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October 16th, 2023

Three years ago today, my mom decided to go on a forever trip. Due to her terribly dark sense of humor, she didn’t send a text to let me know, or even say good bye.

The good news, though, is that after going through these thousand days or so, I don’t even miss her.

Oh, can you imagine?

What a blessing it would be to spread the word that this loss was the kind that just took a few months and a fresh set of bandages to heal; that the wound closes, it doesn’t hurt anymore, and the scar that everybody told me I’d have simply disappeared. I just walked it off.

No, that’s not what happened.

I went through a lot of this online. Just like I did when I got sober, I documented it: I created the thing I wished I would have had when I needed it.

I try to be open and vulnerable here, but even I have my boundaries, because I realize a simple truth: I have to make these confessions pretty in a way, because you won’t keep reading if I don’t. And if you don’t keep reading, like Tinkerbell, I die.

(You could argue that you don’t keep reading either way, but here you are, reading.)

Because of that relationship, I can only be so honest. I can be sad, but it has to be funny. I can be ugly, but it has to be strategic. I can be dark, but I have to offer a door cracked open seeping light from the other side.

They call art a “craft” because there are rules; they would argue it isn’t enough to just say how you feel.

The truth is, some days are fine, and other days I deal with things that I can’t tell or write to anybody. I go through experiences of intense fear and self-loathing, moments where I am certain I am unlovable and irredeemably cringe, times when I question the point of my entire existence, and grief has made all of this undeniably worse.

I guess the difference is that I’m feeling these things with an emotional perspective I didn’t have before.

People familiar with grief will tell you there are good days and bad days, and then say some shit like “loss is a gift” which was clearly written on a good day.

I just finished a book recommended to me called Think Like a Monk (full disclosure: I thought the idea was stupid, even the title was stupid, read the first chapter and fell in love with it). A decade ago, I couldn’t imagine it: not only reading something like this, but taking almost twenty pages of handwritten notes about it.

This is how I choose to deal with things now. I dig.

When I feel unlovable, I dig into that and fill up my compassion for myself. When I feel the sharp fear I’ve been having of late, I dig into that, and use stupid techniques that calm me.

I visualize, and focus on the words: balance, calm, ease, stillness, peace, sipping on each syllable like I used to tiny bottles of vodka.

And every time I stumble wholeheartedly over an obstacle, I can see my mom sitting on the bleachers, cheering me on, her deaf-lady voice embarrassing and nourishing me in a way I won’t ever get back.

The same woman who kept handwritten notes, kept the history of our lives, who loved me, who knew that compassion and service were the highest purposes.

Three years later, I do still miss her. Terribly. So I try to embody the best parts of her, and be better than the worst parts of me. I still turn to her to know what’s good.

Even though she didn’t send me a text before she left.