NINE

Today is nine months for Ang**.

Nine months.

I really can’t understand it. I can’t understand how she can be gone that long. I’m not use to it yet, I am used to everything that has happened since—the new jobs, the new house, even the five or six haircuts I have had since then but I cannot get used to her not being her, to not having access to her, to not hearing her laugh.

Her daughter turned three a couple of months ago. Do you know that means her mom has missed almost a third of her life? How is that possible? How can a mom miss that much?

And why am I not more over this? Actually I am over it. Sometimes. Sometimes I feel guilty because I don’t think about her every day anymore and then sometimes I feel guilty because I feel like I think about her too much. Let the woman rest. Get a grip you emotional cripple. The thing that no one can explain about grief, that no one can help you deal with, is how sometimes it sneaks up on you. You are moving along through your day, through your life and then some one tells you about how their blood pressure is bad but who cares because they are young and no one their age has a heart attack and you are near tears. You are shakily talking about your friend who was thirty-three and died this past year. How she didn’t have bad blood pressure or cholesterol, how she was carrying her killer with her all along and no one warned her and you are rushing to bathroom to cry. Grief has smacked you over the head with a shovel again. You are in the bathroom trying to get your act together, where you can pretend that you have your act together again. But you are pretending.

No one tells you about how you can be fine for days, weeks and then you see that commercial for the American Heart Association—the one where the mom offers her life for her daughter’s? and you cry for an hour, for days. That sometimes you stop believing in anything. That sometimes you think that you need your medication. That sometimes you feel alone and then you feel her behind you and it is not as comforting as it should be.

That is what nine months feels like. Maybe ten is the time when I stop counting. Maybe eleven. One steps forward, two steps back. We are all Paula Abdul songs here.

**I have always called her Gladys here, because that it what she was before she died. But I mean who cares about internet privacy now? Also, Monica is Linda, which you would know if you were reading her site so there let me out everyone that is not me!