new landmines

 

The last time I was in New Mexico at the end of 2019, I couldn't find her grave. There was a lot of snow, which forced us to change up our itinerary a bit, but the roads going into Los Alamos were still open, so I took my adulthood friends back through the familiar mountain roads.

It was beautiful blanketed in just enough snow to accent the landscape. We pulled over on the side of a curve to take pictures - something that I had never done living there.

Mom is buried in Guaje Pines, the name I didn't actually know until I was in college, and I was Googling articles about her death for a memoir writing class I was in. There was only one cemetery in that town that I knew about growing up. Driving there was muscle memory. 

I thought finding her headstone would also be muscle memory. But we shuffled around in the snow, pushing aside the snow with our feet or gloveless hands. I couldn't find her. And I couldn't believe I couldn't find her. I felt a paralyzing disappointment, and then I felt silly to feel that way.

What does it matter that I couldn't stare at her headstone? What was I expecting it to bring me really? As if I would somehow feel more... grief? Peace? Enlightenment? To stand over her grave again? As if that is the only place I could talk to her? Feel her?

We depend on our symbols I guess.

I can't remember if we got breakfast burritos at El Parasol before or after the cemetery visit. Where I actually recognized someone I went to middle school with. She looked exactly the same, and I wondered if I also looked the same. In the end I decided not to interrupt her lunch to say hi. I think I left Los Alamos so sour, it's hard for me to imagine integrating back into it.

I turned 30 this year, which is another dumb symbolic moment in a way. And now I feel like I'm on the cusp of grieving in another way. In six years, I will have lapped my mom in age. I know I've thought about this before, and recently I feel almost obsessive about it. I feel panicked in a way that is irrational. My mom didn't die of some genetically informed chronic illness. She died randomly and unexpectedly. Out of nowhere, I was woefully unprepared. No last words were exchanged and no arrangements could be made.

... Or maybe that's exactly the issue.

How many events these days remind us that we could just.. die at any moment? I think about it whenever I'm just commuting to work or walking around Lake Merritt. In the slowed down moments when I'm not thinking about work or dinner or weekend plans or hobby classes or travel ambitions or sleeping for an entire Saturday, I'm wondering if I'll make it past 36.

I miss you desperately Mom.