Little Girl

My mom was buried on January 20th in 1973. Thirty-seven years ago, but it still feels very present to me. I still see the plot in the ground that was not-so-carefully hidden beneath the fake grass that day. All the assurances that I would see her again some day, or that she wasn't really gone, she was still with me... Though I have her in my heart, that young girl is still wondering WHEN she is going to see her.

My father was just not present. He really hadn't been, even before we lost Mom, but he DEFINITELY did not know how to deal with a 12-year-old who was standing at a cemetery on a dreary January day staring into a hole in the ground where they were going to put her mom. So he didn't.

I find myself furiously cleaning, feeling very angry inside, and letting it out on household cleaning products. Radio on loud, yelling at everyone and everything (on the inside - not saying a word outwardly). It's cathartic I guess, but my mom still isn't here.

Today the radio suddenly blares out lyrics from Bruce Springsteen's I'm On Fire "hey little girl is your daddy home, did he go away and leave you all alone..." and "sometimes it's like someone took a knife baby edgy and dull and cut a six-inch valley through the middle of my soul..."

I have lived 37 out of 49 years without her. I know how to do it, I have been doing it. But I don't WANT to. Yet I have no say about that. We don't know when we will lose someone, something, that we hold dear.

So as I force the vacuum into the rug a little harder, scrape the tile in the bathroom until my hands crack, yell at "someone out there" who took my mom, I need to remember to tell those that I love that they are precious to me RIGHT NOW.

Send someone a note, or better yet - give them a call, and let them know they are important to you and your life is different because they are in it. I hope you'll be glad you did.