-- Change-rae Lee
I wish I had paid more attention.
I feel as though it is easy for people to self reflect back on the things that they could have done better, critiquing and condemning themselves for not doing a better job of it. Having your mother pass away still at a young age, which I am assuming the son is in his late twenties, is hard.
I was actually just thinking about this the other day. After finding out that an old friend from my younger educational years had passed away at the ripe age of twenty, I sent my beloved a text message asking, "Is twenty-one the age where we lose the most people?" Right off the bat I could name five people I were either friends with, graduated with, of knew of enough to know that if we crossed each other in passing, each would say hello. There is still this one girl, my friend from middle school and onto high school whom I lost touched with. I knew she had gotten pregnant shortly after graduation, and knew that she was trying to become a better person. I saw her from behind in the grocery store. I remember getting nervous and a little bit afraid-- of what I don't know. But whatever it was boiled up inside me and caused my feet to face the opposite direction. It was the last time I ever saw her alive. Thankfully we had reconnected on a social media sight a month before her sudden death.
But chatting with pre-made emojis and words that don't do the mood justice will never have been enough. She got into a car accident, was put in a coma for one week, had the baby, and then died-- the both of them. Her boyfriend was the only one survived by them. I constantly think of all the things I could have done differently that day in summer when I was in no more of a rush than I am now. (Currently sitting in the cafeteria, staring at my bowl of empty soup.)
You beat yourself up. Curse yourself for not knowing that that was the last visual image your brain will ever recollect for you. And I put this into play with the Son. He didn't realize the impact of his Mother's sickness. His ignorance was due to his age, and the boarding school was something temporary while his parents were a symbol of something infinite. But nobody is infinite. And when they pass during an age where death has not become apart of your life yet, how can you know how to handle it? You can't. All you can do is quarrel with yourself about the things that could have been said, could have been done, could have been cared differently so that at least they knew, you loved them too. It is the unforgiveness of yourself that is a battle with. And I think this story does an amazing job in analyzing this very feeling that so many of us have gone through. The ending is left open ended. We don't know for sure if the parents reconnected and were kissing, if they were sleeping, or if they were merely just sitting there, letting tear after tear flow. We don't see the other side of these things. And we never will.
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