A span of 4-ish weeks. 34 days. 792 hours. 47, 520 minutes.
That is the space of death. Of dying. The void in time where life went from being as normal as it could be, to not. My mom got up and brushed her teeth, had devotions, chose an outfit, and drove to Kaiser for a complete hysterectomy. At the other end of that space, she begged and pleaded for more time, and eventually, without a say in the matter, took her last breath.
I suppose you could say she was dying for more than that space in between, before the surgery. But for me, death was very present, in that place.
One year later, I find myself in it. No, not quite like it was in 2013, but it's in the air. I can feel it in the coolness of fall, I can see it in the changing of the leaves, I can hear it in the songs that play.
I have thought all year long about October 28, the day, you know? Thought about how that day would be hard. I hadn't realized however that the space in between, the space leading up to, would feel like this.
A bit ago I mentioned to a friend just this thought. About this strange bubble of time where things went downhill so fast we could barely see strait. About how I feel like yesterday, one year after the surgery, I placed one foot in it, then another, then fully immersed myself in the remembrance of it, of her.
It's as if every nerve ending is afire, like my skin has been taken off and I'm feeling the strangest of things with an intensity that I find, physically painful in a way. Simple things like finishing a good book without another to read, vacation let-down, hearing my two-year-old belt worship music in the back of the car. It prickles my skin and raises the hairs on my arm.
So now that I've come to terms with where I'm at, I can keep putting a foot in front of the other. Even if I'm in it, I know it ends. I know the sun rises and it sets. The calendar continues. The seasons change. The space, the void, it will ebb and flow, and life will move.
So will I.
I think it's the perfect time to pick up my memoir - I've been writing it since just weeks after she died, it's come and gone throughout the weeks and months and looking back I think that's just what it was meant to do.
There was this weird pressure, I put upon myself. To finish, to be done by the time October came. But the ironic thing is, this story I'm telling, it's still being written. Still happening. Week after week, as healing happens, as characters in the story evolve and grow and become what they're meant to become. So it's important that I let it. And now that I'm back in the space between here and there, I know I'm meant to keep on telling it.
To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.
-Ecclesiastes 3:1
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