On my mother dying, tonight.

When a parent dies, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter that you expected it, or even that the parent wanted it, longed for the release of death, railing against the too strong hold of life with a body that would not surrender when called to. It doesn’t matter that you ought to have accepted it as inevitable long ago, or that maybe you did, on a surface level. It hits hard, and real, and long, and convulsively, like dry heaves at the end of a long illness. What matters in those first hours, come days, looking forward into weeks, after you find out, when the pain finds you and curls around your belly and makes itself at home. What matters is the black and red empty psychic whine that reverberates with long empty echoes off the walls of the canyons of your insides. What matters is that empty roller coaster feeling that rises and falls, making you believe that echoing twinge is the last, until another joins it, and another, and then another, and then you realize you’ve been awake for hours and it feels like the night is never going to end.

It doesn’t matter that you’re not a baby. You feel like one, as the slow, sinking realization grabs hold that you are no longer the child of anyone living. It hits you that someone who was there at your entry into this plane—whatever you want to believe this world is, a place between other places or an existential place unto itself—is gone. Someone who witnessed your entry here, and maybe the only person present there to whom that entry was significant, is no more. One last barrier between you and mortality is removed. And you feel like that baby, again; alone, and cold, and crying against the encroaching isolation.

It doesn’t matter that you’re an adult, because each adult is also someone’s child, as much as someone’s parent. It doesn’t matter that you’re supposed to understand how this whole cycle of life thing works, and that nobody makes it out alive. None of it matters, toward making you feel any better about it.

It’s because she wanted to go, I think, that I don’t feel bad that she’s dead. Or maybe it’s just innate selfishness. She wanted, and was ready, to die. And so I don’t feel sad that she got what she wanted. I just feel sad at being left behind. And that’s just silly. As silly as the tug of regret at not having said goodbye tonight. My last words to her were “I love you.” But that was over a week ago. It should have been last night.

At this point, I’m tired of crying, tired of searching for sleep that won’t come, and past a point of exhaustion that makes anything understandable. Or seem to matter.

Goodbye, Mom. I love you.