Marie Gauthier

I’m receiving spam from my mother’s email. Someone’s hacked into my dead mother’s email account and is using it to send spam to me and everyone else in her contact list. There are worse things, I know, but. Gee. Zus. The shock of seeing her name in my inbox. Three times so far today.

Tonight Vincent and I had a disagreement about cleaning up, the upshot of which was that he (unintentionally) hit me in the head with a toy. Instead of getting angry, I cried. And then I sobbed. My grief is ever-present, not even under the skin, more like a sheen of sweat you could mistake for rain on the skin, ready to bead and flow at any moment.  Camouflaged. But tonight I let loose and wailed.

Aidan was with me at 6:30 in the morning when my mother died. He was so unnerved by my grief then that he cried too, a mournful lowing that called me back to myself and to him.

Tonight, he patted my head and cried silently next to me. The kind of tears you cry in witness to another’s pain. Not afraid, just sorrowful.  Then Vincent climbed into my lap and held me.

How much they understand, who really knows. I purposefully didn’t hide anything from them, especially those last days. They saw Mum ill, and bald, and yes, even dead. Newly so, at home, and then at the wake. I didn’t want her to just disappear. I wanted them to be able to say goodbye.

Aidan’s too young to truly get what’s happened, but Vincent knows. He comments on it sometimes, how his grammy died; the permanence of it has finally sunk in. At first, he was waiting. A few hours after she died, she was still at the house due to a hospice flub (not a big deal, not their fault, and actually a comfort to me, having her there as long as we could). Vincent said, “What’s taking Grammy so long?”  “What do you mean, sweetheart? So long for what?” “What’s taking Grammy so long to be alive again?”  Brought me up sharply and reminded me that for all his big boy talk, he’s still little.

Her death eight weeks ago is already a lifetime for them. They don’t connect my sobs with anything beyond a boo-boo. But the compassion contained in those little hearts — how gentle and accommodating they were for the rest of the night —  brushed teeth and in bed, on time and without protest, asleep almost immediately.

They so readily accepted my tears, my really over-the-top keening, as just and right and natural.

*”…the little kite that you sent flying on a sunny afternoon. Made of something light as nothing. Made of joy, that matters, too. How the little dreams we dream are all we can really do.”  “Kite Song” by Patty Griffin. (You can only listen to the song in its entirety once at this link. But it’s still better than the videos of it available on Youtube. Seriously.)