Soul Mosaic

Cathartic maybe. Healing, insightful, yes. But easy? Never – And sometimes it takes you down unexpected roads…

It has been a difficult time. I have been writing …well, I WAS writing the next pieces about my childhood, working to move the book forward. But I got sidetracked by Mom.

The festering splinter

I had done a side piece about Mom..her death, her life…her, as part of the prologue. A matching bookend to the prologue entry about my father’s death. Yet every time I tried to edit it I ended up rewriting it instead. First from one angle, then another, struggling to capture that “something” inside me that needed to speak. That “something” that was driving me to write about her, and it was unrelenting. While I felt like I got closer to “it” with each round of writing, still, I was missing the essence.

Whatever it was I was trying to excavate, it was buried deep in my soul. The effort felt like when you have to plunge into your flesh with a needle to remove a deeply embedded festering splinter only to have it keep slipping out of your grasp and sink deeper. I felt like I was failing because that “Mom piece” was taking too long, and I needed to get back on track and return to that piece from my childhood. I was determined to stick to the outline.

This continued until late yesterday afternoon when, in a flash of insight…then despair, I realized I WASN’T off-track at all…and that there was actually something much bigger emerging in all of this. In fact, I suddenly understood that the “Mom” piece wasn’t the “sidetrack” but THE track. I kept getting pulled back to her…her death…her life because there were so many questions that needed answers. Questions like why did it matter so much to me that we took care of her to the end…why was I so proud of how she navigated her death process? Why did I care so much after she had abandoned me for a lifetime?