The One I Never Grieved

When I was 19, I met a guy on the Internet, back before it was normal. I don't remember how long we talked, but in May I flew him up from California to meet my parents and we left on an adventure that is coming full circle on this blustery winter day 26 years later.

We made it about a year and a half, working tech support by day and playing video games in a living room filled with computers by night. We'd moved to Vegas, so I dropped him off at his house in California before I headed back home to mine in Washington, thinking the story was done.

I tried to stay happy in Washington, but I was never cut out for sitting still. That October, with my terminally ill mother sitting in the living room beside us, my Dad said to me, "You're leaving me alone again."

We had no idea how short the time would be.

I headed back to California, took a job in a call center and tried to date the Internet guy again. It didn't work, too much had changed.

Instead, he found someone new and I found a series of bars.

A whisper of life later, I headed out to a bar, but something turned me back around and I went home, sober in a life where every night ended in a bottle.

The call came in the middle of the night. Five years left on her "sentence," my Mom stopped breathing and never started again.

I dropped what life I had--imperfect though it was, it was still mine--and moved home to take care of my Dad and the business she'd been helping him manage. I'd only been gone for three months.

I died a slow death in isolation, taken from city and friends and meaning while my Dad coped by working longer hours still and I ricocheted around an empty house.

I found solace in all the wrong arms, winding up on anti-depressants and living on my own for the first time ever, a year after my mother died.

Life happened quickly after that. I met and married my husband that spring.

Then came babies, and survival, and a health catastrophe.

A life spent surviving, scrabbling for purchase in shifting sands, until at last I built my own foundation.

As I sit in my palace, the palace I created out of thin air, I'm reflecting on the unfinished business of a life lived hard.

I think back to Frosted Venetians in a downtown cafe. Of awkward autistic social bumbles. And a love that never achieved closure because I never had a chance to grieve.

So today, I'm taking a meander down memory lane, seeing the beauty, but also the pain. And to that boy who has now grown into the fullness of a man, I see you, I honor how you shaped so much that came after, and I release you to the wilds of a future yet unwritten.

As for me, time is no longer standing still. And the road, she's a callin'. 😎