Mom

Pals,

My mom died suddenly last week.

I am underwater, moving and thinking in the slowest motion.

It’s now been enough time that my father and husband and daughter and I have gone out for desultory ice creams at Merla-Mae, my hometown’s twist-cone institution, and it’s new enough that I can’t fucking believe it. I don’t know if I’m still in shock? Maybe? I finally get that it actually happened. When my sister called me, in the middle of the night, I kept asking her to give me a second, and turning to Simon to ask him if it was real.

Right now, I’m both 100 years old, and a lost and desperate newborn baby animal. I know one thing for sure: while I did not become a different person after becoming a mother (I think I wrote here, or somewhere, that I had in fact become “more relentlessly myself”) I have been transformed by losing my mom. The atmosphere I now inhabit rolled in with the phone call.

My mom was very loving, and very loved. She was warm, fun, funny, generous, practical and capable, sensitive and delicate, and adventurous most of all. She was brave as hell.

(When I told my sisters that I was going to include one of my favorite childhood memories in my part of the eulogy — the time my mom woke me up during a hailstorm so I could swim with her in the pool — they were like… That was fun for you? Like, isn’t that dangerous? It was the best.)

I love her and I miss her. I’ve been screaming “I want her back!” and I’ve been trying to stay level for my dad and my kid, like she would have. I just wanted to tell you.

xx

Kate