.
Sure of her existence and in my ability to race to her, I look ahead into the waves and let my mind wander back to the moment before. What if I had come to this beach all alone? After all, she had carried her shoes down the beach, so, aside from a slight divot where she’d briefly sat beside me, there were no other markers to say that she’d been there at all.
I sit down again, pushing my feet into the sand, shivering into the damp of my sweatshirt. There are traces of sea salt etched across my bare, goose-bumped legs, and I take a deep breath before closing my eyes and imagining, for the first time in four months, what it would be like if my mom did not survive.
I know. you’re not supposed to do that. Everyone tells you to focus on the positive and envision the best possible outcome. To Push away the “what ifs” that come drumming at your door. But imagine for a moment that she was in pain.
That after all of the treatments and all the heartache, all she wanted was to be somewhere peaceful. Say she went to that far peaceful place, a place where I could not follow, or look down a shoreline to see her there drawing shapes in the sand. With my heartbeat thudding, and my sadness compacting, I continue to imagine.
I imagine that I would find my way to sit by the Pacific Ocean. I’d feel the sand in my toes, lean into that familiar wind at my back, and watch those white peaked waves. I’d look up into that wide-open blue sky and see a piece of my mom there.
Where the skyline meets the sea, I’d see her blue eyes looking back. The curve of her smile on the peak of a wave, rolling inland to meet me where I stand. And then, I’d walk beside her down the beach, feeling her touch in the gentle pull of tide between my toes — the measure of existence as she changed from water to wind, to light all around me.
In the absence of her as she is now, she’d become a part of this great everything; a catch in the wind on the waves or the sun beating down, the traces of salt in my tangled-up hair. In losing one form she’d gain a million.
And of course, I would be sad, though “sad” seems too small a word to cover grief in its entirety. Because my mom is so much of me, and I love the form she has.
I love the scattered freckles across her neck and the way her hair catches the light. It’s so newly grown back that sometimes it looks like a halo. I love the sound of her voice, even when she’s mad because no one else says my name with such sureness. Mila Gabriella.
And when she sings, everything opens and the 1/2 inch that I have on her doesn’t matter in the slightest. She becomes larger than life, full of sound, beauty, and pride. And I know she is proud. Of me and my brothers. Of the family she has and the family she’s chosen. Of the beautiful mistakes that have blossomed and bridged, friendships and kindness that ease the weight of life’s harder choices.
I love her because she is part of me, but who the hell am I to stop someone from being a part of this great everything? The truth is that I can’t stop it. However her journey ends, all I can do is be here and love her with all that I can.
There comes a moment that’s made for simply letting go. It’ll be my job to remember her voice. It’ll be my job to visit the ocean and remember my mama, in all the forms she has.
A mere forty-something feet separates me from this alternate, and entirely possible version of the world without my mom. It is also so much easier to imagine an ending when all I have to do is open my eyes and find her, making her way back toward me.
She sits down close, and I rest my head against her. She begins to work at the tangles in my wind-whipped hair, and I seal the door on those timelines, no matter how looming they are. The only thing to do is just to be, where I am, and with who I am; with my mama by the ocean.
If you’ve read my other pieces on this Substack, you may see a familiar theme.
I have written about my mom before, and in the four years since she passed, I have accepted that I always will. It will be the connective tissue in the beating heart of a human being that lives on through the words that we share; about them and for them.
I like writing about both grief and joy because both have become balancing points of my life thus far. Thank you for reading. I will keep writing. xo