Sometimes I miss my mother so much that I can’t hold back the tears. Just a little while ago, I went for a walk in my neighborhood and, without realizing it, I was crossing toward the building where she last lived.
The crying just started, my face contorted, my shoulders hunched, and I just let it happen. I don’t care who sees me. I’m not like that. My mother died in there. My mother LIVED in there. She greeted me at the door… laughed with me and made me laugh…. shared stories with me…. criticized me and took my criticism… snuck by me when I slept over in the living room to quietly make her tea in the morning… rocked in her chair and stared at me…. she loved me in there.
As usual, when I pass by her building, I stopped outside of her bedroom window and stared at it. Then I looked up toward the sky. I always think, her soul floated right up there to this part of the sky, right up from her body, through the apartment above hers, through the roof and into the sky. I like to think she lingered for a while, looking down on us as we gathered and cried in her apartment…until at least all 3 children were there, maybe longer… and then she went about her new business.
Now that I’ve seen the end of a life up close, I think about where it ended – in a small modest apartment in a two-story white box of a building in a super-modest part of town. No one would know the sadness that suddenly gripped us that night. Neighbors were doing whatever it is they were doing in their own apartments while we were keeling over in pain, having lost someone so significant to us in what looks like a very insignificant place.
And so, I think to myself, this is where Celeste’s life ended. Here. All that long life, all the work, the love affairs, the adventures, the uprooting from the Dominican Republic to New York City to Miami Beach, the hours with the children, the time spent worrying about them when they were in places so far away from her, the family gatherings in person and on the phone, the secrets she never told us, the strength she had to persevere, the love she expressed and the love she didn’t get to express….
All of that LIFE ended here…. And it just doesn’t seem right to me. Maybe in some way it’s in line with her humility, but I feel like all of that living should have met with a better end, fanfare in a beautiful colorful place, a figurative exclamation point to acknowledge the bigness of what she accomplished.
CAS Licet 