Robin Reif
Slept past my alarm. Woke already on my own tail. Almost late getting my daughter to school trip. What’s going on with me? Grief, I think, grief’s going on.
By day, it blankets me like an emotional flu, low grade but enervating. When I sleep, it rages and I wake exhausted.
Though I had my mother as an active presence longer than most, still, the loss is profound. Being orphaned this late in life brings its own particular form of grief.
We’ve had so much time together in this life—time for me to worship her, imitate her, be utterly embarrassed by her, reject her and create prolonged rupture, re-embrace her, bless her with one more grandchild, ask her for something I’d promised myself I'd never, ever ask--parenting advice—and, finally, time to be a caretaker—my older sister bearing the overwhelming brunt--and see her through her final days.
As we wrapped my mother’s shrunken body the night of her death, I glanced for a moment at my port of entry to this world. Though she wore an adult diaper, it still took my breath away that my link to the whole human past, back to hominids on the lowlands of East Africa up through the ages, had just been severed. And as I myself am a genetic dead end (my daughter is adopted), I won’t be sending the DNA passed to me by my mother and father through future generations. Regrets about my early adulthood and the choices I made haunt me afresh.