What broke me as a child was my mother’s death from breast cancer. But around that shattering, I became a person – and learned how to parent my son
I try to remember her hands. They were younger than mine are now. I imagine her long fingers and yellow, uneven and unpolished fingernails. Or had her nails fallen out? I am eight, about to turn nine; she will be dead in two weeks. Today is Mother’s Day and I am allowed to stay home alone with her while everyone else goes to church. I am to be her helper, so I carry a basket up from downstairs. I set it on her bed. She is sitting up.
I know this is meant to be our day, our time; it is the first and last time I will be alone with her in this house. But I don’t want to be here. Within weeks, she has transformed from my mother into a ghost, a skeleton; no hair, scarves covering her head. I know I am supposed to want to be with her on this day, but how can I want that? To be with a dying woman, my disappearing mother, whom I resent. It is too much. “What are you doing?”, I want to scream. “What do you expect me to do now, here without you?”
