Time.

Today was my mum’s birthday, she would have been 56. It seems strange that four years have gone by. It doesn’t feel that long ago, but at the same time I feel like a lifetime has passed. A time warp of grief. Today was a strange day. I didn’t really do anything; it was a nonevent. In past years on my mum’s birthday I’ve done something with my aunty or my mum’s old friends. Lunch, a toast to Roberta, a sharing of stories and anecdotes. But people move on, which is sad - but natural, I guess.

After my dad died and it was just my mum and I, we would sit on the back deck of my house and look out into the yard and listen to Van Morrison. And my mum would tell me stories about my dad, about their trips to India and their wedding and their first date, and it always surprised me how much she could remember – she would recount things down to the finest detail, the dress she wore a certain day, whole sections of conversation, the song that was playing at the bar they went to on a hot night in summer. It makes me sad that I can’t remember her as clearly as I used to. I used to have dreams about her a lot, so did my Aunty Sarah; we’d share our dreams as if they were treasured gifts, a chance to be with that person again. I once had a dream that I was on some kind of game show – answering questions trying to win a grand prize – it had that urgency and fast paced confusion of stressful dreams, heart a-racing, and I won – and the prize was that I got to go grocery shopping with my mum. And it sounds so funny but I really would just kill to go grocery shopping with my mum. I miss mundane things, like ordering pizza, or walking to the petrol station to buy cigarettes. And at the time I didn’t think anything of it, of course.

My parents loved books. They had three floor-to-ceiling bookshelves packed with literature – everything from Austen to Joyce – Kerouac to Alain de Botton. I’m working my way through it. It makes me smile to see my mums name in the cover when I pick up a book, and after I’ve finished it to know that we’ve shared an experience. My mum introduced me to Patti Smith. After she died I found a box of Patti vinyl’s – Horses, Radio Ethiopia, Easter and Twelve. But she died before she got to read Just Kids. And I’m sad that she never will because that’s something I would have loved to share with her. I read Just Kids every time I travel, and I think of my mum all the while when I travel, and every place I go I wonder if she’s been there once, too.

Astral Weeks by Van Morrison, this song is beautiful. *~*~*