I wanted a window with good light in the morning.
I wanted work I was good at and hours that were mostly mine.
I wanted to read books and finish them.
I wanted, eventually, when I had rebuilt enough of myself to have something to bring, a relationship with a person who knew me in the present tense and not only in the context of where I’d been.
The first three I had. The fourth is a longer project.
I’m working on it.
That’s probably the most honest ending to this account. Not resolution in the way that resolves everything. Resolution in the way that means the main thing is settled and the rest is a project and the project is mine.
The folder is in the kitchen drawer.
The morning light comes through the window.
I’m working on it.
THE THINGS NOBODY ASKED ABOUT
There are questions I expected people to ask after my mother died that nobody asked.
Nobody asked how I was managing without the structure of caregiving, which had been my life’s architecture for a third of my adult existence and which disappeared overnight when she died. The structure was demanding and often suffocating and I had wanted to be free of it for years, and I was also, after she was gone, untethered in a way that was harder than I had anticipated.
Nobody asked what it had been like to watch her decline. Not in the clinical sense — there were questions about what happened, what the doctors said, what the final period looked like. But the experience of watching someone you love become a smaller version of herself over years, and the specific grief of grieving someone who is still alive, who has already lost the version of themselves you know — nobody asked about that. Maybe because it’s too large. Maybe because there aren’t good words for it.