Uncle Louie loved to dance
It has been one week since I launched Our Mom Memories, an attempt to find myself and build what I am calling a ‘post-grief’ community twenty years after my mother’s death. Last week while I was driving, I reflected on my Aunt Norma, my mother’s sister who also is now gone, and how she kept her relationship with her dead husband very much alive for 46 years.
Norma and Louie were married only 12 years when he died unexpectedly. She became a widow at age 39. They had tried but were unable to have children, so when she became a widow, she was alone. And single, surrounded by her married sisters and large family of in-laws with children. So Aunt Norma did something extremely brave. She never dated anyone for the rest of her life, but chose to keep Uncle Louie alive. I was two when he died, and for my entire life, Aunt Norma spoke to me and everyone who knew her, just everyone, as if he were not dead and gone permanently, but in a grey state between living and dead. I don’t mean that she was delusional, but without even realizing the semantic genius of not using time markers like ‘ten years ago’ she spoke about him as if he were sitting in an armchair in the other room, or maybe off to sea returning home anytime.
It made an impression on me as a teenager and into adulthood, the love that she had for this man. To soldier on, single, for the rest of her life. Because she kept him in the forefront of her living life, and not in a box, dead and painful, under the bed no one ever dreamed of suggesting that she date someone new. How could she? She didn’t force herself into a new, Louie-free life, like I have as a daughter, she leaned into him all the more. Because of that, she didn’t have to change quite as much, as I have; she didn’t have to take in all the sorries, like I have. She created a way of being that no one else I knew or have ever known has. No one showed her how to do this, she certainly didn’t go to therapy or read books on grieving.
And I think to myself, why did I worry more about how everyone around me would react? About what others were comfortable to talk about? About taking up space? I am here. I had a mother. She was awesome. Not a saint, not perfect, but one of a kind, as mothers are. And I was a daughter to her. I’m tired of only being a daughter to my dad, who frankly, does not deserve me, and the same goes as a sister, relative, and member of a society.
Maybe if I had kept talking about my mother over the last twenty years I wouldn’t have to write for hours to work up the courage to think about starting a conversation with a friend about my mother’s shoe size and then not do it after all and file that away in the box of fuck me.
