Letting Go and Holding On

Today, I am saying goodbye to my mother-in-law and trying to have one last date with my husband before she goes back to Connecticut. So I'm posting something I wrote a long time ago, just after my mother died. It's heartbreaking to remember how difficult those times were, but it's beautiful now to think about how much she left me with.

There's grey light pouring through the windows behind me. Today the day picked the right color. I just read the first two chapters of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking and now I am tired and I can't catch my breath and I can't sit still. Those chapters have caused the memories to come flooding back and now I itch in places I can't scratch. I'm flooded with flashbacks. Flashbacks of riding to the hospital in a screaming ambulance with her. She was wide-eyed and terrified and unable to speak and her body felt empty already. Flashbacks of that flannel red plaid pajama top she had on that I still have because it's soft and the last time I hugged her, she was in it. I think I'm still expecting her to fill that pajama top. She literally disintegrated before my eyes. There was so little of her left that I finally had to let go. And all I have left is this motherless limp red pajama top that can't hug me back.