Dear Mummy,
It has been a while since I have written, hasn’t it? I don’t
know why but it has been hard to write. You know I have been talking to you
each night as I go to sleep, but I haven’t had the need to write for quite a
while. A few weeks ago I was telling Phil how I kept dreaming of you lately,
and I told him how the pain is still the same. As always he calms me down, and
told me yeah, the pain will never lessen, but as time pass I’ll learn to handle
it better. And he wisely told me I can take all the time I want, no one can
tell me when, it is up to me. What makes
me write today was that I had a weird dream of you last night. I dreamt of
going to the psychiatric ward and getting chided by the doctor for not visiting
you more often. The doctor said you have not been improving and they have run
out of option to try. As I was talking to you trying to make sense of your
hallucinations I was blaming myself for not being there for you that whatever
lucidity you use to have is not there anymore. Then I woke up and realize I don’t
have to go visit you in the hospital anymore now. It hurts. I suppose it was my
conscience making me feel guilty for not going to see you before I go. I don’t
know Mum, it just stirred up so many memories.
It brought to mind, when I got my teaching posting to
Sarawak. How you were still warded for your latest relapse, how you wanted no
one else but me when we visited. It was so hard to say goodbye then, I wasn’t
even sure you understood. Then I had to say goodbye to boy, I didn’t think he
understood either, but I found out later he not more that understand, he resented
my leaving. That was my frame of mind, having to leave two family members that
needed me to be there for them, when I received my posting to Kapit. How far it
was from the both of you was the only thing that troubled me. The only reason I
refused to go to the posting. So when a friend who got the same posting,
resentfully said to me at our graduation, that it was a big town, I didn’t have
the heart to tell her if she was in my shoes she would have done the same
thing. My best friends were telling me that there was no way she’d understand, because
not a lot of my friends knew what I have to deal with as a matter of course in
my life.
Then the fact you are gone and no longer here starts hitting
me hard again. I wish you were here more than anything, because you’d be here
to help me sort out so many things. Mummy you don’t know how important your
presence is to me and the family, you were our keystone, the linchpin that
holds everything together. It is hard Mum, especially now that I am so ready to
move on to the nest step of my life but hung in a limbo because of
complications and I have no one to talk to, well no one that won’t judge and
just listen. You were good at that Mum, listening and looking so loving as you
listen. I miss you Mummy.
I guess I have to learn to live without you, and just
remember the good times we had and try to move on and hold on to you in my
heart where you will always be. Al-Fatihah, Mummy.
Love,
Along
