Reflections on death of my mother

In silence, I hear her screaming, but her screaming is muted. It is absent, muted by silence, an aching, stretching nothing.

And yet life marches on, as if nothing changed. Marching, marching — deluded, an unsettling in one’s stomach. Stretching out, more and more days, more and more absence, more and more time from stopped.

from when meaning stopped.

There’s all of that colour, that screeching, that meandering along, that struggle, that push forward, that one day after another, that one thing after another, that searching, that thinking, that seeking, that stretching

a pale face, left.

What odd things we are. What an odd thing life is.

What an odd thing death is, that in those moments of laboured breathing, of life evaporating slowly from the body, one is simply finished.

How strange that we end in seconds 

that all our lives, our thoughts and meaning and feelings, are simply gone in a physical few seconds.

What an odd thing death is.

To try to reach for them, for their meaning, is to realise you are reaching into static

into corroded stone, into ashes covering life in Pompeii.

Unsettling to reach for love, and come to stone — an abrupt, hard surface, not somewhere you can land.

To reach for them, and to come to something that has passed, that has finished.

A safe haven you could once dip into, but now it feels wrong — like entering a grave. Like scratching at the heart.

I am alive, but she is no longer here. She can no longer hear me, can no longer feel 

as if she never existed at all.