Monday, September 28, 2015

Anniversary

It's been nine years today since my mom died.  It's funny: you'd think everything about that awful day would be sort of burned into my memory, as sieve-like as it is, but it really isn't.  I just went back and read my blog entries written the week afterward.  I didn't remember the knock on the door as being almost 3 o'clock, for example; if you'd asked me I might have said noon.  I almost started crying, reading them, but lunch is in ten minutes and I'd rather not have a puffy face.  I still can't believe my last entry before that, at the beginning of September, just about the reality of settling back into Fairfield for senior year.  I looked at the earlier entries, too, for mentions of her.  We're going to Florence for my birthday this week.  It's always been hard for me to conceptualize that when I came home from studying abroad, she only had a few more months to live.  I didn't know, you never know, but.

What would she think now?  Me, living in Italy, Jen, pregnant with a grandson.  On the phone with Jen last night I realized how terribly sad I am for her, that our mom won't be there for the birth of her child.  I wish Jen could have that, almost more than I wish I could have her back for myself.

How far we've come as sisters.  I am lucky to have her, in the end.  I was lucky to have the mom I did, too.

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