Without.

            More than anything, it’s the not knowing that eats at me.  Not knowing what she actually said, what I actually said, verses what I desperately hope we said to each other. Not knowing what happened. And now… not knowing what to do.

It was a Thursday evening when I found my mother lifeless on her bed. She was pale, ice cold, and bruised. I stood in her room screaming and shaking her bed for what felt like hours, turned out to only be about 15 minutes. Eventually I called 911, and they urged me to “not touch ‘the body’” and to “immediately go outside.”  Scared and confused I still managed to be offended at how impersonal the dispatcher was when referring to my mother. I hung up the phone and quickly tucked my mother in, trying to make her look more “presentable” for the strangers in uniform that were now on their way.

            I went outside and paced in front of the house crying and screaming, waiting for the police to show up. My cries were louder as I passed my mother’s window, knowing that I was still secretly hoping to wake her, that possibly she had only been in a deep sleep. Eventually the first policeman showed up. Grabbing his hand as we walked back into the house to show him where my mother was. As we walked back out of the house, I turned to the officer and whispered “she’s my only mom.”

            Eventually family slowly began to show up and congregated on the front lawn. I was able to stand and walk around occasionally, but for the most part, I just stayed crumpled on the lawn outside of my mother’s window. As I laid there in silence, listening to my family frantically make arrangements with the mortician, and the police declare that there was no foul play, I tried to remember each detail of my last night with my mother, which had only  been two days prior.

            This is where the first wave of unknown began. I sat up and continued crying, but now hysterically. I couldn’t remember if when I had said goodbye, I had also said “I love you.” My chest got tight, I was shaking, my body felt stiff and weak at the same time; all I could say was “I don’t know what I told her.”

            The funeral came and went; it was lovely, emotional, and very pink. She would have adored it.

            Roughly a month after the burial, I received a package in the mail containing my mother’s autopsy report. I was finally going to know why she didn’t wake up. I was finally going to know why she left without saying goodbye. So much was going to be resolved. My grieving was now going to have direction.

Cause of Death: Undetermined.

There’s my second wave of unknown. She wasn’t a picture of health, but she shouldn’t have died, not yet. So what was it? What did they miss? How do I move on from something I have no answer to? How am I supposed to act normal and under control when I have a heart palpitation? What if she died from heart failure? Or a brain aneurysm, she had headaches all the time. But they checked all that. Everything came up clean. I get nervous about the sniffles, and petrified by the stomach flu. I’ve become my family doctor’s healthiest frequent flyer, and my therapist’s most self aware hypochondriac.

And finally the third wave, being a single female in her mid twenties, with no parents, depressed, and scared. It’s been four years since I checked my mother’s frozen wrist for a pulse, and I still don’t know what to do without her. I panic during break ups, who am I supposed to call? I cry when I get a raise, who is going to care? I walk into classes pretending to have picked a major, when I really have no idea who or what I am.

It’s the not knowing that eats at me. It encompasses every fear I have since I lost her: Did she know I loved her? What happened? And what if I can’t do all this without a mom? There are so many things in this world that each of us will have questions about that will never get fully answered. There are times when these answers feel like they hold the key to our happiness, our direction, or our closure. I guess this is where growing up comes into play… the day that we realize the answers will never come, and we will simply have to live without.