Mom was my first audience. I would write poems or stories and read them aloud to her as my sounding board. I would join her when she ‘d work late Friday night or an occasional Saturday at the local paper and do rewrites on one of the then cutting edge Macintosh computers. They mostly consisted of me substituting words I found in the desktop thesaurus for the originals to show how smart ten year old me was. I still have those stories somewhere which were mostly painful Anne Rice and Stephen King clones but you have to start somewhere. She was always encouraging, though, and that was what I needed. She was the first person I talked to about Catcher In the Rye, Huckleberry Finn, On the Road and her all time favorite, To Kill a Mockingbird. Later, when I started publishing in the school literary magazine i always snagged an extra copy for her and she’d deconstruct them in the car before I’d leave to go into the Smelly Cat for my afternoon coffee and my first circle of true friends. I remember watching a lot of old movies with her. Casablanca was a shared favorite, ditto Annie Hall and other 70’s Woody Allen. She also once made me sit down and watch National Lampoon’s Animal House and we laughed at the same parts. We’d have nights with the classic Dracula and Hitchcock’s Psycho right before Halloween. In later years she was hooked on Dateline and Investigation Discovery and we would bond over true crime and cold cases, especially. I often wondered if dad got nervous that most of those shows featured husbands murdered by the wife?
Mom passed on Saturday after a three year battle with cancer. As per her wishes she died at home in her own bedroom peacefully. It’s going to be a long time before I can get through this and even lonfer, I think before I can think clearly enough to write. I know that the strength will return because it always does and it’s what she’d want from me and for me. In a weird way it’s like a weight has been lifted because I know she no longer has to live in pain. At the same time, though, I am in a state that exists beyond numbness. I have yet to really cry or accept everything that’s happened in the last few weeks, not just this, but I know it will come if I’m just patient enough. I miss you, mom.
death is real,
someone’s there
and then they’re not,
it’s not for singing about,
it’s not for making into art,
when real death enters the house
all poetry is dumb.
-Phil Elvrum
Do You Remember? 