Like they were @ the start of me...

29 year old me misses my 6 year old self.

Moreover, she misses her Mom. 23 years ago my Mom managed to hold a cigarette in her mouth while simultaneously singing/cleaning/cooking/watching me & my sister (then 2). Impressionable 6-year-old me was awed and amazed by her, my real-time Mom, not by the cartoon mothers or TV mothers I had vague recognition of. Even my young mind knew that those mothers were made up, make believe and I knew that my Mom was real – I mean, I lived with her.

Obviously the years have given me insights and have thrown the blinds of innocence off of my dark brown eyes but the memory refuses to be tarnished. I still hold in silent reverence the image of my beautiful Mom caring for us, loving us and her happiness continues to shower over me. Time has made me wiser (and older) but I can still look back at my Mom, all those years ago, and see her with the innocence of a child – before reality came into play. I can still hear the records, see the cigarette smoke, see her big, round, tinted glasses, and hear her strong voice singing along to the music. I sat among the noise pretending to read but really watching her, memorizing her.

I smile as I think that my sister, then 2 and now about to become a Mom for the first time, probably doesn’t have much recollection of this Mom that I remember.

In years to come I hope I can laugh with my nephew and recall my memories of the apartment where his Mom & I were young, the apartment that my younger sister lives in now and will probably be in for a few years. An apartment that, when I lived there briefly as an adult, still invoked memories, ghosts of laughter and tears. I could still see the memories playing on the wall.

People change and grow, surroundings change and grow old but the memories that form our belief systems remain intact – if only colored by the tiniest hint of blue, reminding us that time moves forward not back and that sometimes memories are all we have.

Flowers for Ann*

Nobody even noticed she was gone until they looked around and realized they hadn’t seen her in years. Occasionally she would flare up and someone would joke “Must be Ann again,” but over the years the flare ups had become so few and far between that it seemed appropriate to say a proper “good-bye” to her.

There was no formal service. Nothing to really mark the occasion. Nobody cried. Nobody even gathered. Just one by one it dawned on the family that Ann had left. She was nowhere to be found.

If there had been a service, I believe it would have been a short one. No pomp & circumstance – quite the opposite of everything Ann represented – but a few people gathering. Probably not even to “pay respects” but to make sure she was not coming back. I prepared this little “Eulogy” for Ann. And I brought her flowers.

Ann:

“Not that it is customary to be happy someone has passed but I must say that I bring these flowers with a bounce in my step and a smile in my heart. For Ann brought our family many years of heartache and sorrows. Every time she visited we had a new crisis to handle. And so today I speak from a place of happiness when I bid farewell to Ann.

Ann was a difficult character. She acted out at sensitive moments because she was scared and lonely. She wanted to love and to be loved with a desperation that many of us can relate to. She kicked, screamed, clawed and cried her way into our lives and, once she had your attention, she wound herself around you and held on with a vise-like grip. Thinking that this was love, or the way to get it.

I don’t mean to sound cruel but I speak truth today. I am happy to see Ann go. May she never come back to where she has been put – hidden away beneath layers of happiness and positive life that have pushed her deep down into our memories. May the scratch of her scream, the rip of her volatility and the pain of her desperation be a thing of our family’s past – to learn from and grow from but never to go back to.

So, Ann, I smile and am happy that you are gone. In your passing may you enjoy these flowers as you never would have when you were here.”

(*Just to be clear: Ann is not a real person, nor even a made up person, she is a personality/alter-ego invented by my family. This is a work of fiction!)