Hi Mom,

Jan 11 2024

Hi Mom,

My therapist Vikki spent three years trying to convince me to take the time to sit down and write you a letter, and despite her best efforts, and often helpful advice, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I think I was afraid I would sit here and just cry over the letter, I think I was afraid it would be filled with anger, that I would feel like I hated you, that I somehow would overlook all the good and hold on to all the parts that had hurt me. I’ve learned so much so quickly, and I don’t want to be the victim, and I don’t want to place any blame, because sometimes life is just the way it is and there isn’t anything we can do about it. You gave me the best you could, and it’s me who gets to wake up and can make a choice every day how I want to live my life, despite a rocky foundation I’m still grateful to be here. I started this letter on November 15th originally, and hadn’t been able to finish it, so maybe I wasn’t completely wrong.

November 15th should have been your 54th Birthday. I can’t believe we’ve missed nine of both yours and mine. It makes me feel a little bitter, how the woman who carried me in her body will have only been present for less than half of my time on this earth. I’ve got this nagging dialogue lately, filled with all these things I want to tell you, how I want to pick up the phone and catch you up on, how even in your absence you’re teaching me lessons.

Mom I want to tell you about so much that has happened, in fact it made me think how I could really sit down and write a book in all that you’ve missed. I don’t even know where to start. I want to hope that you’d be proud of me, I know I would have called you about all the awful parts. Like when the house burned down, when the puppies were trapped in the house, how I couldn’t sleep for months because every time I closed my eyes that’s all I could think about. I would tell you how I never wanted to experience how guilt eats away at you, ruthlessly. How even years later, sometimes it still sneaks in and keeps me up. How Dad had become so unfamiliar without you on this earth. How I wished you had been here to help with Grams, to help make her bed and making sure she took her medicine. To be there with me when I went alone to say goodbye to her, to thank her for raising me. I think you would have thanked her too. To love someone and see them off the way I think we’re supposed to. I wish you could have been with me when she was laying there in that hospital bed, she looked so small. For that time we were together, she was the most cognitive she had been in years. She pointed at a chair across the room and told me Dad had been sitting there everyday with her, with her dementia, no one had the heart to tell her he had died just a few months earlier. She suddenly looks at the chair and says, “Tell her yourself” she told me he wanted to tell me he was sorry but she didn’t understand why. It covered my body in chills up until I left the hospital that day. With every death of someone I have loved, I have for some reason believed less and less in an afterlife. But sometimes I still hope I’m wrong. I wish I could have had you in the trenches with me through all of my little heart breaks, as I’ve gotten older I’m wishing even more that you had been here for the good parts. Little things like new books I read that I think you’d like, how I get to own one of the sweetest dogs I’ve ever met, how I tried a new recipe and it reminds me of you. Or big things like how both people I loved and complete strangers all over the US donated money to me and helped me buy my own apartment. Restoring a faithfulness in humanity while giving me a second chance at a life I didn’t think I deserved. I wish you were here to help me decorate it, because my brain feels frozen like I don’t deserve this space, and as if all my ideas are bad, and you never once thought my ideas were wrong. That was one of the greatest things about you, you truly saw the best in people and forever rooted for them.

I wish you could come over and eat dinner with my friends. Remember when Claire and I were drunk off watermelon punch while all of our friends were outside in the backyard? How we sat inside with you while you were trying to fix the dishwasher. I don’t remember what we were talking about, I just remember us laughing a lot. Claire and I shaved our heads together, she had brain surgery and she doesn’t have seizures anymore, isn’t that incredible? My friend had a baby in May, I wish you were here to meet them both. It’s wild to see motherhood through the lens of your best friend, it makes me think of you and appreciate you often. I’ll never forget the time we were at Dennys when I was a kid, there was a woman sitting behind us with a baby who wouldn’t stop crying. You turned around and asked if you could hold her baby while she ate, she let you, and she was so grateful. You were never afraid of strangers, especially when it came to wanting to help them. Another friend of mine and I have traveled all over the world together. Places like The Bahamas, Mexico, and Greece. I’m trying to take in the world for myself and all of the parts you were never able to see. I’m not religious anymore Mom, you’d be sad to know I don’t believe in God anymore, but it hasn’t stopped me from lighting devotional candles and saying a small prayer for you and dad in churches all over the world. I’m with a guy I think you would really like. I think about how you would always hug anyone I brought home, from friends to relationships, I wish I had inherited that same comfortability with people, but I’m trying to teach myself. He’s the kind of guy that will bring me coffees and make me soup when I’m not feeling well, offers to clean up the kitchen and take the dog out, even if I won’t let him. A few weeks ago we came back to my house, after a day that a man had died in the restaurant I work at. I can’t begin to map out the twists my brain took processing and pushing down resurfaced memories of the day you died, but when I came home the dog had gotten sick all over my apartment. He kept trying to help me clean it up, and I couldn’t accept the help. I was so wrapped up in my survival brain. But once I was finished we laid on the couch and I could feel my nervous system regulate in a way, doesn’t that sound ridiculous to say? For the first time in my life I’m learning that a healthy relationship is challenging in different ways, not in ways of anxiety and trustworthiness, but of learning how to be vulnerable, to stop all my self sabotaging, to learn to be more self aware, show up, and let people in. Learning that to love people is to truly know them. I don’t know if I've ever been with someone and not felt as though I'm constantly on the edge of catastrophe, but I’m learning to. One of my best friends killed himself last year, how he had been such a part of my family, how he was around for me when you were in the hospital before you died, how he invited me over to sit and watch The Office and get drunk so I wasn’t thinking about it. How he looked out for Dad when he came into the bar, even though dad didn’t deserve it at the time. How he would always give me the hard truths, even if it put him in a bad spot sometimes. He’s a main reason why the Dark Horse has become my family, how without you and Dad I still have a group of people I look forward to spending the holidays with. How I had this group of people help me rebuild my life when I thought there was nothing left. This year was hard without him. I wish I had had more time to tell him how many times he saved my life. Mom, after you died I found a small note taped to the wall behind your pillows. It was a note I wrote to you on a hospital paper towel telling you I loved you. I didn’t know you had kept it all those years. I try really hard to write more notes to people I love, to remind them they’re important so that they hopefully never feel like they aren’t.

In a way the world keeps forcing me into circles, connecting me to parts that have nothing to do with me. How there’s a man I know that was recently in a terrible car accident, how he’s in a coma and they don’t know what will happen. He has a wife and a kid. I think of how when I was five years old you were getting the same phone call about Dad, how scared you must have been and how strong you were to show up everyday, even once he got better, how it had changed both of your lives forever. How LA is on fire and I can’t stop checking the news, how my heart breaks because I can relate all too well with people losing their homes. How I’m crying for other people, and that no matter how much I want to help, from experience I know there is only time. There are still a lot of days that sometimes I have to just hunker down, I have to disassociate and distract my brain enough just to get through those days it’s trying to trick itself. How I have to convince myself that how I feel is only temporary, in either direction. I still feel really lonely sometimes, but I’m also learning to find comfort in my own company, to trust myself that if I’ve made it this far, I can probably do anything. That I don’t need to die in order to be reborn. Mom, I’m seeing all of the second chances I’ve been given, and I want to keep trying. I’m trying to keep writing, I’m trying to go for more walks, drink more water, I signed up for a painting class, I’m really trying to keep going with all of these second chances life has given me. I’m trying to keep living my life in a way that honors myself, and everyone else who isn’t here. I don’t want to waste it. Thank you for making me, for raising me, and for teaching me to be kind to the world despite what it throws back at you. To be the bigger person and just try to do what’s right, and what makes me happy. To teach me how to be crafty, to be resilient, that I can teach myself how to do anything. If I could go back and change the time we spent together in so many ways I would, but I can’t. So I’m ridding myself of all the bad parts, I’ve dissected them and learned as much as I possibly could, and I’m making more space for all the good memories I have of you. I was wrong, I’m not mad at you anymore, maybe I never really was. I just didn’t know how to name any of the things I was feeling and anger felt the easiest. I was right about one thing, I did sit here and cry over this letter, but Vikki was even more right, I needed it.

I love you Mom.