Liminal Spaces & Late night Ruminations

It started in that gray time, far too late and much too early for anything to happen.

Later than the witching hour but still too early for that bird to get the worm, that’s when it hit. After tossinng and turning something just clicked in.

See, with my Dad I can see his house. I can visit that place and drink coffee with his widow in the room where I’d watched him die. I know there’s a woman inside who remembers him, his imprint is still there in the paint on the kitchen walls and the tick marks for his grandson’s height.

I can think back to a day when a group of strangers told me how much he meant to them, how he’d affected their worlds and changed their lives.

I can even visit a rock with his fathers’ name on it with his dust buried below or sit on a bench that hundreds of people donated thousands of dollars to install in his memory.

So with him, the grief? it’s tangible. Something more like a ghost than a memory.

My mom though, her death, it’s always felt distant. I missed the big mourning event my family held. Hadn’t been in contact with her for almost a year, I actively avoided her in life to preserve myself.

I know it happened, and it hurts, but when I drive past her street I know it’s only a stranger in that space. That the people living there never knew her. Probably wouldn’t know, or want to know, that someone’s mother took her life in their main bedroom.

I tried holding my own memorial, after some time had passed and I wasn’t quite so overwhelmed… but it was more my friends showing support than those who knew her showing their love for her. I know her family misses her too, her sisters and brothers, but with every year that goes by I know them less and less.

I wish I could call them both sometimes, and I miss random catch-up calls with Dad, but a call from mom could be chaos or comfort, so it’s easier to ignore the absence. Push away that pain.

This isn’t new information, not really. It’s just become more prescient. I miss her more than before, and I wanted to document it somewhere. Tell someone without having to actually tell someone, you know?