Seven Years.

I've been on this planet 7 years without her. I was away from her - at a different house with my newborn baby - in the middle of the last night she would spend trapped in her human body. I wish I could have been there for her. I hope she didn't feel scared. I hope she didn't think she was all alone. I hope she never doubted that I care for her more than I care for anyone in the whole universe.

We were like sisters. Yes she was my mother, but we were sisters mostly. I think she always knew we were meant to be that way. Being separated is hard. I wish she would just jab me in the arm or say "boo" from the doorway; if she could just tease me a little bit from her current location just so I can be sure we've still got each other and that our journey together will resume shortly.

It can get lonely here. Not that I dwell on lonely. I don't. I'm fine. I'm only wishing for a sign on the anniversary of her journey home. And if she visits anybody it sure as hell better be me. I may be a pest and impatient and ungrateful but all the more reason for her to stop by and remind me to be humble.

I was just remembering a night like this about 30 years ago. I was 7. I was laying in the dark listening to a story on cassette tape about a mom who died and a little boy who had to say goodbye to her. And the song "I'll send down a rainbow, way up high above, to sprinkle down raindrops, teardrops of love...". Something like that. My dad had just told me that my mom was dying. As I lay there I supposed mailing this cassette to me was her way of offering comfort from 500 miles away, but I was not comforted. I was in shock, I was scared, and I was achingly lonely (as always). My life felt like a neverending cascade of decay and ruin and the imminent death of my mom was simply more of the same. So I lay on my back in the quiet dark of my room and pulled the devastation up under my chin like a quilt and fell asleep against its tragic coolness.

But my mom didn't die that year. She rallied back to life (without her right breast) and she trudged onward. As a result, we all suffered, as her survival caused my father to feel very upset. He raged. He ranted. He told everyone he knew that there never was any cancer at all, only a desperate charade put on for sympathy - which is a very believable lie to those who have never seen the jagged purple scar with their own eyes.

By the time the cancer came back the second time my dad had already done his worst in our family and there was nothing left for him to ruin. I was 20. And then by the third time the cancer came for her, she had her bags packed and had already said her goodbyes. She'd had enough suffering, physical pain, mental anguish, injustice, abuse, illness, and poverty. She needed something soft to lie down on. So she smiled. And gave up.

My mother has been the biggest tragedy of my life. More acute than my own pain and fear, was her slow lingering destruction. There's no one left alive who I can blame. I'm just alone again. And still wishing for a message from heaven.

As a young person I learned that loss and brokenness were solid guarantees I could lean my forehead against. They would never let me down; around every corner was their inevitable appearance. I grew accustomed to a soul always off-balance. I stopped relying on gravity to consistently pull my feet down - some people don't get that privilege. I understood that nothing belonged to me and I could wake up at any moment to find everything gone. There were no givens. Nothing was sacred. Not family. Not houses. Not possessions. All I ever really got to keep was myself, and even that seemed too often out-of-reach, with religion vying for posession of my soul and human men longing to possess my body.

But that was another life. Now I've grown roots and Reese has built four lovely walls around me to forever keep out the wind. Somewhere there is an old trunk with a rusty lock that holds all the stories. My stories. My brother's and sisters' stories. My mom's stories. The epic journey we once took together through the treacherous wilderness. We were all blind in some way. We only began to see as we looked backwards.