Young Writers Society

Flight

Growing up I had it all. I had everything any happy person needed, a mom and a dad, a big house, my dad owned a motorcycle and my mom was a hippy. My dad was always angry and my mom, always calm. Dad had frequent outbursts but mom kept him sane. She knew how to handle him when he got too emotional. There were never another women who could handle my father like my mom did. I watched my father lay every part of his body on his mother but never my mother, he couldn’t bare the pain he would carry if he was to put his hands on his wife but every other women didn’t matter to him. Our family kept its distance, mom and dad never had dinner parties with friends and the only time we got together with other people were with my dad’s extended family and it wouldn’t of happened without my mother. Mom didn’t talk to her family too much. She said they were too much of hippies, which never really made sense to me because she was the biggest hippy I had ever met. I remember ease dropping on mom and dad’s conversation, they sat at dinning room table after dinner was finished and went on about my uncle’s addiction and how my dad would turn into my Uncle Joey if he didn’t stop, but I didn’t really clue into what meant back then.

Now let me tell you about my mother- she was beautiful. Her moss green eyes that never seemed to go unseen by everyone who she laid her eyes on would compliment them. She had long, wavy blonde hair that was found everywhere around our house but was silk and smooth like a Pantene commercial. I smell her once in a while and every once and a while when I can smell her scent, it brings me back to the moment she died. The very instant second that she stopped breathing and was carried into her after life and transformed into an angel.

“Holly can fly” was printed on stickers and covered every inch of the walls of the funeral home on Elm Street. For me, I knew how to hide it; I knew how to cope with it on my own. But for my dad, he took it out on the world around him. Every good thing he had going for him crumbled right in front of me and I was left alone, where the only family I had was my father and I didn’t even consider him family. It was hard for me to speak up for myself to someone who was so arrogant and ignorant to everyone but his own sense of entitlement. My mom died too early, she didn’t get to teach me half the things she said she would. She never taught me how to control my dad in the ways she could and maybe its because he doesn’t love me as much as he loved her but he would never love anything as much as he loved my mother.

When she passed it was hard for everyone. As much as we as a family kept out distance, my mother was well known for her beautiful sense of style and her bubbly personality that not one person could tolerate not having a conversation with her.

I was seven when my mom died. Seven years I knew my mother.

Four years I don’t remember. Three years filled with vague memories of her and pictures I don’t remember taking of her holding me in her arms. Seventeen years ago my mom died and I remember it like it was yesterday. The funeral home filled with friends, family, acquaintances and people I had never seen before that gave me their condolences like I knew what the word Condolences meant.

Condolences? An expression of sympathy, especially on occasion of a death.

Yeah… an expression was all I wore on my face; a blank, dull expression like a ghost had just taken over my body. Out of everyone in this world, out of every Holly of humanity, out of every mother to ever be taken away from her kid, it was mine- my mother died and I had to live with that. I couldn’t tell you why this had to happen to me but if I told you there was a silver lining would you keep reading?

I wish she was my silver lining but she only brought distance and tears and my grandmother once told me “Sometimes the most beautiful things in the world get taken from us and disappoint us” But my mother’s absence taught me more than any other’s existence ever could have.

“Stay strong son”, My father said crouched down to my seven year old body with his hand up to my ear, “I know its weird seeing all these people but we will be home soon and we will never have to see their faces again”.

“Who are these people?” I mumbled to my father, holding back my tears from streaming down my face.

“None of these people love your mother as much as I do, none one could have loved your mother more than I did” He said, while holding a picture of my mom up to his mouth and kissing her forehead.

“Why would they show up?” I asked confusedly.

“Death brings everyone together.” He took a sip of his beer and walked away into the room where the reception was being held.

I remember looking up at him in total disgust and looking at the rest of the dads in the room and thinking of why I couldn’t be blessed with a father that I wasn’t scared of and didn’t want to kill. Then I took a look in my mom’s coffin, I rubbed her hand and kissed her cheek. When I turned away from the coffin, I looked at all the mom’s that filled Elm Street funeral home and wondered why was the most beautiful women in the room was the one not breathing?

As with everything in life, it all comes to an end. The hurting, the mourning, the company and the funeral all have an end at some point. When the funeral came to an end and the company started to leave, the hurting grew in my heart and travelled around through the room and never seemed to come to a complete end.