This has been sort of an emotional day. I haven't really done much, just went to the gym and sat around the house, took a nap and worked on school stuff, but the thought of my mother has been with me all day. My brother had sent me a gift of Almond Roca, something we all traditionally gave my mom every year for various holidays, and I had sent him a small pillow I had made from one of my mom's shirts. Our dad had suggested that we didn't really need to celebrate Mother's Day anymore, since neither of us have children, but to hell with that, we decided. So we sent each other cards and gifts, and spent the day thinking about what we didn't have.

But what really drove it home came as I was finishing a book my Honors students have been reading. The book is The Life All Around Me by Ellen Foster, by Kaye Gibbons. It is a sequel to another book, Ellen Foster, and follows the life of a girl named Ellen who lost her mother when she was about ten and is now going through adolesence with her adoptive mother and the rest of her somewhat crazy family and rural-town friends. The stories have been very good, but obviously in the past few weeks the character of Ellen has become a bit more familiar to me. Although we are different ages and lost our mothers in different ways (and of course she is fictional and I am not, at least I don't think I am), some of the thoughts and ideas that drift around Ellen are ones that have crossed my mind in the not-so-distant past. Anyway, the last passage in the book, as I was finishing it up and preparing to write a quiz for the girls, struck me very suddenly, and I found myself briefly in tears, but not in a bad way.

"Knowing well that I could be more than what my mother did, more than the moment she died--I am what she was before and is now, here with me in the burden of her love I'm content to carry, gorgeous to me and lighter than breath."

I cannot stay in the waiting room of the hospital, waiting for a phone call from the surgeon that I simultaneously needed and dreaded. I cannot stay in that room at the hospital, the one where the doctor summoned us to tell us that he had lost my mother on the operating table. I cannot stay in that little curtained-off area in the ICU where they brought my mother's body afterwards for us to view. But I am afraid that when I left the hospital finally that afternoon, hours after my mother's spirit left me behind, I left part of myself behind, in that waiting room, in that little room on the third floor, in the ICU beside the shell of my mother.

My life is not the one that ended. I don't want to stay in that hospital. I don't think my mother would have wanted me to, either. But I do not feel whole, yet, and I do not know how to regain the part of me that could not bear to leave.