Blame

May 9, 2011

Hi Andrea,

            How can a person know so many, and yet feel so alone? It's too hard to hide the tears today. Why is it easy to forget the phone can dial out as easily as it can   ring? Why is it people can't see the important people right in front of them? Relationships by virtue require more than one person... Today I remember, the quote  I live by... "Friends are the family you choose for yourself." I can breathe again, for now...

Your sister wrote this on her Facebook Wall today.

I hear her hurting.  I do not know what to answer.

I wrote back, “I am sorry you are feeling bad.”

Nothing.

Yesterday was Mother’s Day.  Your sister sent me a text message, “Happy Mother’s Day.”

I texted back, “Thank you.”  And then a bunch of smiling faces.  Reading her Facebook Wall, I think to myself, “Was I supposed to call her?

I feel your arm around my shoulder.  Hear your voice in my head.  “That’s just Erin.  She’ll get over it.”

I don’t know.

I cannot stand in the face of all her pain unleashed, and live with mine.  Though some of it I may have caused unintentionally, unwittingly, I have held my own accounting.  It was far more rigorous and exacting than what anyone else could have done.  I have forgiven myself, and I have forgiven.  What she is left with now is hers.

She blames herself that you died.  She feels guilt she did not come check on you before she went to bed that night, in those early hours when half asleep she got up to use the bathroom, in the morning when she started her day, until late in the afternoon, when she opened your door to finally check on you.  And found you dead, with Sadie lying on top of you.  She knows she was angry with you, frustrated you were still living in her house. 

She has accused me of blaming her too.  But I know how and why you died.  I don’t blame her.  You would have died if a medic had been standing right in front of you.  The only thing that might have saved you is a double lung transplant one second earlier.  Or if someone had told you injecting dissolved morphine pills into your port would eventually kill you.

I don’t know what to do with this.  Any of it. 

So I retreat.  Because to save myself I have to.

                                                                             Love,

                                                                             Mom