The Quiet

 I have been quiet. 

I have been silent. 

It's not that I have nothing to say, quite the contrary, but it has been more that I needed to take time for me, for my family. I needed to just be for a while. My world has been in flux. Death, work, and taxes will do that but it's more that I realized that my whole family needed healing. My kids are dealing with grief and trauma, my dad is working hard to keep himself busy and I am over here, way too busy for words. I needed to stop. I needed to do things for myself for a change. Infinitesimal change is still change. I unplugged for moments. I spent time with my kids, worked around the house, and smiled. It was so needed. How therapeutic and yet, there were moments where the bottom fell out beneath me. 

Dad came down to our house for a weekend. It was wonderful and fun. We had cocktails, did some shopping, laughed, ate delicious food, and enjoyed each other's company. However with all of that, there was still some work to do, sorting out my mother's estate, or at least the smaller chunks I can take off my father's plate was the least I could do. With that, came opening mom's computer. At first, it wasn't so bad until I realized how far down the rabbit hole she had gone at the end, to the point where a four-digit pin was too difficult to enter. Cancer eating at her brain made things nigh impossible for her and it sucks. The reminder right on the loading screen sucked. I took a deep breath in and calmly said fuck you cancer under my breath as I logged in with extra steps because of the many failed attempts. 

I got in, submitted my father's insurance claim for his eye test, and then started to investigate why my mother's computer was so ridiculously slow. I removed what felt like hundreds of games and then still wondered why it was bogged down. I looked at the hard drive properties and that's when I realized my mistake. I went to the photos folder and was smacked in the fact with my mother's archive of pictures and videos. She had every important event from the last 10 years documented and saved on this computer. The kids when they were babies, every recital, every event. All of it. I clicked absentmindedly and found myself listening to my mother recording Christmas morning and listening to her laugh. The air was immediately sucked out of the room and it felt like it was spinning. I realized that her voice, that voice I have heard all of my life, no longer creates. It no longer ages and changes... instead it is frozen. It is stuck in the videoes and recordings (answering machine), never to utter a new phrase again. My mother, like myself, was not shy about her opinions or her notions and yet, realized that there will never be new. She lives in her archive. But it's not all doom and gloom here... let me repeat. She lives in her archive. Sure there may not be anything new from her, but she is living somewhere. Her voice is not lost to the ages like some people, she documented and kept everything. Her voice and likeness included. 

I have been quiet, but that is because I felt like she was forever silenced. Now that I know that is not the case, the world seems less dark. 

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