You were still warm, mother, but your heart was no longer beating. I was longing to make you hear, desperately, my gratitude for the life you gave me. That day I stood there, staring at you, thinking how beautiful you looked, even in dying, on that ugly ER bed. You could have been an actress. You could have been everyone's star, but you were mine, and our family's. You could have been popular, and yet you chose to be a teacher, spreading kindness and future into difficult kids who needed both badly.
And you, You saved me. Many times. In many ways.
I remember when I was eleven and overdosed on Nutella. You said it was an 800-gram jar I ate. I remember it smaller. I was hospitalized in the same place where you died today, which is the kind of symmetry the universe throws at you when it wants you to feel something. I remember how you put me back on the right path after that episode. How you taught me not to abuse the things I love. I also remember the day I called you a whore and you, instead of breaking a broomstick across my back (which, looking back, would have been deserved), sat me down and asked if I even knew what that word meant. I didn't. I had picked it up at school. I knew it was offensive but had no real concept of why. You made me understand how important it is to know what you're saying before you say it. That day I learned, without either of us realizing it, the concept of "as-a-service," which is funny now because it's applied to absolutely everything. I know you forgave me instantly. I'm still working on forgiving myself.
A carcinoma with metastases to the lymph nodes, they said. Spread from your womb, my first house, till your lungs. Stage IV, they said. Incurable. Palliative chemo eventually, they said. It must be a mistake, check again please, I said. It wasn't. It all sounded like a death sentence without an expiry date, like a mozzarella left in the fridge, slowly becoming something else entirely.
The dignity you showed in handling that disgraceful news, I will never forget it. I was a grown man and I was still learning from you, right there, in that doctor's office, on that specific horrible day that I would happily erase from the calendar of my life. A day that made me forcefully resign to everything to follow you. I would have started swearing in every foreign language I know, and I know a few, enough to cause a diplomatic incident. You, though. You just looked at the ceiling for a moment, the way people do when they're not actually looking at the ceiling but somewhere else entirely. Then you turned to me, your eyes in tears, and said, "We fight. We won't retreat by a millimetre".
Love your mothers, out there. They deserve better. Don't waste your fucking time. Tell them how grateful you are, while they can still hear you. You will regret it if you don't, exactly as I am doing right now, because once they fade because of an unannounced cancer, once they pass, you're on your own.