Dedication: my mom
It’s hard not to feel like you’ve been robbed. I wouldn’t even call it robbery really. When you get robbed, at some point the items taken will be replaced or returned (if your lucky). But when you lose someone close to you, it’s a different story. The adventures and good times that could have been shared are now obsolete. You don’t know what they had in store for you and you never will. That’s just a part of the deal. You didn’t sign up for it. You didn’t wish for it. But its happening to you none the less. And now you will stay wondering what moments would have been your favorite memories. Memories that you will never have.
My favorite memory of my mother is my wedding. I walk into the reception holding the hand of my beautiful wife with cameras flashing, and the clapping of 200 of my closest friends and family. Seeing my mom standing at the end of this tunnel of smiling faces. Her smile always shined the brightest in the room. She had this way about her that was so amazing to me. She was silly yet sincere. She knew exactly how to talk and act in a way that could put you in this happy trance. When we would talk, it was like she was talking to the most important person in the world. She was just standing there, in her beautiful crème flowery dress that she spent hours looking for online two weeks before. We walk past the sea of faces and up to her, and she dives into my chest in that kind of hug only a mother can give a son, and tells me she is proud of me.
Now, unlike many other unfortunate kids, my mom always told me she was proud of me. Even after every screw up and failure; she somehow would find a reason to be proud of me. Then we sat together through the daddy daughter portion of the dancing, and the new do the mother son portion which made her super excited because you can count the number of times I’ve danced on one hand.
She starts telling me how she always looked forward to this dance, and how she danced with my dad at their wedding and how she amazed at how life works. She was always about the little coincidences of life. She would tell me stories of her childhood with her six brothers and sisters. How they would play and how things are so different yet the same in their adult lives. She was always part kid in the sense that she had a wonderment for adventures. She saw everything as something she got to do, not something she had to do.
She gives me one last squeeze and let’s go so I can be with new wife. This is my favorite memory with my mother. But this memory has one really bad characteristic. Something that haunts me constantly. It never happened. This memory is one that was taken from me before I even had the chance to know who I wanted to marry. I will never get to call this story a memory and it haunts me.
Instead my actual memories are of me taking her to doctor’s appointments, or helping her change. I have memories of walking her to the bathroom, and feeding her spoonful after spoonful. Laying on the floor of my parent’s room late before a school day, listening to my mom scream in pain. These are what took that memories place of my mother at my wedding. I was robbed and I am not getting those moments back.