A good vacation, mostly: A great Richard Thompson concert, the unexpected discovery of a fine restaurant, time spent with family. Even spending half a week away from Katie was good; surprised to realize how much I missed her while I was gone, I blathered on and on to her on my cellphone while walking through a grocery store. And I hate people who do that. (She and I got together when I got home and things went great. You probably don't want to know the details.)
But as usual, melancholy intruded. Gradually, at first, in degrees so tiny only one familiar with the feeling might have noticed. Still, watching my nephew perform the lead in Fiddler On The Roof, the impossibility of watching this without imagining Mom's reaction became overwhelming. ( I know exactly what that reaction would have been: sniping about many aspects of the show and other performers, but as soon as Matthew started into Sunrise, Sunset, she'd have dissolved into a puddle of tears.)
Mom's absence seems felt in a much more profound way, though. As much as I enjoy hanging out with my brother and his family, the simple act of doing that reminds me of other family members I don't see so much. Some of them are vague presences, some have vanished completely from my radar. This never would have happened when Mom was around.
She held the family together simply by being. She was the one person everybody talked to, stopped by to visit, hung out with. She kept us all informed about the comings and goings of other familial strands, nieces and nephews or cousins we hadn't seen for so long. Without her, without a center, we all seem to have gone our separate ways.
Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Without Mom, the strongest tie to the past has been severed, and we're all free to live in the here-and-now. Things play out now as they will, and if paths never cross, so be it. Part of me feels free, as though my life has finally become my own, and I can succeed and fail without concern for the approval of family.
Family. It's what is missing in my life right now, a sense of being connected to something more than myself. Life is good, life is bad, the same as always, but there's this weird feeling I have lately of something winding down, a climax with no resolution, things lost and never replaced.
