Is it my first shower in 2 days or 3? Can’t be 4. I feel like a new mom again. Less in love. Sadness feels heavy but different. Elation-surely less. Loneliness different- very different. The thirst too. I’m so tired so sleepy. My memory is drained, my body is too. My boobs, my career both hurt less this time around. Probably.
I feel like a new mom, yes and also a bereaved mom. A widowed mom. A mad woman, crying to her child. asking her son to read her that book on Small and Large. Asking her son “Can you sleep here tonight?” “can you just be quiet for a minute, a day?” “Can give me space?” “Clean up please PLEASE” Sometimes all at once. Son complies, mostly. Son needs attention that I cannot give.
A part of me inside is screaming, throwing tantrums, can you hear me? That part of me threw my phone away this morning, took all my clothes off, ran upstairs and hid under the blanket that smelled like him only to scream louder because it didn’t anymore. That part of me knows not how to love again anything or anyone and stares at those eyes looking back at me, because that’s a different kind of a soothing, different smell.
Another part of me tells my child, “he comes to me when I am quiet.”
Son says “Maybe after everyone leaves when I can make myself lonely on purpose, I feel him too.” “Do you need a hug, mommy?” I tell myself I am… a good mom, a mom with a short fuse but good children.
His ashes have arrived, 8 days after we left him in that room, limp then rigid. The box is the same weight as him. How? There’s a wooden box inside it. There’s a leather box too. And seeds to grow flowers. There’s a paw print made of something soft. I don’t want to touch it. There is no hair, fur(?) in that print. I don’t want to see it either. They must have worn gloves and held his paw hard and pressed it into this with no love. My baby’s hand. My baby’s feet. The hand I held before I left that room. The asthi must have been discarded. I know that’s how they do it here. Not that it matters. That’s not him, just cremains. The seeds, the print, the box. But the part of me that was laughing at one thing or another, minutes before is now oozing tears.
How does that cardboard box that says “handle with care” that the mailman without care threw on the porch, feel like his weight on my lap? That weight alone is him.
So many words. Instructions. Poetry. Too many words to read and fathom. I register nothing. He would have sighed, looked away, looked at me. He would have sighed. Understood. Me.
I don’t want to read it. I don’t want to see the paw print. Plant plants. Raise anyone. Sons, dogs.
I want to scream.
I want to take his ashes to the trails. Smear them on my bed, on my arm, on my breath, on my back, on my chest, on my lap, into the wind, the front seat and the back seat of my old, old car and every car I drive in, on the back porch stairs, the front porch bench, on the sunshine, on the blanket, on his toys, onto Fall, on dates all over the calendar but especially on good weather days, like today and quiet snowfall days that are inevitable, on sunsets on the footbridge and in Fresh Pond, on dry Fall leaves, on Saturday mornings, smear them on the old small couch behind the pillows, open my skull and into my brain, smear a bit of him nto the eyes of every dog that ever looks at me, on the flower beds, beds of trees- baby trees and old gnarly trees, insides of my nice clothes and the bras that he used to hug when I got out of the shower and that one teal robe and maybe that willow I wanted my ashes to go under. With his.
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