THAT DAY - a blurry memory

 

THAT DAY

a blurry memory

Where can you start when all seems so confusing… like a blurry photo taken in the 70s? It all seemed so extraordinarily huge and yet small. It is like experiencing a side reality in which everyone is overpowered by a painful passing, whereas you, you are just experiencing a ball of emotions ranging from inexplicable pain to surreal calmness.

That day I had finished taking a shower while some rock band song played in the background, blasting with fury my ears. Perhaps it was a way to soothe the pain, perhaps it was a way for materializing my grief. Up to this day I still do not have the answer. I still do not have the answer to many questions. I just only know I am here, in front of my laptop screen while listening to a relaxing piano tune with the sound of rain in the background, which I have discovered calms me down incredibly. I can’t seem to recollect the clothes I wore on that day, or how my short walk from my uncle’s home to my grandma’s was. I just know I got there, feeling not much but certainly confused, unaware of people, trying to live my life in that moment I suppose. I entered my grandma’s house as usual, I guess greeting someone here and there? … people sitting down in white-linen-covered chairs, showing a somber expression with bloodshot eyes. I noticed the room filled up with flower wraiths all over, all of them expressing messages of condolences and mourn though up to this day I do not know who had sent them… I also noticed there were four silver candle poles with white-thick candles standing on each side of the wooden-polished coffin, which had inside the most important person in my life, whose personality was once full of light, sensibility, pure love for me and my dear brother, and all other good traits a person may have… that person there being my dearest mother… my dearest mother.

I saw her lying there, inert…I looked at her as if waiting for her to wake up…wishing for her to wake up!… wishing the reality was another, but that of course didn’t happen. I knew she wouldn’t wake up from her final dream and despite of this I was calm, I was there, I was standing there… and I was broken… I was mourning the passing of my mother, realizing she wouldn’t come back, realizing she wouldn’t bless me every morning, that she wouldn’t wake me up to go to school, that she wouldn’t call me up for dinner or to help do something….she just wouldn’t… she just wouldn’t….she wouldn’t say to me again: ‘my little man, look how handsome you have become!’ with a sweet smile, with her honey-like voice…she wouldn’t come back, no matter how much I wanted.

I think it was on that day that she was taken out to the church, where the priest would say what is religiously appropriate for such an occasion. I clearly remember my uncles and other people carrying the coffin on their shoulders while my dearest aunt was holding me as we were walking our way through the procession…they were singing a beautiful song about our Lord Jesus Christ, and  I could sense her harrowing pain crawling withing me, her tears flowing down her cheeks as she hardly pulled herself together to sing the tune…I sensed her pain and I just crumbled inside and to this day… I still crumble and cry like that little boy whom she, my beloved mother, loved dearly. And to be honest, I do not remember much of that day except of what I am writing here. I do not know where my brother was, or my grandma, but I am certain they were there. I just think that consciously or unconsciously my mind has blocked a lot of what happened on that dreadful day.

We got to the cemetery under a grey sky, those clouds up above announcing they would start crying at any moment. And so, they did. They cried. The rain watering us as if we were flowers, washing away our tears so that we could not see them on each other’s faces. They lowered the coffin and proceeded to the inevitable bury. I think I was holding my grandma, whose heart again had been shattered. I cannot even fathom how much grief and pain she was in, seeing that her daughter was no more. Up to this day, neither one of us, nor my brother, nor my uncles and aunts have recovered of losing her. It hurt back then, and it still does today. Even though we as people register death as a natural event of life, we are not fully equipped to deal with it maybe? Though in my heart I still hope to see her again one day, for I still have her in my heart and in my thoughts. May God Almighty allow me to be with her again.