#YOUR GONE BUT NOTFROM MYTHOUGHTS MOM MOVIE#
She’d start ripping the movie apart the moment the credits started to roll.īut I feel much more distant from her death than I expected. I miss the annoying immediacy of her critique of every film we ever saw together. When I walk out of a great movie or a terrible one, I want to tell my mother about it. Yet whenever I see an old person with a walker or someone over 80 struggling to rise from a chair, I feel an ache. I’m relieved that she isn’t monopolizing all the space in my brain, that I no longer have to be obsessed with whether I’m making the right decisions or being the best daughter I can possibly be. I am relieved that I no longer wake imagining my mother miserable and lingering, dying a horrible death in an understaffed nursing home. Old demented people and the ER do no mix. Relief that I no longer have to dread a phone call from Maple House that means racing to the ER, that we won’t have to face all the trauma that entails. Relief that I no longer spend my days worrying that she’ll forget she’s not supposed to walk, and that she’ll fall, that she’ll break her hip again, the same one or the other one. When I think about my mother, I mostly feel relief. It’s not real to me that she is really gone. The words, “My mother is dead,” come easily from my lips, but they haven’t reached my heart. I think I’m open to the grief, but so far, in the first weeks of this journey of mother loss, I feel very little. I’ve created an altar to her in my living room, but I find myself rushing past it without really seeing it, without actually stopping and looking or feeling its significance. It’s been a little more two months since my mother died.