41 Months of Living in the Fracture of

My Darling Mum’s Absence

My Mum lives in two places at once, firmly in the past of this earthly timeline

and permanently in the present tense of my heart’s language

the grammar may be broken, but the meaning is clear

Ma, 41 months without you, sounds tidy when written down, measurable, contained, but this is what the last 41 months have taught me, grief does not respect numbers and language is no longer reliable, especially, language is supposed to be the framework we build our days upon, the syntax of our reality, each tense has its assigned, proper grammatical place, we live in the present, we remember the past, we anticipate the future, yet your sudden absence was an earthquake that shattered that architecture, for 41 months, my inner voice has been a battlefield of tenses, the present tense is the language of my love for you, which is alive, current, and ceaseless, whereas, the past tense is the language of my loss of you, which is historical, factual, and fixed

Ma, life has unfolded in the 41 months since your heartbreaking loss, in broken grammar, in emotional whiplash, in moments where time refuses to behave, the world insists on me speaking in the present tense, it demands participation, forward motion, because I am still here, living, breathing, functioning, I am doing the things life requires of me, on the surface, everything sounds grammatically correct, but beneath that thin layer of normality, the past lives so dangerously close, ready to break through at the slightest provocation, past and present tense cannot coexist politely, they collide, fracture, and crash into each other violently, they leave me standing in the wreckage of a half-spoken truth, and clutching a pronoun that no longer knows its proper time

Ma, grief does not accept that time has passed simply because calendars insist it has, 41 months is a statistic, not an experience, as experience is a thought begins firmly rooted in the sunlit now and ends in the shadowed then, a sentence starts in the vibrant, breathing present tense “she is”, and collapses mid-breath into the stark, silent past “she was”, it is the moment when I instinctively reach for you, for a split second, you exist again, fully, vividly, before the disjointed reality cuts in, language now betrays me, grammar fails to contain this kind of loss, since there is no tense can accurately capture you, who no longer here in the way you once did, but has also never left, no verb form for still here, but not here, no sentence structure for gone yet everywhere

Ma, in your absence of the past 41 months, I have been forced to be a bilingual speaker in a world that only understands one language, I live in the present but a fundamental part of my heart has free-falling into a past where you still present, one moment I speak of today, the next I mourn yesterday, these are the daily collisions, not just in the acknowledged birthdays or anniversaries but in the micro failures of grammar, broken by a truth that decline to stay in its correct tense, my mind, repeatedly tries to speak of you in the same way it speaks of the sun rising, as a present, reliable fact, and that is the violence of grief, it obstinately refuses to let the past stay buried, it refuses to let the present stand alone, and you are existing in this constant overlap of time now

Ma, the present continues, full of triggers, it is a minefield of habits, instincts, and loves, every present moment carries a tripwire back into the past, every present moment ache seeks a comfort, that exists only in the past, the two states live simultaneously, and neither cancels the other out, they rub against each other and creating friction that shows up in the smallest moments, when something insignificant to anyone else, fractures it, a phrase you used to say, a decision you would have helped me make, or a version of myself that only with you together, some days, I am able to stand in the interruption without collapsing, other days, it leaves me disoriented, unsure of where, or who I am, adult and child coexist uneasily, strength and longing share the same breath

Ma, grief is surgical, and it interrupts the present, again and again, it feels so damn cruel, this demand to choose between past and present, to speak of you as if you only inhabited once upon a time, denies the truth of how alive you remain within us, my heart does not conjugate verbs, and its impulse always places you in the eternal present, that fights to use the dynamic verb, talks about your presence in my life was so fundamental, so integral to my understanding of life, my very neurology rebels against your absence, even with a series of abrupt corrections, a constant re-learning of a devastating new reality, my language lags behind my heart, forever tripping over the gap between what is and what was, each correction is a forced agreement I never consented to

Ma, 41 months, long enough for the world to expect my grammar to have settled, for people to assume I speak of you comfortably in the past tense, but inside, the clash is ongoing between the two tectonic plates, my mind lives on one, my heart on the other, every day is spent in the seismic zone, as the ‘s’ is amputated, that single, sharp ‘d’ sound is the most painful letter in the alphabet, it is a full stop where there should be a comma, a door slammed shut on a room, that still feels alive with warmth, perhaps the fracture is not just errors, but evidence that I remember you so completely that my default setting is still a world with you in it, some sentences will always break, some thoughts will always trail off into what was, some moments will always pull double duty

Ma, 41 months in, you are still the first person I want to tell my stories, so I will keeping navigating this brutal grammar, instead of correcting myself, I will allow tenses to carry overlapping truths, letting the past to heckle the present without apology, I will refuse to choose one over the other, I will endure the pains, as the alternative to never begin a thought with “My Mum…” at all, would be a far greater loss for me, even if it must end in the past tense, I will permit the ‘s’ to pause for a second before the ‘d’ arrive, in that brief, linguistic error, you are alive and loving again, and that is an ache I will suffer over silence, every single time, because love is the only verb that, even in your absence, reminds me that what you built within me is eternally, grammatically, present