It’s absurd to have lost her: my mom, with her wicked indifference. Her voice that only ever agitated the air between us to widen the chasm—jabs, dismissals, rebukes—promising we’d never truly be known to each other.

And then her failing liver. Her swelling brain, her regressions, her prognosis. Her utter helplessness.

Her somnolent, ritualistic wandering in confusion to the closet, closing the door and collapsing, slumped. In the labyrinth of her diminishing mind, I wonder what drew her there, into the quiet black of the closet, over and over and over.

The viscous remedy only harnessed her disease some of the time. Without its grip, she unraveled.

There’s nowhere I can go to see her again, formed and breathing and looking at me, with the same hazel eyes as mine above our high cheekbones. I glimpse her in my reflection and hear her in the timbre of my voice. I am of her. I am her.

I had attempted an escape of the droning days of being nothing and going nowhere with her. Yet, like a tide pulled by the moon, I dropped in defeat at her doorstep with a broken body. Her own flesh and blood, bloodied before her. A homecoming to sickly roots: my mom, with her unwavering refusal to love me.

How dare she die?

Even in death, she denies answers and atonement. She tended nothing in me and shone no light, and yet I orbit her,
forgive her,
grieve her.

She endures in my voice and in my eyes and in my cheekbones. She is everywhere, and she is nowhere.

My mom, who I’ve mourned all my life.
My mom, who died today, or maybe yesterday.