THINGS I CAN’T DO ANYMORE

1) I can’t call you out of the blue to ask if something really happened to me or not. You were the holder of family memories while my mind is often blank or obscured with doubt. I’ll never be able to fact-check my personal lore again, which means I will likely lose much of it to time like I have the actual memories.

2) I can’t go on all day shopping trips with you where we scamper from dressing room to dressing room hoping to find new versions of ourselves. I won’t have someone telling me to just try it on and once I do admit it’s not doing anything for me.

3) I can’t look forward to Mother’s Day because it is a celebration of the longest, deepest relationship of my life. Instead, it will be a painful reminder of what I don’t have anymore. I will have to scour through old pictures of you to post in remembrance because I will never get to take a new one.

4) I can’t call you up multiple times a day just to share mundane details of my life or settle a playful argument with my husband. My house used to ring out with declarations of let’s call my mommy. Now it’s haunted with murmurs of I miss my mom.

5) I can’t look forward to going to my parents’ house in New York anymore because now it belongs to my father and his new girlfriend. I can’t rifle through your bathroom cabinet searching for a ChapStick or a new bottle of cream because someone else uses your sink and I barely know her.

6) I can’t ask you how you survived living so much of your life without your own mom. How did you hide your grief so well? Or was I just not looking close enough to notice?

7) I can’t ask for your help when I bring my future child home for the first time. I can’t ask you to be in the delivery room with me or depend on your giving nature when my body is wrecked and my baby is crying. I won’t have you to help guide me through one of the biggest transitions of my life after you’ve been with me for every other spurt of growth and change. It kills me that I will inevitably become someone you will never get to meet.

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8) I can’t assume that just because something is incredibly unlikely it won’t happen. When I told you there was a chance that what was happening to your body might kill you back in August, I truly believed I was just giving you all the information. I naively assured you that CJD was so rare that I felt confident it wasn’t what you had. I was wrong. Rare doesn’t mean never and that is a lesson I won’t be able to forget.

9) I can’t convince myself that everything is okay when I am spiraling or worried about something that doesn’t actually matter. While those things might be a waste of my mental energy, the overall sense that I am okay no longer exists. I will never be okay again because I will always be without you and that is simply unacceptable, even if it is (somehow) tolerable.

10) I can’t ask you if your knee has ever hurt in this specific way or not. I can’t compare notes on our chronic joint issues and feel solace that someone else knows what it’s like to live in a body similar to mine.

11) I can’t feel unconflicted about becoming a mother myself because I know the experience will be a spigot for my grief, each new moment a glaring reminder that you aren’t here to share it with me.

12) I can’t completely fall apart because I know you will be there to fly across the country and infuse me with the care needed to put myself back together. I have to find a way to stay strong now—the way you always did.

xoxo,

Allison

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