fast - day two

I'm sitting on the couch, surrounded by cats, tears flowing down my face. I just finished Mitch Albom's "for one more day." He's books seem to come when I need them most. I read "Tuesdays with Morrie" after my university mentor, Hank Trewhitt, had died. I read his "The Five People You Meet in Heaven" when I flew to Oregon for my grandfather's funeral. And now more than a year after my mother's death, I find "one more day" sitting on the table Sunday at my favorite bookstore in Holland.

I picked it up this afternoon and read straight through until just now 11 p.m. It's a story of a man who needed "one more day" with his mother to tell her how much he loved her, how sorry he was and to forgive himself.

Feeling rather "low" currently. Actually, down right depressed - so much that I didn't even notice being hungry today and consumed less liquads than the day before and my neck hurts so badly I can barely breathe from the tension and stress I'm hording in it. All of that combined -
the line that resonated most with me was on page 73 when his mother says "So," she said, moving away, "now you know how badly someone wanted you, Charley. Children forget that sometimes. They think of themselves as a burden instead of a wish granted."

I don't know when I'm supposed to get over my mother. I've tried reading self-help books, I've tried writing essays, I've tried therapy but nothing seems to fill that emptiness left by her absence in the world.

We didn't have a good relationship. And although I know she loved me, I also know that I suffered for that love. My childhood was a monument to that suffering - her's and mine. The abuse was bloody, leaving marks both physical and emotional, many which I still bear.

But I have to say some of that emptiness is my own unwillingness to forgive myself like "Chick" in the book for what I did to my mother - for all the years I refused to talk to her, for all the times I wished her dead.

I know there is nothing I can do or say to change that but if I had one more day - one day with her being sober and coherant I'd like to have a conversation with her.