The life she breathed

As I was lying in bed the other day running through the events of the day in my head, I suddenly found myself thinking of the past eight and a half years I’ve lived without my mother.

Sometimes I find it very difficult to absorb the fact that I have actually managed to live for nine long years without seeing my mom, hearing her voice, feeling her presence, taking for granted that she will pick up the phone when I called home.

Sometimes I try to close my eyes and remember her voice. Every time I do that I hear her calling my name with a happy musical tone! She was all about happiness, music and love. I sometimes make up a whole conversation with her to remember what her pure soul felt like.

I’ve looked for her in the face of every woman her age, in my own face when I look at the mirror every morning! I’ve looked for her in everything she used to love; in sunflowers, hot sweet potatoes, dark chocolate and the beautiful bougainvillea she used to talk to every morning.

Losing her was our first real encounter with death. When it happened I felt that death had entered our house and took away that feeling of safety and security forever. I felt I’ve lost grip of a major string that was holding me on to life.  

I say that with total peace in my heart. But once you’ve got a taste of death you start to lose sense of life.

I wont deny the fact that I’ve totally lived those nine years; I fell in and out of love, travelled, moved two countries, changed three jobs, made many new friends who will never meet my mom. I laughed a lot and cried even more.  I lived my life like any normal human being.  But I carried a deep dormant cut that would be awakened every now and then by tough and painful times. That awful feeling of loss would hit again so hard as if it were the first time. And when that happens I’d think to myself “where did she disappear? She was just right here!”

But she would visit me in my dreams and I would hold on to the details of that dream until the next one and the next.

I’ve always wondered are we as human beings strong enough to carry such loss in our hearts and move on with our lives? Or are we very weak and tend to use God’s gift of forgetfulness to help us carry on? I honestly don’t have an answer to that.

All I know is that I miss my mom more than words can say. I miss waking up to the smell of her coffee every morning; I miss the smell of her cooking in our house, the early sound of her watering the plants. I simply miss the life she breathed into our hearts every day.