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.