Antidote.

Maybe it’s just the way we are as humans; that we always find a way to make ourselves the victims in how we tell our stories.

Though it’s true that sometimes it is hard to know to whom the tragedy really belongs. How do we determine the victim if we cannot measure whose heart broke first or whose sorrow runs deepest?

I must have been 12/13 the first time I ever saw my mother cry and I think that was the only time.

You know you people don’t know my mother. She was the baddest, strongest, some would even say scariest woman ever. She was 6.2 and well built with the physical strength of a bull. In my eyes my mum was Wonder Woman, she got everything done and everyone covered.

So I walked in on her crying by herself in the dining room. Thing is her mum (my grandma) had died a few days before that, in her true fashion, mum was incharge of all the funeral arrangements and what not. She got everyone and everything covered so no one had to worry about anything. At this point my relationship with death was very abstract, I’m not even sure I knew what it meant for someone to die.

I remember being shocked and panicking at seeing what at the time I thought of as a glimpse of weakness in this god, things must be really bad huh? I asked her, mum what’s wrong? And and she said “I still can’t believe my mother is dead”. This would be a first of the now many face to face with pain and grief that I’ve come to encounter in my life, I empathized with my mum and my heart broke for her. The gravity of this death thing started to sink in even though I could only imagine how it must have felt to experience that kind of loss.

15 years later I mourn my mother like the first day I lost her. It’s hard to imagine my life with her now, I can’t even picture it. I just wish I could tell her that now I 100% understand what it feels like to lose your mother.