Mama

Today I traverse the stairs to the world below and I cry for you. Today the men who find their thrones beside the station will not sponge sop soak absorb my expression. The sun hits me like a towel’s embrace upon departing the tub. You always rinsed me beneath the shower head, leaving my feet the last appendages to go up against the water before landing sequentially on terry-clothed tile. In the seconds of wet body interacting with air I let my eyes bounce around your cubbies of accoutrements. 

The Dax hair pomade used to slick my soft and adventurous hair back into two braids – or “plaits” as your Southern sisters remind us. Reminds me of my mother’s stories of egg and mayonnaise in her hair. Maybe that is why your hair was so long – cascading between shoulder blades even in your older age (sixty-nine is not dying age, I know that now. When you are a child everything is older so everything is old. You were not old not old enough ).

Irish Springs bar soap and at least a hundred other types of bar soaps whose scents I now pick up on the most unexpected of wafts. 

A slew of Johnson & Johnson products on shelves dedicated to my care. 

Bleach to supplement what every other cleaning product in the house lacked and then some. Even the baby wipes carried the astringent scent – their juvenile attempt at cleanliness leaving too much room for error. 

A menagerie of Vaseline jars coming in all shapes and sizes. Jars as big as my baby girl head and as miniscule as the pinky toe of my favorite plastic playmate.  

You would dry me in a towel that always pilled rugged against my skin before dousing me in petroleum jelly. Sticky and oily I recoiled internally but decades later my skin is still supple and I am indebted to this ritual. 

You loved the motions of cleanliness. 

When I began grasping for autonomy as children do, my mother gently drew back my arm. She understood the gravity of moments. Let her take care of you. So I did, though I wish I had let you smother me a bit more completely. But I’ve always been running – speeding to my death in the name of having and having had.   

Your mother died sixty years before you joined her. You are sixty years older than me and thirty years older than my mother who is thirty years older than me. I always felt that made us special. The three of us had a line that my aunts and cousins did not. Does that mean we share the same pain? Your incessant cleaning, the way you stacked locks along the front door and boxes beneath the doorknob at night, the need to try and wrap your arms around everything unpredictable and command it into obedience, did I inherit this? Walking about with my shoulders at my ears predicting and adjusting for others' volatility. My mother says you were never the same after you lost your son. Your mother died and you were never the same your son died and you were never the same.

And what of the boy who made a slide of the banister – partner / co-signer / domestic-debate adversary / joiner in grief / pre-school picker-upper/ chauffeur / beloved Poppy – was he your everything? When mouths launched bullets from foyer to the landing did you ever try to wish back your aloneness or had love for you, transformed? You lost your child. who was not just a child. But a man. Together you lost him. Is that when love becomes something else? Did you ever cock your head back and interrogate the Lord you loved? Why do you take from me? Little daughters should not lose their mothers / mothers should not lose their wandering sons. These are the rules. Why does the Lord crack the rules senseless in the faces of our kind? You taught English my mother taught English. She and I speak often of the rules. But your nudge to break free seems obligatory. This is our journey / find freedom in the light find light in the freedom.  

I carry your pain like something inherited. I wear your pain like an emblem. 

For all the life you lived I was born to watch you die. I remember you in snippets / glimpses / flashes but most of my life will be dragging around the feeling of watching you die. People pity sufferers of incurable illness but life is an incurable illness. Pain is an illness we all develop. 

Nine years does not prepare you to watch someone die to watch a mother your mother die. The moments we shared together epitomize intimacy even if only in hindsight. 

I am spiritual now because of you. It is you I channel to read the cards and I understand now why you used to say I had been here before. I see the messages you send me in the chalk on the sidewalk in the sound of the trees, in the way I forget things and must retrace my steps, in the paintings and poems that deal with serenity and chaos, in the people you bring to me and the ways that they treat me. When the man I love presses his lips to my face soft and sure, I feel loved the way you have always loved me. I walk to school where I create in your memory and assert myself in the way you taught my mother in the way my mother taught me.