May 31, 1992. The day I lost my mother. My, how time does fly. How could it have been 17 years ago when it still feels like it happened yesterday? I will never forget sitting in a chair in the living room of my mother's apartment watching the paramedics carry her from her bedroom into the living room to be placed on a stretcher. I will never forget my family sneaking me into my mother's hospital room and sometimes having to argue with the nurses "this is her daughter, she needs to be with her mother". Rules are rules, no children allowed on certain floors, but I always got in. I will never forget the pain on my grandmother's face and the tears in her eyes as she came out to the waiting room and simply said, "she's gone". As I sat on my aunt's lap, I didn't know what that meant. I was only 8 years old. I didn't know the pain and tears that my grandmother had that day were the expression of a mother's loss of her first born, and I didn't know that I too, would feel similar pain, that would be shown in expressions of my own.

I will never forget the small funeral home that held my mother's body. The little place that sat right on the outskirts of my hood. I will always remember walking from my house to that little place and sitting with my mother as she lay in her casket. I will never forget the chill of her hand as I stroked a scar that lay there. What I do not remember is the warmth of her breath, the sound of her voice or the happiness of her laughter. I can't even remember the smell of her fragrance. Perhaps 8 years old was too young for me to know that I should tuck these things away deep in my memory. Perhaps I did tuck them deeply away and pain does not allow me to retrieve them. I don't really know, I just know that I do not have access to them anymore and I wish that I still did.

Unless you have lost a parent as a young child you could never understand that experience. Its not the same experience as growing up with an absent parent. With an absent parent, there is always the possibility of that parent's return. No, the death of a parent is truly a life changing experience, on so many different levels, and it is one of those events in life that shape your very existence. Or at least, it has truly shaped mine. As a child, I questioned God daily about why my mother wasn't allowed to exist. About why "I" had to be drastically different than every other 8 year old that I knew. I can't say that I got an answer to that question, but I did gain more understanding over the years about the time that my mother did exist.

Although I have been missing and grieving my mother for 17 whole years, in a way she is still with me. After her death her energy was still with me for a while. Her cigarette smoke would surround me, my touch-lamp would flicker. But then those things stopped and I felt that she had left me indefinitely. Indefinitely, until her cigarette smoke surrounded me again during a lecture at Cal, and nine months later I gave birth to a little girl, on the same date that my mother was buried.

Time flies, wounds remain fresh...