The Weeping Woman
The human brain is a prediction machine. It reaches into the future based on what it knows. A child, by definition, belongs in your future. The brain has already placed them there, in a thousand small ways, in a thousand small futures. At the graduation, at the wedding, at the table, at the deathbed that was supposed to be yours. When the child dies, all of those futures fall simultaneously. You are not grieving one loss. You are grieving every version of what was supposed to happen. Every unremarkable Thursday. Every phone call. Every single thing you were still going to say.
The morning was hot. I remember the sky being Cerulean blue, not a cloud anywhere. A day so explicitly ordinary you don’t know to hold onto it. A day you think you’ll look back on when the kids are grown and miss. And I would have. I would have stood in some quiet future kitchen and missed exactly this. The chaos. The noise. The way the house couldn’t contain all of it. The way I couldn’t contain all of it. Just an unassuming hot morning and everyone alive and everyone home and no reason in the world to know that you should stop. That you should put down whatever you’re doing and just stand there. Just look. Look at the fingerprints on the glass. Look at the shoes by the door. Look at the way the light is coming through the window right now, at this exact angle, on this exact morning, with these exact people in it. Look at all of it because you will want it back. You will want it back so badly you will try to rebuild it from memory and find that memory is not enough, that it was never enough, that you needed more time and more looking and more of just standing there in the middle of all that noise thinking this is too much when it was not too much, it was exactly enough, it was everything. I didn’t know. How could I have known.
In Japanese, amae describes a dependency so complete, so cellular, it exists outside the reach of translation. It is what a mother and child are to each other. How you know which cry means hunger and which one means fear before your eyes are open. How his whole body fit against yours like it was always supposed to be there. How you woke up this morning and for one second he was still alive. And then you remembered. And the day began. When the child dies, amae has nowhere to go. It just stays in you, intact, and you don’t know what to do with that, you never know what to do with that. It becomes something language never made a word for because it never imagined it would need one.
I need you to understand something. One moment it was all there. All of it. Right in my hands. And then it wasn’t. And there is no way to explain the distance between those two places except to say that it is infinite. There was light. There was an ordinary morning that had no idea what it was about to become. And then the light was the same and the room was the same and everything was exactly where it had been and nothing would ever be the same again. And then my body was already running and the microwave was beeping and a door slammed somewhere and the dog was barking and the world kept going, unbothered and loud and still itself, and I was falling through the floor of everything I had ever known and I couldn’t get to him and I couldn’t fix it and I couldn’t breathe and then I was everywhere and nowhere, floating up and out and away from my own body, and I was watching and she was on the floor and she was screaming and she was his mother and she was coming apart and I could not reach her.
And how do you come away from this? You don’t. You just move through it. Your body insists. And I had reasons, real reasons, to let it insist. And staying meant waking up inside a world that had rearranged itself overnight into something I had no instructions for. Everything I had ever used to hold myself together had stopped working. And I was still here. Still breathing. Still expected to function. And I could not find a single thing that was where I had left it.
Was any of this random. Can anyone tell me. Does the difference even matter when he is gone either way. I have sat with this question longer than I have sat with anything else in my life. I have looked for the answer in philosophy and in science and in the dark at 3am and in the faces of people who told me it was part of a plan and in the faces of people who told me it wasn’t and none of them could give me what I needed. What I keep coming back to is this. He was here. Four years. And the love that happened in those four years was real and it was ours and the universe can be random or it can be designed and either way that love existed and it lives in me and I remember every second of it and that has to be enough.
There is a Mexican folk legend, centuries old, of a mother who lost her children and could not stop looking for them. She wanders forever, weeping, neither alive nor dead, neither here nor gone. They call her La Llorona. The Weeping Woman. She is the thing children are warned about in whispers. She is also the most honest portrait of grief I have ever encountered. The grief so total it uproots you from the living world. The mother who cannot stop looking. I have met her. In the mirror. In the wanting. In the knowing it will never end.
It will not be okay. Not fully. Not ever. You will walk through the rest of your life with something permanently removed. The world will expect you to act as though you are whole. And you will. You will get very good at it. You will show up and function and love people and mean it. You will sit at tables and laugh at things and people will look at you and see someone who made it through. And you will have made it through. And it will cost you anyway. Every morning you open your eyes. Every room you walk into that he is not in. Every milestone that arrives without him. Every version of the future that keeps happening without him in it. You will do it because the alternative is a darkness you cannot afford. You will do it because you have to. You will do it because he was here and you were his mother and that means something and you will spend the rest of your life figuring out what. Underneath all of it, every single day, invisible to everyone but you. And that is what it is to survive this.
He was here. That is the whole story. He was here and I loved him and the world was loud and beautiful and innocent and had no idea what it was holding. And neither did I. And I would not trade a single second of it. Not the before. Not even the after. Because the after is the price of the before and the before was him and he was here and I loved him and that love did not end in that room and it will outlast every single thing I have left.