Thoughts

I continue to choose seclusion for myself, to prefer solitude and quiet to my usual inclination toward the social, the people, the noise. At times over these past weeks I've worried that this choice, this intentional aloneness is unhealthy for me, a choice or change I should work against, push against until my circle opens wider and I fill it.

In my aloneness my mother is with me, with me intensely, with me in her humor, her smile. Often while I sit and write she enters my thoughts and I picture her here with me, all the times we spent together here in my home, here when we drank tea, watched movies, sewed her baby quilts together. I know this is grief and it will pass.

Other thoughts eke in, welcome or not, and as I grieve for my mother other grief emerges and works its way to the surface, works its way up from where it has been buried, hidden in me. My mother did not choose to leave us, my son did. Months have passed without contact, without communication from him and in those months I relive every moment of his childhood and teenage years and each time fail to find what I search for, fail to understand the reason he would walk away.

So I will keep my aloneness for as long as I need to, as long as it serves me, protects me. I will seclude, I will hide, I will grieve.

Ache

I miss my mother. Beyond belief and from the depth of who I am, I miss her. On the outside I am certain this doesn't show, that I am able to conceal this ache for her as I busy myself with work and home and friends and all the moments and people that comprise my life. But it is there, this ache, this longing, this grief.

Early evening is the worst, the hardest. This is the time that was mine with her, became my time with her and even as I recall how I wished I didn't have to go to her room, that small room that had become her world, I ache to be there with her, be anywhere with her. Have her with me.

The middle of the night is bad, too, those hours when I wake and listen to the quiet of my house around me and know she is gone. Those are the minutes, hours, when I search for memories, memories of our life, not her death. Sometimes I find them and when I do I lose her again.

My sister and I visited with our mother's best friend yesterday. It was good to see her, to hear her voice, have her with us. She misses Mom, too. Misses their friendship, their time. We sat at the table, my sister, my mother's best friend, her daughter and me and ached together.

Watching and Waiting

Last night I sat with my daughter in her world, her world of a local restaurant, a small place down the road from her home in Connecticut, a place where she and her husband and their friends gather and relax and eat (and eat and eat and eat....you've got to try the salmon!). A place where the owner (and cook) emerges from the kitchen and hugs his customers, no, not his customers, his guests. He hugs them and greets them by name, makes sure they are having fun, that they like their food, that he knows who is there so he can return to the kitchen and cook for them.

I sat with my daughter in her world and watched her ease with the people in this place, her place. I watched her ease of being absorbed into the embrace of this community and in that ease I see that she is happy. She has found her place, her home. I watched her and in her I saw the child she was and the woman she is and know that her life is here and now and as she waits, waits yet again for her husband to serve, to serve his men and our country, that while she waits she does not wait alone, she will not wait alone. She has a place where others will wait with her.

I sat with my daughter in her world and watched her. While I watched, she waits. She waits with patience, she waits with confidence, she waits with love, both in her for her husband and around her from her friends. While she does this waiting, while she waits in small blocks of time now as her husband and his troops prepare, she prepares for the longer wait, the big wait. This big wait that comes for her in a matter of weeks will come and through it I will wait with her. I will wait and watch. Watch and wait. And as we do this, as she does this I will picture her in her place, picture her in the arms of her community, in the arms of those who love her, in the arms of this place that has become her home.