My mom is who painted the hummingbird for me, a paint-by-number set she got at Michaels. Weeks and weeks and months of work.
At first, I think she meant to surprise me. But as she started realizing how long she was going to be at it, she moved to the kitchen table where I could see her progress, a magnifying glass resting nearby that she sometimes used to see the numbers.
A true labor of love.
I wasn’t ready for how striking the finished painting would look when framed, but this treasure now sits on a shelf atop my TV stand and I look at it everyday, sometimes just lost in memories of my mom.
I went to my doctor visit. Every year I make next year’s appointment for my physical as I’m checking out.
When my doctor walked into the exam room she knew immediately that something wrong.
I told her my mom had died recently. She offered her condolences.
Then, we got down to brass tacks.
The very basics of my current reality are a contradiction: I really don’t give a shit about being alive right now but I have a great deal to live for.
“I’ve had one serious experience with suicidal ideation in my 20s,” I told her. “This time, it’s more passive. I have my anchors in place and I’m not actively thinking about dying. But, I’m also finding that essential life skills, like making dinner and laundry, are more difficult, though I do them. If something happens to my son, I'm checking out for sure.”
My blunt confession didn’t seem to alarm her, though we got straight to work at looking at her piece of my care puzzle.
“Nothing’s going to happen to your son,” she started. “And if another catastrophe happens, you’ll talk to me.”
We agreed increasing my antidepressant was in order. She provided a list of therapists in my aftercare summary. My blood pressure and cholesterol have been creeping a little, so she wants me to buy a cuff and send her an average of a few weeks’ worth of blood pressures. After fasting blood work, we’ll discuss if medication is necessary.
Earlier this year, we’d talked about my cholesterol. My dad’s cholesterol has been medically treated for decades, but because both my parents’ heart issues at the time were electrical and not arterial, we’d decided to hold off.
“With your mom dying, we should treat more conservatively,” she told me, warning that would mean perhaps adding cholesterol and blood pressure medication in the near future.
I’m not opposed. I do what I can. I exercise, eat decently, though probably too much, and am aware and respectful of my mental health. I’m still fat, and OK with that, to be clear, and deal with multiple autoimmune issues.
So, if medication to protect my heart health is necessary, that’s fine with me.
What’s the point of this recounting?
The truth is somewhere between assuring people who care about me that I’m not a danger to myself and reaffirming my own connection to this existence.
A couple of nights ago, I was remembering something about my mom that made me laugh. I was sitting watching TV.
When I woke up the next morning, in the haze before full consciousness took hold, I realized I had no idea what the memory had been been, only that I was going to write about it at some point.
Laying there, I was desperate to recall what’d been so funny.
I still haven’t been able to.
My experience is that time is a thief. You think you’ll remember everything about who you’ve lost, but reality is much more muddy.
I would have bet my life that I’d always remember Kurt’s smell, his laugh, his voice, and I don’t remember any of those things clearly. We were a decade ahead of the first iPhone. Photos were on cameras with film. The only recording I had of his voice was from my answering machine, long since lost.
When I think of him, I have distinct timestamped memories and more general, broadly aggregated feelings that help bring him back to me. The time I spent sitting on the back steps of the bar where he worked, talking to him while he checked IDs. Him under the hood of my Corolla fixing the horn. Playing slot machines together on the gambling boat when visiting my parents.
His black leather motorcycle jacket. “We’re going to send this with him,” his dad told me at his wake.
The way it rained after his funeral.
Gratefully, I have my mom’s voice. I have pictures. But I still wonder at what moment I’ll forget exactly what her voice sounded like. How long before I can no longer hear her answering her phone with a kind of exaggerated “Helllloooo” when she saw it was me calling.
The way she hated cooking and would always ask when I was visiting: “So, what do you want for dinner?” When I’d tell her I didn’t care, she’d often answer: “Ohhhhh no. You have to choose.”
How she buttered her bagel and then flipped it over, bottom facing up, her plate slicked yellow when she was finished.
All those details, big and small.
I want to hoard them the same way she patiently stood over that painting dipping different brushes in different colors, point by point, until finally the entire picture came into view, as clear and obvious as the all the ways I miss her.