the legacy of loss.
The Legacy of Loss: my mother’s legacy.
A book I read recently described how the author presented herself around the time of losing her mother, quoting a column, ‘For a long time, it was all you needed to know about me, a kind of vest-pocket description of my emotional complexion: ‘Meet you in the lobby in ten minutes - I have long brown hair, am on the short side, have on a red coat, and my mother died when I was nineteen’.’ She continues, ‘It was the core of my identity, my very state of being’ (Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss - Hope Edelman). Over the past year that is exactly how I have felt. To call it a ‘legacy’ seems a strange way to describe a loss, but that’s exactly what it is. Despite everything else, that is what you left with, what you are granted, the ‘understanding’ of having such a loss. To have a loss like this means that you feel that it is stamped across you, that is apparently obvious to everyone you meet. You feel like it is so much an intense part of you, you are surprised really when someone doesn’t know or doesn’t see it. You feel like they should. It is as much a part of you as the colour of your eyes, or the size of your feet. It can’t be changed or altered, not in the slightest. Something like this doesn’t happen without leaving you permanently changed. No matter what you do, it will change you, your fundamental being. Of course it does. It is everything you’ve ever known and your whole life changing, in an instant, never to be the same again.
Even now, I look back at the last year and wonder how I did it. How I had the strength to carry on in the way I did and pretend that everything was okay, when really it wasn’t. It was never okay. But I pretended to make sense of it and pretended that it was. Because that was easier. It was easier to fit in to everyone else’s agenda than make my own. I still don’t make sense of it. I’m still pretending. Maybe I always will be.
If she had still been there I may have been content to sit in my room and do nothing - I don’t know. You can never tell the way something might have been if it was different. Because who really knows? In the end it’s not down to you. You can’t control the world, nor God. There must be a reason. You have to keep telling yourself that it must be a really good reason for all this to happen, but there can’t not be a point to it all. You have to be positive - and strong.
I’m glad I somewhere found the confidence to go do all that, all that I did.
But the thing is, it’s not just about that. It’s more than that.
It’s missing someone who is so central and fundamental to life - or at least the lives that we live here in this culture. Unless it has happened to you, it doesn’t cross many people’s minds that it could have happened. It’s just not something you take into consideration when talking to someone, or even when designing a marketing campaign, or a global holiday. It’s like the centre of our family has fallen out and it’s up to us to re-centre it, without anyone knowing how or why. It’s like a part of yourself has gone missing, and you’re waiting for it to come back, not quite able to realise that it won’t. It’s hard for anyone else to understand - no matter what they say.
It’s still impossible for me to quite put it all into words. I have tried many a time, to understand it all, to know what this is. But I really don’t know. I don’t know if I ever will. I can keep trying though. And I will, keep trying.