Pick Up The Pieces

I Should've Stayed in Bed

Adrian ~

"Taking care of loved ones in my world was not based on affection. It was based on the fear of losing them."

- Clemantine Wamariya

I Should've Stayed in Bed

One place where reality is always altered is any graveyard at dawn. Sometimes it feels like someone is watching me, or that someone is going to raise undead from the grave and start dancing to a strangely catchy Michael Jackson song that everyone knows.

I didn't mean to come out to the graveyard so early, but I go back to school tomorrow and I couldn't sleep, so I snuck out. Kind of just wandered around and I found myself back here. I always end up here.

I'm sitting up against the large willow tree across from the grave, a cigarette between my teeth. The words are etched in, so permanent and final.

Elena Gonzales

21 October 1975 - 21 October 2019

Happy birthday, Mom. It's time for you to face your biggest fear.

Movies and sad teen romance books always depict the bittersweet ending where they're ready when it's time to go. They have that one, sad, 'it's okay for you to move on' conversation and everyone picks themselves up and moves on. 'It was a great life' and all of that other bullshit.

Unfortunately, reality tends to be messier than it might be in the stories.

My mother did not go quietly. For years, she had known she might die young and she fought it from the second she got her cancer diagnosis to when she flatlined in that ICU bed. When it got worse, she refused to accept it. Her last few months were spent crying, and then sleeping once she had tired herself out.

She was crying when she died. In a moment of weakness, she asked me what she had done to deserve this. Feverishly, she had begged me to stop the tumor from killing her. She pleaded with the doctors to find a way to fix it, but at a certain point, a tumor becomes inoperable and some things become too broken to fix.

After she died, my dad just sat on the couch. I tried to get him to take a shower, eat. Anything would have been better than staring at the TV for three days straight. He wasn't watching, because all that played were dumb lifetime movies he always scoffed at me for watching. My little sister sat right in front of the TV and tried talking to him, and locked herself in her room when he didn't respond.

I got a little angry with him for that. He lost his wife. I know that had to hurt, but his daughter lost her mother and he couldn't even respond to her or make sure she was okay. I put my feelings away and tried to be there for her, but I'm not her dad.

For those two weeks, I did my best to cook and clean and help my sister deal with the fact that she had only been in this world six years before she lost her mother.

When we were at the hospital, I was floating. Cognitive dissonance is a bitch. I felt like I was walking through a nightmare. Ximena was sitting in the waiting room with her stuffed animal, looking up at me with sleepy eyes.

"Can we take Mama home now?" she had asked me.

That was another time where I didn't know what to say to her. Do six-year-olds have any concept of death? Did she understand that our mother is dead and that she's never coming back?

The nurse she was sitting with explained it for me when she realized that I didn't know how and that my dad was near catatonic. She was perfect; using all of the right words, the correct tone. Ximena hadn't even cried. She just sat there and moved to sit on my lap and buried her face into my neck, and I just held on to her, tears spilling onto her head.