Emerging from hibernation feels a bit awkward. It’s been almost eight months since I posted here. As for writing, there’s only snatches of notes and quotes scattered in my journal. Just now, I feel more comfortable with other peoples’ words than I do my own. I find my meaning and fill my need through them and theirs.

I wonder what exactly I’m afraid of. I wonder about the loss of my voice. I notice the fragmentation of my thoughts, the unsustainability of my attention. I miss writing, sure, but I’ve been in hiding. From you. From me. From feelings and experiences too fresh and difficult to explore.

Ernest Hemingway once advised: “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.”

So here’s mine: My mother died January 8, 2019.

I am bereft. A little directionless. Still stunned to just about wordless.

It’s not as if I didn’t know what was coming. I did. Much of last fall was spent in preparation and a gradual comprehension of what was to come. Perhaps it’s more that I didn’t and couldn’t know how I’d feel right there at the end. And after.

After, I’m learning, is for always.

There must’ve been a part of me that didn’t know what that would feel like until I lived it. Until I loved it. Because love endures, tangled up as it is with grief, regret, years of memories, and a new awareness of my own mortality.. Losing my mother has evolved into a certain loneliness. I catch myself sometimes mentally feeling for her, emotionally reaching for her. And she’s gone. I feel orphaned. A fact which I’m somehow still unable to resolve.

Last Mother’s Day, I gave my mother a tangerine-colored, single subject, wide-ruled notebook. Nothing fancy, but cheery, functional, and ready. Tucked between its pages, quotes from many of my favorite writers: Joan Didion, Hemingway, Anne Lamott, Stephen King, Erin Loechner, and Donald Murray who wrote, “Writers are expert dawdlers.”

For as long as I could remember, my mother talked of writing her story.  I hoped she’d release her words to the winds and maybe a bit of pain as well. Confined to her bed for the most part, I hoped she’d finally write in that notebook. Get it all down. Let it all out. Be the writer I always knew she could be.

Funny to think of it now, I believe she wanted the very same for me.

I know I’m out of my writing rhythm, and not at all sure what to say. But for today at least, I’m feeling brave enough to emerge from silence, stretch a bit, and give it another go. Today’s a day as good as any to start writing again.