First Entry….Good Grief~

May 29, 2010 irishwordpainter

This emotional bloodletting is an assignment from my grief counselor.  It is my first entry and words come hard when we take aim; it’s like reaching for something in the distance.  These words are dripping from my mind’s saliva; soul stained.  My body has been broken hard against the tile floor.  I am out of sorts as if I am a tourist on foreign soil.  It is difficult to breathe and nothing seems familiar.  I am in a skin a size too small.  I have lost my footing and my center.  Every good thing I knew about my life is a lie.  And the weight of loss has sent me to my knees.  The power life has over an individual makes one bow to greater considerations and also has the marked advantage of slipping in like a thief in the night.  It happens just like that…. you can be in the sweetest embrace of sleep, wrapped in a cocoon of hopes and dreams; and you awake with lies and despair.  Suddenly you are afraid to surrender to sleep, you tuck yourself in tightly at night, weigh your body down with extra bedding for fear of flying off the face of the Earth.  Certain that nothing will ever be the same, and it can’t be, can it? 

Because the one person who defined me has left me blurred and in shades of gray.  She hung the sun and moon on my crib, and applauded my small lights until they grew so bright no one could blow them out.  She was at the top of every stairway I have ever climbed.  Mom taught me how to laugh in every language and told me the only sin is denying the flight of paper airplanes.  It was with her ears that I learned flowers speak of beauty of the world and that there are no guilty birds.  I have lost the ability to hear the flowers’ songs.  Morning is no longer a promise, but a sentence stretched before me like a plain white sheet.  The red in my painting is covered in darkness.  The gift of language has been taken from me.  The laughter has died in my throat and my expansive heart has grown so small, I am afraid I have swallowed it with the laughter. 

When I would leave for school, slumber parties or summer camp, Mom would say, ” kiss me so you won’t miss me”.  I will never hear those words again and I will miss her forever.  I have a favorite passage from Emily Raboteau:  ” I love the the ocean of Portuguese in my mouth.  My favorite word has no English equivalent.  You hear it in all the bittersweet love songs.  Saudade.   A noun with the taste of rum-soaked lime.  Loosely translated, it means ‘missing’, or ‘longing’.  Longing is probably closer in meaning because it’s a word touched with loss.  You experience saudade for something absent, something gone from you, something stolen or something that left, something close to your heart but far.  You feel saudade for the haunting thing that has a hold on you, what blues everything you see.  Perhaps Mother left so I would always have the saudade  for her.   So I could struggle into a name.  So I could begin.”

Entry Filed under: Mother/Daughter,Relationships,Sadness

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