Despite my mother’s death, I had an amazing childhood; so good in fact, that I've wrestled with my fair share of white guilt over it. But that is neither here nor there. An interesting part of my childhood, a part with which I struggled, was not really ever having known my mother. I didn’t struggle with this so much in the “I’m missing mommy” fashion, but in the fact that I was fairly consistently surrounded by people (aka adults) who knew my mother a lot better than I ever did…people for whom my mother’s death involved history, and personal narrative…I guess this is to say loss. Her death involved loss for me, but mostly loss of what could have been, not what was (which is questionable, because how do you lose something you never had?).

This situation, this being surrounded by folks who knew this person to whom you are supposed to be ultimately connected — who is your incipit core — better than you, is a strange one. It is a situation that I never even realized was confusing or potentially traumatic while living through it (I guess I am still sort of living through it).

To my mother’s friends and family, my mother was more than a fleeting character; she was a bona fide person; a friend. To me, she was briefly there, and then existent within my life as a nearly mythic character; mythic not in scope, but in her distance from and connection to me. If my life were a book, cartoon, or movie, she'd be a character with whom the audience wouldn't be able to connect — she would be a force, like the east wind in Greek myth — she would be environmental rather than singular or character-based.

#ILoveCartoons