Hollow

            I feel disjointed from my body with the reality of my Mother’s death stalking me slightly out of sight, creeping around my peripheral line of vision. I feel hollow, with the echoes reverberating inside me trying to call attention to something I don’t understand. My therapist said I need to cry more, but I am just not able to let myself go. This pain is comforting in a way. It is holding me together when all I want to do is avoid connection to this world twirling around me, confusing me, and reminding me that I am not complete. Incomplete? Is that what I feel? Maybe, I truly don’t know. 

Death truly does bring the best and the worst in people. You know who you can count on. It solidifies the strength of a relationship or brings forth its demise.  Sue and I often speak of our dead and the funerals. I have said many a time that one may not remember who all came to a loved one’s funeral, but we never forget who wasn’t there. Having someone not come to a funeral who one expected be there feels like being abandoned. It compounds the grief being experienced. It can often lead to the end of a relationship. I try to not make final decisions about relationships in the first two years following a death. Too much gets jumbled up with the pain of grief. Regardless, the disappointment is felt deeply at a time when one needs much support and familiar warmth.

            So for now, I sit with this hollow, disconnected, and incomplete feeling. It is odd, this hollowness. I find myself “checking out” more and more each day. I missed three red lights last week, thankfully they were at inconsequential intersections.  I miss so many turns and exits that I told a client the other day that my tombstone will say, “Vicenta. She made many U-turns.” 

Pictures

           I took pictures of my Mother as she was dying. I took pictures of my dead Mother before they took her lifeless body away in that death scented body bag. I remember wondering how many other loved ones had been cocooned in the bag that enveloped her. Death is messy. Literally. Bodily fluids are released as the body relaxes as if surrendering to its finality. That’s one of the reasons why the transport the dead in body bags, in case you were wondering so that the fluids don’t end up leaking everywhere.  So, as they were transferring Mother from the bed into the body bag gurney, I wondered if they washed the bags after each transfer. It certainly didn’t smell as if they did. I wanted to ask and to demand that she be put in a clean bag. I stopped myself because I sounded ridiculous in my own head. So, before they came and took Mother away, I took between five to ten pictures. I don’t know why I did it. There was part of me that wanted to have something to make her death real, I suppose, but I’m just guessing.  I’m still not able to look at the pictures. I pass them quickly when looking for other pictures, even as I feel a quick stabbing pain in my heart. No matter how fast I move through them, I can still see her death yellowed face. I want to move them into their own folder to spare me this torture, but it will require me to look at the pictures, an impossibility presently. So for now, they sit in my photo gallery, weighing down my phone.