My moms sweater still hangs outside
It’s been a year and a half since she died and it’s still there. Dirty, moldy, but there. Nobody has touched it. It’s not even placed where she left it, unbothered, because it fell to the wooded planks this last winter, the weight of the snow pushing it off the chair.
i cleaned my room tonight, extensively. Finally placed the things where I’ve intended to for months and easily threw so much in the trash. I painted the door stop.
S and my youngest nephew are sleeping his his room. They stayed up late, as to be expected. What I didn’t expect is for them both to pass out in his bed. My nephew, he’s 13 and bullheaded. He’s always been kind of a jerk which I contribute to his mom leaving when he was just a baby. S has always clung to my nephew only for him to be mean to him. But I don’t think he knows much else, my nephew that is. There’s tenderness under that demeanor though as I’ve always seen it, regardless of how infuriated I’ve been at times for the way he’s treated my first born.
Tonight as I was folding laundry, going back and forth between cleaning, I heard my youngest nephew ask my boy, “What’s your greatest fear?”
S responded, “My friends or family dying.”
it struck me. That’s his greatest fear because he’s lived it and therefore is a young child with the weight of reality looming over him every day— that people die. Your loved ones can die. They will be gone and you can never see or touch them or cuddle them or listen to their voice ever again. So often I tell him that I’m never going anywhere. Which I’m not, I don’t plan to. I don’t plan to because I’m not going to kill myself and I take a multivitamin and quit smoking a long time ago. I can’t leave him. I can’t do that to him.
Its not that my other children are less important, but I cannot even acknowledge the reality of death catching me at any moment not only because of my innate fear of it, but because S needs me more than anyone. He has a lot of wonderful grown up’s in his life…but I’m his rock.
More often than I wish, do I remember his face. The confusion. The fear. The way he stood there possibly less than 2 feet away as his father choked me. For the rest of my life I’ll be apologizing for it in ways he doesn’t see, as it’s a memory he cannot visualize. I’m thankful for that. But I know enough to understand the imprint left on him that he doesn’t even realize.