Elena

Mother, you are dead. A decade ago I dreamt
that you had merely gone away to rest,
undisturbed, unburdened, in our old flat
in ‘90s Golders Green, because you were
too tired, and too tired
to have to explain it all to me.
I saw you out of a double-decker bus window
as you turned your head towards our old front door,
not knowing I was watching, and I was hurt confused glad.
Your hair had grown long again, and you were younger
than you were and younger than I am now.
Soon I will be older than you were
and then I will likely keep on living.

Mother, I am wasting your life
and want to give it back to you,
but I’m not sure how.

You would like what I have done with the flat.
I have had the time to do things with it that would never have occurred to you in your
childcare-worksphere-friendships-love-heartbreak-struggle-literature-tea-raspberry-jam-
chaos,
but I have always had a better sense of aesthetic.
I struggle to think of other things
that I am better at than you were.
But on a good day I can think of something.

Mother, it’s been nearly seventeen years since I saw your corpse
with its eerily ringless fingers and unhinged mouth and poorly-fitting wig.
You looked foolish and didn’t deserve to.

Mother, I do not believe I’m writing to you now and
I use mother because the term does not describe you.
I try to talk to you when I visit your grave and try
to use the terms of endearment that were true
when you existed, but they also feel wrong;
I have no voice that can speak to you anymore.
Sometimes, when I am there and the skies are overcast
and there is a quiet, miniature funeral in the distance
and an elderly couple are walking slowly to their car,
I pretend you’re listening, but mostly
I imagine your bones
underneath the grey stone on which I sit and smoke -
and I’m reassured that a part of you still exists materially.
And then I read the absurd epitaph with its anomalous Cyrillic,
and smoke and think, and think of your skull, and everything is still.

Mother, I no longer always wear your rings because
I associate them more with myself than you now
and I need to try to remember myself less.
I still have not thrown out your clothes
and somewhere there is your hairbrush,
but I don’t know exactly where.

Mother, I need to take your place, and I need to love something more than you,
but I don’t and I can’t.
And I waste my life and I waste your death,
and I’m not sure that either of those things matter.

Next month is my birthday and I will still be alive.
I will think of you as a twenty-two-year-old,
pushing me out of your body, tired and scared and glad.
And then I will think of you dying.
I will think of what you achieved and what you tried to achieve
and will try to measure attainment against effort
to see if it was worth it in the end.
And then I will pick apart the terms
and stare blankly at the pieces.

The other month, Tom broke part of the wooden table that you bought.
My mother is dead, I thought.
The table isn’t an extension of you, but I sometimes think that it is.
And maybe I will one day even lose our rings.
It would feel like your-my-death, again, but I would likely continue being alive even then.

Mother, I don’t remember the last conversation we had.
I remember you cancer-ridden drugged on a hospice bed,
clutching at consciousness and doodling pictures in crayon
with me and the hospice art therapist, but this wasn’t a conversation.

I was crying and you were unable to look at me,
whether from the medication or your steadfast denial, I don’t know.

You died shortly after and I
buried myself

under you. And then I
continued living.

A Big Heart

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