Mom 18 years

 It has been quite awhile since I have entered anything into this blog. 

Today is 18 years since my mom passed away after having open heart surgery. That wasn’t supposed to be the outcome. We were reassured that she would be fine but what we encountered was a month long of emotional trauma and daily torture as something new and unexpected cropped up every day. To this day I am not convinced that the hospital did all that they could do to see that she had a more positive outcome.

She would have been 80 that August 2005, and we had planned a family trip to Italy to celebrate and to take her back to the homeland, to which she had never been. Needless to say, we had to cancel but we did go on that family trip the following year and left a little piece of one of her blouses in all the places we visited from Venezia to Nusco. A piece of her is in some of the most famous places in Italy as well as some of the most rural and obscure. It was truly a remarkable and memorable excursion with family in tow and many stories to tell including the one about Ken and the Grappa in Venezia and Aunt Joni getting up out of her wheelchair to throw coins into the Trevi Fountain in Roma, and the sighting of a perfect rainbow over the Tuscan Countryside. No matter how American we are, we are truly Italian in Heart and Soul. I feel it every time I go back to the motherland.

I felt that it was necessary to write something after 18 years because when I turned 18 was when I felt that I was finally an adult. So 18 years after her death I feel like I am at the adult stage of looking back and trying to make my Peace with her dying.

For the first five years I was just angry and tried to place blame wherever I could find it. At 10 years I was missing talking to her and wanting to know more about her life before me. At 15 years, I was starting to feel the amount of distance and her death seemed to be fading from my emotions. But at 18 years, the adult stage of grieving kicked in and I realized how much she meant to me and how much she shaped who I am and what I have done with my life. How I feel her presence throughout my daily routines and how every now and then her essence seems to pass by and whisper something in my ear. I still talk to her at night as I lie in bed and ask her for her advice on things bothering me and to send positive energy my way. I don’t think I will ever stop doing that. And for some reason this year particularly I had to go visit her grave. I needed to touch the grave stone and get down on my knees and tell her how much I missed her. I had to pay homage to her and my other Ancestors buried there. It made me feel whole, like I had come full circle, like I am at the beginning of finally making peace with her dying, not to forget but to remember more.

MOM! I will never forget!