“Sis, mom passed away” – that was the text at 5:51am December14, 2020 that broke the dam of the blinding grief. My brother had attempted to call. But my phone was on silence.
I was finally wakened up by another call at 7:30am, but I saw the text first. The shock of seeing the words but not being able to process the meaning spurred a slurry of profanities hurled to my poor brother, who found my mother unresponsive on the hallway floor of her house.
There are two tiger cubs – me and my brother. I was the smart one and my brother was the tall and good-looking one. I was the shortest in the family. Dad often joked that I thought too much -- that’s what had been weighing me down.
Being the smallest volumetrically had its advantage – it sparked that over-whelming over-protective instinct from my parents, which counterbalanced my brother’s physical advantage in the family hierarchy. Oh, there were times he was so pissed with my smug face with both my parents planting solidly behind me!
We are not a physically close family, but emotionally, we were very close. For us tiger cubs, it is that feeling of free to explore, daring to experiment and daring to push the boundary without caring the consequences because mom is going to catch it if sky falls. That is what it felt to have a rock always at your corner and have a tigress always watching your back.
Now, mom was no longer at my 6, and the emptiness is unnerving. I never knew that grief comes in wave but lacking the predictability of a physical wave; the peak would swarm in at random times, which often brought out uncontrollable sobbing and howling.
There is a tiny piece of me holding an almost clinical-grade fascination about those strange sounds coming out of me when the wave hits. Those primitive and raw emotional responses have been so hard wired genetically that my frontal lobe was never aware of its presence. Just like that invisible biologically hard-wired emotional bond connecting me to mom, the presence was only made aware when the bond was crudely severed by a massive intracranial hemorrhage. Now the loose end is simply hanging from me and dangling in the emptiness.
I feel cold and slightly lost, a feeling that is so foreign, I am completely blindsided.
JLF's tiger cub
Comments
Post a Comment