Mother's Day 2021

My mind is not on the women connected to me by birth today. Normally it would be. If you read the blog, you know that I write about them every year on this day. Well, most years. My relationships with the women of my line are complicated. I honor them, I often didn't exactly LIKE them, I love them, I feel guilt about how things went down, I absolve myself of said guilt because I was young, I seek to understand them, and I mourn. Complicated.

Today my thoughts were in Colorado. Last year, my aunt had everyone over for Mother's Day, because of course, she saw no reason to social distance. They all came because they rarely saw reason to fight with her, even when they thought she was wrong. Some people are forces of nature and tend to win fights. That often isn't fair. 

Some weeks later, she was in the hospital for a number of things. None of them Covid. All of them potentially fatal. One proved to be. Or maybe even more than one. At that point, her body was going through so much. She lasted until October. She'd been ill for years, sometimes to the point of being immobile. Ill, but never truly dying. Suddenly she went from ill to dying and it felt so fast. Even if the illness part had lasted for decades, that transition into actually dying and then into actual death was so fast. 

They crashed on the rocks of grief for a while, reeling with pain and confusion and loss. They thought things were going back to normal but then in February, my oldest cousin's oldest child (the child that made him a father and made his siblings aunts and uncle and made his parents grandparents) killed herself. More sudden than my aunt's death, more jarring than losing her, this new pain ripped open all the wounds from before. I'm not sure how long it will take to heal now. I'm not even sure what that would look like. 

So my thoughts and my heart are there with my cousins, with my uncle, with my second cousins. I wish they didn't have to experience this day with grief. I wish every gift and smile from their own children didn't have to be bittersweet and given with the underlining whisper that this too could be taken away. I wish it could all just be a normal Mother's Day with the normal stuff and the normal rituals. I really wish that.