After Dad: Mom and Son in Love

My dad passed away two years ago on a rainy February day. I remember how mom and I were sitting on the cheap plastic chairs beside dad's hospital bed, as we had been doing for weeks, while the rain lashed against the windows overlooking the desolate parking lot.

I was reading dad from a National Geography article about the Rocky Mountains. I did this more to kill time than for him. For, dad had already lost conscious for weeks by then. Mom was holding his hand, as she always did when we sat here under the bright white hospital lights.

Having been in this limbo for so long, we almost believed that we would be here forever - going in rounds from work to the hospital to home to work to the hospital. But change has its ways of creeping up on us like a thief in the night. Mom and I watched silently as the monitor beside the bed began to bleep. We froze. The nurse ran in and we made way to let her do whatever she could to save dad. To no avail. Just like that, dad died. We watched his body, which looked exactly the same as before, and tried to realize that everything was different now.

Mom had been losing her colour since dad's illness. But at the funeral it was as if she had turned into a black and white version of herself. The priest spoke the last words as dad's body was lowered in the ground.

"I will miss him so much." I said to mom, when we hid away in the garage from all the relatives and friends swarming our house after the funeral. We felt so disoriented.

"Me too." she answered. We breathed in and out and forced ourselves to mingle again.

***

Some memories of my father.

When I was five, we used to feed the ducks at a local pond. Dad had managed to train them to catch the bread out of the air, which made all the other kids jealous of me and him.

When I was eighteen, dad managed to keep his temper when he saw my awful grades and, again, when he found the bag of weed stacked away between my shoes in my closet. Other dads would have yelled at me, but my dad simply sat down for a long and serious and calm talk about Responsibility and Discipline. Then we smoked a farewell-to-weed joint together, after which mom found us giggling and rolling over the carpet. The strategy was smart. If even my dad approved of weed, there was not any bad-boy appeal to it and I never smoked again.

When I turned nineteen, dad helped me make my own bed for in college. We worked on the project for months in the evenings and had so much fun, listening to Aerosmith on the small bluetooth speaker and shooting the shit together. Every time my parents would visit my dorm, dad would proudly pat the bed and recall how we had worked on it together.

Overall, I remember dad as the guy who kept it all together. When mom was stressed at work, he would take us camping. When I messed up at school, we would sit together and study - and with so much humour as dad had, it was always fun. Now, with him gone, I was afraid that if things fell apart, there would be no one to magically fix everything, as he had always done.

***

It was hard to continue to work the weeks after. I had just started as a high school teacher in our small Midwest town. The kids were kind to me. They listened when I told them what had happened to my father and why I might not be myself for a while. But they also were rowdy teenagers, and I had trouble retaining their attention after a kid called Brandon showed a TickTock movie of him downing a can of beer in three seconds.

In the evenings I went to mom. She had been allowed some leave time from her job as a secretary for the local university. It did not seem to do her much good. She looked pale. Having little distraction, anxious thoughts crept in her mind like so many spiders.

I worried for her. I worried so much that on top of the stress my work was giving, I was paying too little attention to my girlfriend at the time. We were living together, but I was hardly home, and when I was I was grading student papers or lying flat out in front of the television. I should have seen it coming. But I didn't. We broke up.

Mom allowed me to move in with her for a while. Secretly, I didn't mind. I wanted to be there for her. It was my way to cope with the grief, I guess. I tried to do the little things that dad did for her, like make her breakfast and prepare some cheese snacks after dinner over a glass of wine.

Whenever I thought of dad I had to fight my tears.

Mom appreciated everything I did, but she was still gloomy and pale and she looked as if the colour had been shaken out of her. But when her work started, and she had some distraction, things got a bit better.

"You can stay as long as you like." mom said over dinner one evening, as if she had telepathically read my mind. I had been worried that I was overstaying. It was three months now. Although I had half-heartedly looked for apartments in town, I simply could not see myself living anywhere else than with her for now. I needed to be here to go through the motions together.

"I want you around. It helps."

Often, we cried together over dad. We would cuddle on the couch and recall nice things about dad. How he would make awful puns on every town's name that we passed on holiday. ("You know my buddy Al? Al would move to Elwood if he could sell wood.") We chuckled. It was comforting to feel mom's warm body so close to mine. She would hide her face on my chest as I felt her warm tears through my shirt. I would kiss her hair. I recognized the smell of her shampoo.

Over time, we started to think of nice things to do in the evening. Mom was reluctant at first. She explained that she felt guilty. As if having fun was betraying her memory of dad.

"Dad would have liked you to keep on living." I replied. "He loved you most when you were happy and cheerful."

Mom took that in for a while. Memories must have flashed before her mind's eye. "Remember how he always used to tease me about my freckles?"

"He called you his summer goddess. I always cringed, but it was kind of cute actually."

"He didn't want me to stay inside but to go outside in the sun. Whenever I got too caught up in work, he would force me to take some days off and go out with the three of us. I loved our camping trips."

Mom slowly became convinced happiness wasn't a sin. I remember that the first time we went to a cinema together, she was nervous. She looked over her shoulder and seemed to want to be inside as fast as possible.

"I am afraid someone sees me. What will they think - so soon after your dad passed away?

I braided my arm through mom's and pulled her close.

"You are overthinking it. Please, please just enjoy tonight."

Her head rested on my shoulder. Her hair tickled my neck.

"Okay. I will try to."

The movie was awful but we had a great night criticizing it in the little café adjacent to the cinema. Mom did some great expressions of the actors. Only when I saw her smile, did I realize how long ago it had been since I had last seen her smile. Her blue eyes had regained some of their life.

***

Other people just didn't understand what it was like to lose someone so dear to you. Over the months, mom and I had disappointing experiences with our friends, who made blunt remarks or gave us the impression that we had been mourning for too long. People find it hard to accept grief. They do not want to acknowledge that there are things that simply will not be repaired again, that things can break for good. Everybody seemed so impatient for us to just get over it.

But because of this our bond grew stronger than it had ever been. Our house in the suburbs became our vestige. It was our safe place, in which we could show how we felt. Mom and I talked full evenings. We reflected on our grief, how it grew like an ink stain, tainting everything that it touched. How silent the house was. How hard it was for her to throw dad's clothes out.

Our house was our palace of grief. We could be who we were. And when I was sad, mom would just sense it and we would cuddle until we could face life's tasks again. When mom was sad, I made her dinner or spontaneously took her out. And sometimes, when I found her on the floor sobbing, crying her eyes out, I would just be there for her and let her go through whatever she was going through.

We worked like a well-oiled machine, and soon our lives became so intertwined that I started to feel a knot in my stomach thinking about ever leaving and living on my own again.

Mom would still meet friends. But as if by some secret agreement, she always met them at their places our outdoors. It was as if our home had become a sanctity where we could deal with our sadness as we liked, which was not to be disturbed by others. Everything was okay there, nothing would be too much.

Summer came. Mom took some weeks off, and I had my summer holidays. And we stayed inside much of the time, hiding in our bubble. Late winter we had still gone out often, but mom found it hard to be seen outside. Especially the longer days made her feel vulnerable, as more people were on the street and she didn't like the idea of seeming to be over dad already. Many of my plans to cheer her up had to take place within the four walls of our home.

"This is the first year I have seen you without freckles." I said one time over dinner. Outside the sun still shone. But we had plans to watch some music documentaries on the couch.

Mom touched her face. "You are right. We have been hiding from the world a bit, haven't we?"

For some reason, I placed my hand on hers, touching her soft cheek. She looked at me with her radiant blue eyes. Was she startled?

The touch felt too intimate. Even though we had been so close physically many times. Snuggling on the couch. Hugging. We even kissed each other's faces when one of us was crying. But perhaps it was the casualness of my gesture that felt out of the ordinary. We both knew that I wouldn't have held her hand like this before dad passed away and that something had changed over the months. I softly pulled my hand back.

I was silent for a bit.

"I should go out more." Mom said then, but it sounded like she wasn't looking forward to it. "Perhaps I should take a small vacation or something."

I am not sure whether my touch had anything to do with it, but mom decided to take a break without me. With three friends she went to a nearby lake for a long weekend. It gave me time to think about the last few months, about how life was without dad nearby, and how my relation to mom was changing.

But overall, I just felt miserable without mom. The house, which with her was a shelter, now felt like a tomb. I also missed being able to hold her. Seeing her. Being so close to her all the time. I missed her smell of her shampoo that made the house into a home.

I went out for long walks through the suburbs, thinking about dad at first, but then quickly returning my thoughts to mom. I felt a deep urge to hold her close to me, and I missed the way she would fold her warm body into a ball so that I could fully wrap her in my arms. Sitting at a bench near a field with old oaks, I suddenly realized that I felt the same as when my relationship with my ex had just started, and when she had been away for a week. The longing was just as intense.

This was the first time I had thought about my ex at all.

how is life there? I texted mom on the second day. the house feels quite empty .

The rest of the day, I waited for a reply. Jumping up every time my phone buzzed. Only at night did mom reply.

I miss you.

I held my phone in my hand as if it held a puzzle that I had to solve. Mom missed me. Did she feel the same? I got startled when the phone buzzed again.

I will tell you more when i get home. sleep well xxx she added.

love you xxx

We had never sent each other such messages. We had hardly texted at all. In a strange way, it felt natural. But it also felt much more like messages I would send to my lover than to my mother. They sparked my longing to see her again. And they made the days that we were separated seem even longer.

The days crawled by like a wounded soldier crawling to safety. I had nothing to do, and I soon found myself hovering around my phone waiting for anything to come in.

I want to hug you. I wrote her, when I could no longer refrain.

I want to hold you close. she replied hours later, and in the meanwhile I had done nothing than fret over whether it was weird to have texted her that. Can't talk with my friends as I can with you.

Hope it isn't too bad. Miss you on the couch next to me.

I'll be back soon for you, baby. We'll cuddle as much as you like.

Mom had only been gone for three days. But we fell in each other's arms like lovers reunited after a long war when she can back.

Her holiday had been okayish. But her friends had avoided the topic of dad, which had made mom feel lonely. She knew it was just awkwardness on her friends' side. But the pain never abode.

"But you have some freckles again." I replied, while I listened to her, as I was lying against her on the couch. "Dad would have loved that. I love it."

And again I touched her face. Our eyes met as I gently patted her cheek.

After her return, mom and I both seemed to have a physical craving to be near one another. After work, we ate dinner on the couch, our bodies close. We lay in the garden, sunbathing, holding hands. Only when night fell did we separate, climbing into our separate beds, looking forward to another day of being close.

***

"Do you know how there are these moments when you forget -- only during an instant -- that he is no longer here, so that the pain only smacks you in the face when you realize that he will never walk through that door again? Like a jackhammer hitting you right in the face?" Mom had dried her tears but her blue eyes were still watery. I grabbed her hands and held them like I was protecting a frail little bird.

"I know...It's just so... Fucked. And everything just goes on and everybody expects you to have given it a place, but you haven't because there is no place to put it for you because the world just feels broken, doesn't it?"

Silence fell. We just had had dinner and our plates were still on the table. We had eaten little to nothing.

"Come, let's cuddle." mom said, after we had found nothing to say.

And we spooned on the couch, and I held mom and we just let time flow.

"It is as if only here I am understood." mom whispered, as she kissed my hand. "You know what I feel. Only you know what I feel."

I nodded. It was the same for me. My pupils had all but forgotten about that day when I told them my dad passed away. My colleagues never asked. It was just something that you were supposed to get over, I guess. But I hadn't, really.

I remembered how dad and I went fishing every summer, even after I had graduated. He used to make the stupidest jokes, that I found myself reiterating in my mind when I lay in bed. Sometimes I would share one with mom, and she would have that nostalgic smile when she remembered the occasion where dad had made it.

But overall, I found it hard to reach my pain. Sometimes I cried. But most of all, I found myself over-performing to try to keep mom happy, compensating the emptiness I felt inside. Doing chores, thinking of plans, consoling her. Still, I could only so long hold that big black cloud of grief at bay, and it felt lonely that no one in my work or of my friends understood.

No one but mom.

"I admire you, mom." I replied to her. "I think you are so strong, how you deal with your pain. And that we are really making something of life still."

"Thank you, honey. I really like you being here for me. I appreciate all the time you take to help me. It would be too lonely without you."

Mom held my hand and placed it on her face. We just lay there cuddling. It was not awkward, being so intimate with mom. I wanted to be with her, to feel her warmth warm the frozen inside me. And I felt something deep stirring in me as I kept stroking mom's cheek. We belonged.

***

A week or so after mom had returned from her holiday, we went to the pool together. The sky was blue and the sun was high, and we found a nice, cool spot near a tree. We went into the cabins to get changed.

When we both emerged again, mom wore the bikini she had already had when I was a child. Black, with white polka dots. It had been a long time since I had seen so much of mom's body. Out of decency, I tried to not look at her. Still, that bikini, her legs, her belly brought back memories of when mom bathed me as a boy -- she wore that exact bikini on pictures I had seen in our photobooks. Her body somehow signaled safety to me, a time of innocence when my body was under her complete care.

She seemed to have gained some weight over time, as her curves almost bulged out of the bikini. I saw that she realized. A blush spread across her cheeks as an octopus' ink through water.

"I must really watch what I eat." she said, while she uncomfortably held her arms in front of her, as to hide her womanly shapes.

I did not know what to reply. I wanted to compliment her, but that would have been strange. Instead, I simply placed my hand on her back and gently steered her towards the pool.

"Who's in latest is a loser!" I said. And we swam.

For some blissful moments, mom seemed to forget her sorrows. The sun shone on her red hair. The splashing water brought a smile to her face.

Later, we moved our towels to let the sun dry our bodies. It felt nice to be outside with mom. We had found a way to move our bubble beyond the house, to embrace reality somehow but still feel the safety of our palace of grief that we had built between us. It was also a relief that there was no one we knew at the pool, so that we could indulge in the security we felt between us.

When mom thought she was getting sunburned with her sensitive skin, she moved her towel to the shade under the tree again and went to read a book. I still lay directly at her feet, letting the sun tan my body, and when I turned on my belly, I could look up at mom.

"Hi there." she said.

"Hi."

And she continued reading. Her legs were up to be able to support her book on her knees, her face was hidden behind the book to me. I looked at her legs, absentmindedly, thinking about some assignments the pupils had to hand in soon.

I could see mom's bikini bottom from here. My gaze had inadvertently lowered itself to her crotch, where the fabric of her bikini bottom stretched over her intimate parts. I looked away, blushing. But soon I found my gaze drawn to her legs again. I followed her under legs. Cute tiny stubbles. Strong and smooth upper legs. Her wide thighs. Then, the point where it all came together.

I peeked up but mom was still reading. I looked down again. The bikini bottom pressed against her vagina so tightly, that I could tell out the shapes of her lips. My breath became heavier, as a dizziness came over me. It felt as if I were falling and falling. But I kept looking. And looking.

When I finally looked up, I met the blue of mom's eyes. She had lowered her book and now just looked at me, showing no sign of what she was thinking. I looked back and felt myself blush.

Then mom slowly raised her book again and continued reading. I turned on my back and avoided her gaze the rest of the day.

Although I felt more awkward being close to mom after this moment, she did not show any distance. Back home, everything went on as it had. I made breakfast, we went to work, and in the evening we had dinner together.

The next day, I found mom crying in the kitchen and she beckoned me to come close. I held her sobbing body in my arms and I was glad to feel that we were as close as ever. The moment at the pool had not driven a wedge in our physical intimacy.