The Blood & The Bones

Dear Mama,

It’s almost been 2 years and I’m not who I was. I’ve changed so much.

Found the edges of my kindness and my anger.

Found the shut door. Opened it for all of us. To see you better. To know me better. To love him more.

I don’t try to avoid the truth now that I know it was yours first.

I hate that it came too late and from the loss of you. It’s beautiful and it’s tragic but it won’t be wasted.

You see, I know now that when we grow up and our parents die we become a compass, a letter to the past, present and future. We look to the one that’s left, if we’re lucky, and hope to redeem ourselves and bring them to redemption. To teach and find the lesson.

You realize it might not have been all their fault and the weapons formed were just hand me down traumas they didn’t mean to pass on.

You remember all the times they looked at you and wanted you to put it down without knowing how to tell you to bury it. How they hoped you’d forgive them without understanding how to ask for forgiveness.

You would forgive even though it’s not that simple. Because how do you detach from something that started when you were too young to even know what having to earn love meant?

How do you say I love the way I do because of the way you didn’t?

How do you tell them you understand they learned about love this way too?

Nothing makes it right, but it becomes less wrong somehow.

You were still growing up..misguided, unsure. You didn’t mean to leave me with all that had grown in the place in you that was supposed to nurture.

And that love was there in many ways, in things I overlooked.

It was in the call me when you get home. It was in your arms when you held my son and everyone who told me after that you were proud of me because I never thought you were. It was in the way, in your own way, you were always there. Who had been there for you, though?

I wish that I could go back in time to when you were a child and be the person that you needed.

I wish I could tell you that now I see you and I hope that Heaven is real, Mama and you’re happy there.

I hope that you’ll forgive me for not knowing that guilt is heavy but regret is heavier.

the blood
& the bones