Unfinished Symphony

Your proper ending would have been far in the future.

Now that I’m grown, I would have learned to understand you better. And I would have learned from you.

There are too many questions I have that have gone unanswered. Too many things we never did together.

You always wanted to come see where I lived, but I always lived kind of far. You’d say “I would love to see your home one day.” I wish you were here to see it now. It has all the things you would have loved! A big deck, a swimming pool and trees everywhere. It’s the oasis from the city you always wanted.

I have a dog now and she’s the cutest button ever. I look at that picture of you smiling with a friend’s dog and think of how much you would have spoiled her.

A walk with you would be everything to me. A walk with you, me, and my puppy june would be the world.

I wish you could see me now. I was so broken when we said goodbye - I didn’t think I could ever recover from that.

But here I am. I think about you often - but I am able to compartmentalize.

You live in my mind and show up throughout my day in the beautiful moments. But I no longer cry every day. And I have been able to stop harboring most of my anger at the doctors and the world and most of all myself.

I can go through life now with you in my heart and you make my life so much more full.

I know what love - tru unconditional love - is supposed to feel like because of you. I’ll miss you every single day for eternity.

Every big moment. Every job promotion, new child in the family, wedding, and bar mitzvah I’ll cry wishing you were here.

But I can now live and love life despite the distance death has put between us. I imagine what you’d say or do. When I see beauty, I think of you. When I’m wearing a pretty dress, I think of you. When I feel lonely, I think of you.

As a young person I can’t say I thought of you this much. The way it’s supposed to work is that I push you away as a teenager, and come back to you in my twenties.

I’m ready to come back to you now and you’re just gone. But that’s why I need to hold you close and why I think of you every day.

I look around and see others in my life talk to their mothers, telling them about mundane things and I wish I had that with you or could have it now. I know you would want me to believe you’re with me now in spirit, so I try to. But it’s been a few years and you feel more like a memory, than someone I used to hug super duper tight.

I wish I could go visit you at the house - hear your sweet voice. Sink myself into your amazing embrace, and then offload my soul onto you.

I know we would have shared everything if you were still here. I know you would love me no matter what and that you’d tell me I’ll be ok.

I want to go with you to Disneyland. Or any places families go together. We never really got to have that all American family vacation. I want to see you be happy and smiling.

I wish I could take you on a road trip - like that time you drove me to Sedona and had the best time I have a big white car now - we could take a cooler with us and drive wherever you want. we’d go on hikes and adventures together, spotting pretty birds and talking about life. You would be here and you would be happy.

I wish I could go back in time to when you told me you were afraid - that the medicine wasn’t working and you thought it was the end. I wish now that it was the current version of myself that had been sitting with you in that hospital room that day. I would do it all so differently.

I’d hold you and tell you that no matter what happened I’d be with you through it. I’d tell you that I would quit my job the next day, move in with you and take care of you. But I was naive. I didn’t learn enough about what was killing you to know that it certainly would.

I didn’t think that you would die. I really just didn’t. It was hard for me to see you crying and so the little girl in me, told me you would get better. That you’d find a better treatment again and it would be ok.

But it wasn’t and I was wrong.

I don’t like dwelling on the past, but I know about our future. I’m going to make sure everyone who knows me, heard about you. That my kids know their Bubbe, and that I our family honors your memory. I’ll keep writing to you in case there’s a heaven and they ever let me in. Wouldn’t wanna be the type of daughter who never writes home.

And Ma, I’ll keep loving and missing you forever. I’ll hold you near and dear and take you with me always.

• Anonymous member of The Mending Word: In Person Workshops