Tomorrow is the Monday, the 8th of May; it is VE Day. I am home alone with the boys this long holiday weekend. Yesterday I realised that the service for my mother in Georgia is this upcoming Friday. My aunt, her sister, sent me a reminder via a message on Facebook. How painfully modern, in a time when a phone call is too personal, too intimate. It is somehow more appropriate to communicate with a distanced relative by social media message. We all just accept this disconnection casually, in the age of connectivity, never really present, but represented everywhere by a version of ourselves that we feel like we can share and not be bothered.

Having been reminded, I am overwhelmed with emotions, strong pain, and deep sadness. My default mode is avoidance, which pains me to say but at least by saying it I can be somewhat aware of its workings and try to fight it. The pain frightens me. I know that by writing, I will get into it and face it, bit by bit. I write slowly now, and with many pauses. Even the music I listen to now is slow, ambient and long, frequencies mixed with slow pianos and echoing.

Parenting is hard when I am also in this state, especially now that I am trying to behave in a new way, a kind and understanding way, that respects the individuals that my children are while also reining them in when they need to be herded. I am exhausted and alone. My body hurts. Still experiencing the aftershocks of that seemingly uncomplicated accident that happened already a year ago. As I write, I wear a brace on the left wrist, a stabiliser, which slows me down, too, forcing a deliberateness in my typing. No pain, though there, the pain is in my heel, on my left side, as has been every other problem. It is probably cause by a pinched nerve in my S1 vertebra, or sacrum. There is something here to be investigates, the Latin root that links sacrum with the sacred that I will have to look up after, as I am sure that the symptoms of this area of sacredness relate to the deepness of my emotional and spiritual experiences at the moment.

Inside I feel like I quietly screaming, all the time. My grief needs to and wants to come out, so that this silent screaming can stop. I cannot and do not want to ignore it anymore. Surely this occasion of the internment of my mother’s ashes into the earth (I think) in her ancestral home – the place of her mother’s childhood, where so much of the family still remains – is at least a catalyst for letting this grief go, so that she may be free of her earthly responsibilities. We must set her free, together, letting her know that it is safe to go, that we will be okay without her.

Earlier, I was drifting in my thoughts, thinking about the piece of paper that I found at Mom’s house that I kept and brought back with me home to France. It was old, wide rule, loose binder paper, the kind you write in in middle school. Typed on it, on an old electric typewriter, I think, was a short and beautiful poem about love and letting go. It was read, she had noted, at the funeral for Princess Diana by a Lady or sister, exactly who, I forget. Above it, in italics were the words In Memoriam. It was surrounded by so much blank space; the emptiness of the entire page just made its simplicity so much more impactful, with its solemness to bear witness.

On the reverse of this paper she had written out this poem, as well, as though she had taken pleasure in writing it out in her own hand, of feeling the words travel from her mind to her heart to her fingers, and then again as she read it as she went along. It was a beautiful thing to realise, as one thing that my mother could do, in her inner world, was to truly feel pleasure in the beauty of words and of poetry. She was a classic soul, a bonne vivante, who was born with the innate sensibility for aesthetics, an irony for someone who had no care for beauty in her outside environment with the exception of her garden, which she loved. Even when she had the opportunity and help to do so, she just couldn’t seem to understand how to execute it. She understood what really mattered in life, somehow.

Below the poem that she had written out was “the Corinthians quote about love”. I guess I saved this for just this occasion, her service, having tucked it away among the odds and end of paper things that I brought back with me. I read it again yesterday, after realising that the service was this week, not May 20th, which for some reason was the date that I had in my head for it. Reading it again sent me right back into it, the overwhelm, the panic, back to buying cigarettes today, falling back into old habits.

While I was drifting today, thinking of this poem again, knowing I have to share it, to send it through to one of the family members that will be physically there, so that it will be read and that she will hear it, because I know that she will be there. I also want to write a prayer for her, for the family together, so that we may each heal in our own way from the hurt and the loneliness that we all share inside of us that is recent, learned, and inherited. Also though, and most pertinent to this moment is healing from the loss of her, such an exceptional person.

I said earlier today, out loud, to myself, that I just wanted to go home and watch easy Sunday night television. It is the kind that reassures, delights, sometimes with humour, sometimes with wit, or with romance. It might relish in a time gone by and foreign or fantastic. It transports, that is sure, into a place of escape but also familiar. It is warm like a family afghan and lets the mind and heart be enveloped in security. I want to be home again, on a Sunday night, watching PBS with Mom.