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I have a recurring dream that I have lost my voice. I am sobbing for Mom, and sometimes I am screaming at someone about how unfair it is, and I can’t scream loudly enough. My voice chokes in my throat, and I scream without sound. When I wake, I don’t need much dream theory to suggest that this relates to the depth of my grief, and how it isn’t fully exorcisable, how it will always live in my chest along with my love for my mother. For the rest of my life, I will love and miss her. I will be only so happy. My happiness will always be laced with sadness - and yet I have to try to be twice as happy, for her, and for the happiness she embodied that she can no longer give to others. She gives it in memory, of course, and that is going to have to be enough - except it isn’t enough. It just is.

I hear a car on the avenue outside my window and I think it is my mother’s car pulling into the driveway of my childhood home. I think this for two full seconds, and then I remember. I travel back through grief and memory along the tow rope of the Way My Life is Now, Without Her, and I am back in Brooklyn, back in my pajamas, back writing about a mother who should be still alive but wasn’t given that chance. I should not be writing a eulogy. I should be planning to take her to Hawaii. I should be trying to convince her to visit, to hug her grandcat (a word I didn’t feel comfortable with her using until she got sick), to hug ME. I should be arguing with her over why I should take the couch and she should take my bed, with my discounted high thread count sheets. We should agree that they are not as luxurious as they should be, and we should then discuss that part of the appeal of hotels is the fact that you don’t have to do your own laundry. We should be making fun of my ex boyfriend together, and she should be meeting the dear friends of mine that she never got to meet. We should be visiting my aunt together.

I have done and will do all of these things. I have done some with her in life, and I will do all with her in death - in After Life, I guess I should say. To me, the After of her Life is togetherness with me. She is on my shoulder, in my heart, in my DNA, in my smile, in my eyes, in every breath, in every beat of my heart. I am without her, and she is within me. And it’s not enough. It just is.