the time she left*

I don't like January.
It's a potent month. Christmas is over, it's cold and it's dark and it's the anniversary of her death. I feel it all in my bones, the gray drizzle of horror.

Time makes a difference.
She died eight years ago.
Still, I wake each day with some sorrow.
Plus high hope.
I wake grateful and astonished and I do not brood.
But I remember the time she left.
Time barely cares.

Her personality, her preferences, all the particulars extinguished before they could bloom.
She died one day in January, but also across the years. She is still dying, really - which must mean she is still living, too?
Mostly my revelations pick not at whether she would’ve been the person I thought she would be, but whether I am the person I thought I was.
There is a casual dismissal of the complexity of my role, mothering children here and gone.
I never meant to stay home forever.
There is privilege in being allowed to grieve, the time and the space and the resources to sit in the pain. I got to stay home and hold her while she lived, and I got to sit with her as it ended, and I get to be with my boys now.

The death of a person is not just the death of a person, it’s the loss of who they were in the world. I cannot stop wondering who she would have been, who I would have been, if time had not bled out between us.

She lingers in everything, the things she touched and the things she didn't.
And in all three of her brothers.


*from a poem Tucker wrote, as a Christmas gift to us. It is called Where I'm From, and mentions things like Macbooks and our Toyota minivan, a small metal cement mixer and the new white house, cousins and grandmothers and great grandpa Jim.
And his sister, somehow indelible: