Sitting and waiting has always been the most treacherous feeling, especially knowing that no matter how many pleasant scenarios play before your imagination, the news you await is heartbreaking…
My mom will always be my best friend. The only problem with having a human best friend is that there is a form of risk involved with loving them. My dilemma lies within the worst fundamental problem of the human condition. One that has stood the test of time—the gut-wrenching pain of losing those you love. But that's just what love is, a risk. The risk of being rejected, or loving too much. However, when you fall too hard in love or you lose someone, there is always something that can catch you from falling uncontrollably, functioning as your personal safety net… books. They open up the most vulnerable and hurting parts of you and heal you—the pages the thread, and words the needle—slowly, yet effectively, stitching your wound until you are mended back together.
Life started in a simpler time: resting in the small, brown chair beside my parent's bed, reading books with my mom in their disturbingly green bedroom. The walls, the carpet, even the ceiling devoured in a hideous shade of dark murky green. But looking back, the green was comforting, even nourishing. It was a safe place for growth and learning. It was the place that I learned to read and developed a love for books. It began with children's books "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie" and "Chicka Chicka Boom Boom" being two of my favorites. But over time it transformed into more sophisticated novels "Cannery Row" and "Charlotte's Web". Even evolving into trilogies and collections of stories such as the A-Z Mysteries series and The Lord of The Rings Trilogy. Although the difficulty of the books progressed, one thing remained the same about all of them, my love for reading them with her. Sometimes I even got the honor of reading the precious words myself. Little by little, I read more and more of it myself until it became me reading to my mom rather than her reading to me. But I think that she liked that, she would always laugh in a light, playful manner when I said a word incorrectly and then would helpfully tell me how to pronounce it the right way.
It was exhilarating. A never-ending adventure. However, that is where I was mistaken...
Reading with my mom wasn't forever. The underlying truth that she and I tried to ignore was always sitting in the corner. Like an ominous ghostly presence. She had stage three, Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma cancer. But as much as we tried to ignore its ghostly presence, life has a way of always catching up with you. Unfortunately, life didn't let me live out my childhood fantasies of a perfect family and a solid relationship with my mother. And at the age of eight, it whisked my reading partner away from me with its haunted, ghostly grasp. However, the last night that I spent with my mom wasn't haunted by what would happen the next day. Instead, I sat in my favorite brown reading chair and she sat next to me, comforting me with her presence. She was weak, but not too weak to read to me one last time. Harry Potter was popular at the time and we had been reading it so quickly we were already diving into the second book intrigued by its adventurous content. It was a little too advanced for me to read so she had been reading me one chapter every night before we went to bed for the past couple of months. That night we read the third chapter of the second book, The Chamber of Secrets. When we finished I kissed her goodnight. Little did I know that I would wake up to hours of waiting in the hospital.
It wasn't our first time waiting in the hospital as a family. But something felt different about that day. It was November 30th, 2010, she didn't wake up in the morning. My father called 911 and they took her in an ambulance. But the problem is, she never woke up… making that dreadful and cold winter day the worst one of my life.
After her death, I would go into her room and read. It began by me finishing the book that we had read together the day before she died. I poured over the pages, longing for them to reveal something to me. However, what I was looking for remained a mystery to me for a long time. But my inability to uncover that mystery didn't stop me from trying. I would spend all of my free time reading. I finished the other five Harry Potter books in a mere six months. I moved from book to book desperately trying to find the part of me that died when she did. Eventually, I stopped trying. I read not out of desperation, but because I wanted to explore behind the door of never-ending knowledge books opened to me. I began to idolize the popular books that every young girl liked: "The Hunger Games", "Divergent", and "The Perks of Being a Wallflower'". I discovered that I could use those books to fill the dense hole that had formed inside me. Since I didn't have a mother to give me motherly advice. Those books taught me a lot about who I was and who I wanted to be. Their strong female lead characters empowered me to want to be a strong woman like my mom was.
I took little bits of each book with me. They manifested themselves into my personality, relationships with others, and helped me to formulate goals of what I wanted for myself. They were my mother figure. Teaching me the dignified way to carry myself in conversations, treat others with respect, and embrace my deep desire to help those around me. This solidified my dependence on books, I needed them to grow, they made up for what I didn't have in my life.
Even though I gave up on my search for the truth about what my mom's death meant at twelve. I learned that when I stopped searching and I let the secret approach me instead of waiting, it was finally ready to reveal itself to me. My secret was that reading wasn't just something I did to heal myself from my mom's death—it was how I connected with her. See, time doesn't heal every wound. But it does strip you of the vivid memories you have until they seem like a distant dream. That is why I read. It allows me to temporarily live in that distant dream. To remember and connect with my wonderful and loving reading partner... my mom.
