Please Talk about Me When I'm Gone

Solitude

(2013)

Anyone who has lost a parent (or worse, a child) can understand that the loss becomes an indelible line of demarcation: your life before and your life after. It doesn't mean nothing is ever the same or that you can never get past it (everything is the same and you can get past it except for the fact that nothing is ever the same and you can never get past it. You don't want to).

Of course, you don't need to suffer the untimely death of a parent to appreciate that his or her presence-in the ways we can measure and the ones we can never fully fathom-is inextricable from your own. Up to a certain age my mother was my confidante, my confessor, my friend, my mother. It's discomfiting to imagine how I might have handled her death if it had happened earlier-not to mention much earlier-in my life.

According to the socially accepted laws of society, I became an adult at eighteen. By my rather more reliable reckoning, I didn't become an individual prepared to wrestle with adult realities until I'd finished graduate school and then spent several crucial years learning new things and unlearning others.

The months from early summer 1995 through late spring 1996 did more than anything else to prepare me for the rest of my life, with and without my mother. Severing an engagement and opting not to enter the PhD program that had accepted me are two decisions that befuddled friends and family, then, and likely perplex some of them, still. During this year I figured out, for the first time, how to take care of myself. I was alone, really alone, for the first time, yet I found that I seldom felt lonely. Being on my own-alone with my thoughts, questions, and concerns-provided the space, physical and mental, to unravel the reveries that signaled the kind of person I hoped to become.

Being one's own best friend is dangerous, potentially delusional territory and I knew it. But I found that the more time I spent alone the better I was able to love everyone around me, and my capacity to learn and evolve did not abate. When my mother got sick the first person I talked to was myself. If this had happened five or ten years earlier I would have been lost, without a foundation. My mother remained my number-one resource in so many regards, but I was finally equipped to withstand the ordeal I had unwittingly been fortifying myself for. Depending on my mind, my music, and an ability to take care of myself, I managed to get through it. Barely.