What frustrates me more than anything in life is turning on my television and seeing rich, famous, beautiful people smiling because they know that they are on the top of the world. Here’s the thing about how my brain works: I’ve come into contact with every day, normal, wealthy people. I’ve shopped at expensive stores, I’ve had my fair share of expensive cuisine, and I even own a few expensive pieces from different name-brand collections. But, as ungrateful as this might sound, despite all of this I still feel like I am only getting mere samples of what it feels like to live the life that these famous people live. Apart of me always questions myself “what’s the big deal with being famous? Why can’t you just be normal and happy?”

And the thing is, I could. I could be normal. Nothing knocks the simplicity of normality. But I yearn for something more. I don’t want to wake up to go to a  9-5 job, come home to my kids, and my husband, cook dinner, watch a good movie with the kids, and retire to bed with my husband. It’s a beautiful, comfortable life, but I don’t want it. I want to write a good book that touches the lives of a lot of people; I want to inspire people by sharing a story that has inspired me. I want to get rich from my book, then use the money to buy the house my dad and grandmother could never afford. I want to use my money to visit Japan, and Korea, and Italy, and England. I want to take my closest friends on shopping sprees as a way of saying “thanks for sticking with me, even when I had nothing”.
I want to give my mother a proper burial…

It’s been exactly 2 years since my mother has passed away and none of it has gotten easier. I don’t talk about her much, so people have almost forgotten that I’ve lost her. But I haven’t. There are days when she’s on my mind more than others. Sometimes I can ward off my feelings by distracting myself with tv, or music, or watching cute boys, never actually talking to them. But then there are other times where I absolutely can’t dismiss my feelings, where she is stuck in my mind and nothing but a good cry, and some alone time can temporarily quell my yearning for her.

We were on the 7 train after shopping, one evening, Cris, Jules, and I. It was Christmas Eve, I think. Jules was smiling as usual, looking down at her phone, rereading a text message that must’ve been from the guy she likes. Cris was looking through her shopping bags, and yawning. Grand Central was already filled with a buzz of noises from the trains, to the subway performers, and the other passengers having their own light conversations.  There were no words between us, which was mutually understood because we knew that in life communication was vital, but not always needed. Yet, despite all of the sounds around us, what broke the silence between us was me.

“I miss my mom,” I whispered to myself. Somewhere between the subway performers, and the steady, but loud, beat of the train tracks, I expected my voice to be drowned out. Cris looked up from her nails, and Jules put her phone away. Both of them stared in my eyes with a look of understanding. Sometimes in sad moments, between friends, there aren’t any tears, or soothing words, or even facial expressions. Sometimes people can understand each other through completely emotionless exchanges.

Sometimes when words aren’t offered I’m grateful, because I get to close my eyes and think of what my mother would say to me in that moment. ‘You’re allowed to feel that way’, she’d say. ‘You’re allowed to want what you want, even if it’s selfish. You’re allowed to be selfish, if that’s how you want to live your life’. Sometimes I could almost hear her say the words herself. Partially as if she never left me, as if she is a part of me. And partially because of how she raised me, the values that she introduced to me, yet allowed me to instill in myself.
You can’t pick and choose the way you die. I learned that the hard way. Sometimes good people die in bad ways, and sometimes bad people die painlessly. Sometimes even the bad choices that you make don’t ever catch up with you. I knew a guy who smoked 2 packs of cigarettes a day and died in a car accident. The way people thought he would go out was lung cancer, because he started smoking when he was 12. But one beautiful, Sunday morning, while he strolled across the street to pick up the newspaper and a coffee, he got hit and died on the spot.

But, my mother got cancer.

My mother had quit smoking about 4 years before she died. I read somewhere that the minute you stopped smoking your lungs began to repair themselves. But her cancer was ovarian. According to the doctors she ‘let it spread’ to her other organs and that’s what killed her. The scary thing about cancer is that anyone can have it, and they can look perfectly healthy right up until their dying day. My mother was like that.

I remember the first time it actually hit me that she had cancer. I was such a di*khead that I didn’t believe her because she was a worrier…she constantly self-diagnosed herself with various ailments which never plagued her. My mother and father were separated since I was 4, my mother and I since I was 7. She was going through a lot and I needed a parent who could support me better, so my dad took full custody of me. It was the week before Christmas, in 2010 and I was on the phone with her. I remember the conversation

“You’re coming to Christmas dinner, right?”

She was silent which caused me to let out a loud sigh.

“Mom,” I hissed, “You’re coming to Christmas dinner, right?”

She, too, sighed. “I don’t know.”

“You always make excuses about why you can’t come when I invite you. Why can’t you come this time?”

“Aari,” she called my name slowly, “Don’t make me promise something that I can’t keep.”

That was how I knew that my mother not only had cancer, but that it was slowly killing her, and that this time she really wasn’t going to be okay.

There’s something powerful in the words that people never say that can move even the coldest person to tears. Whether it is the smile on your daughters face when she takes her first steps, or the look in your mothers’ eyes as she lay there helplessly in a hospital bed, I find that, mostly, it’s the silence that nearly incapacitates you.

My friends would call me cry baby. They were never full-fledged crying sessions, but rather short out bursts of uncontrollable tears that never compromised themselves. If someone I didn’t know died, I would cry. If animals were wounded, I would cry. I cried almost over everything and anything and I didn’t find a problem with it. I liked being sensitive and in touch with life and the vulnerable side of humanity. But when I visited my mother on her death bed, and I saw her glossy green-eyes, and her drugged up body limp from the pain of cancer I cried tears that I never knew existed.
It’s entirely possible to miss someone that’s right in front of you, I believe. I guess it’s the fear surrounding the fact that this person isn’t going to be with you forever. They’ll eventually have to go home, or go to sleep, or die. I missed my mother while she was dying. I missed the smile that almost never left her face, I missed her soft, velvet like voice, and her misplaced Jersey accent. The woman I saw, dying in front of me, had been reduced to nothing but pain and fear. In her final moments she was alone, and scared, about to end her journey. Tears could never be enough to let out the amount of anger, sadness, and emptiness that engulfed my heart.

So when people ask me why I never cry I tell them that my tears dried up after I watched my mother die in front of me.

There are worst things in this world to cry over, or even more so, to lose all of your tears over. There’s starvation, and r*pe, and genocide, and suicide. But in a single blow, losing your mother is like losing the blanket that shields you from those things, until you are old enough to shield yourself. I was only 16 at the time that I lost her, and it seemed to me that it wasn’t until after her death that life somehow started to throw me curveballs that only she could catch.