Yesterday was my mother's Birthday. I just realised, I forgot. She would have been 73 and it has been 13 and a half years since she died after a decade of cancer.
She told me a story once that when she was 18, she went to a fortuneteller and was told that she wouldn't reach her 60th birthday. As you can likely count, she was 59 and a half when she passed. I don't believe in such things but she did and perhaps she somehow willed the prophecy to life or in this case, to death.
It is amazing how memories fade, how what was a significant occasion once upon a time becomes another day that goes by unnoticed. Although i am relatively pragmatic about death and our fears and connections to it, I can't help but feel a pang of guilt for letting her memory pass from mine. One day, it will be the memory of me that is forgotten but, I do not mind this at all as we all live on.
My mother, remembered or not, good or bad has impacted on my life and the lives of family and friends and strangers in the street. Perhaps yours even, we cannot say. We do not know which shores all of our ripples end up breaking against, we can never understand their complete spread.
It is not far from our action that we lose sight of the consequences and how far ranging they flow. They move for eternity, crashing and fractaling into the distance of space and time. Even after we are gone and our memories fade, even after all we know is gone, what we do continues on.
So, I have forgotten once again, I will hopefully have the chance to forget many more but this is something I cannot say. You live in through my actions, whether you meant it or not, whether I like it or not and even if I change, part of you moves through me always. There is no escape from such things.
There were lots of words left unsaid but that is the way life is, it is not to be dwelt upon, it is not to be reminisced, it is to be lived and part of that is living with death. That of others and the understanding we are in a constant negotiation at its door.
There or another place matters very little, nor does before, then or later as all we have is the here and now.
Happy birthday mum.
Taraz
[ a Steemit original ]