On being a bad person

I feel like a bad person all the time. I’m not a thoughtful or caring enough friend, I don’t remember as many things as I should, I’m not doing enough to make the world a better place. I think, to an extent, most people feel this way. I don’t really know how you tune that voice out, I guess you just try to work harder at it, to make more time, to find small ways to show people you care.

But recently, the reason why I’ve been feeling like a bad person is because we’ve been planning a trip out to visit my mom at the cemetery (which is a horrible sentence, for multiple reasons, only one of them being that it almost sounds as though that’s where she lives now). I love my mom, and I know going to visit her gravesite is the Right Thing To Do, but there is not even one part of me that wants to stand outside the tombstone, where she is buried. But what’s the alternative? Not go visit my dead mother at the cemetery? A good person wouldn’t feel this way. My mom, who was a very good person, made frequent visits to my grandfather’s grave. I had 29 years with her and I’m still not a fraction of the person she was.

But the thing is, I hate having a mom who died - and not just that - I hate that she died. I selfishly don’t want to be a person who’s seen the things I have, who’s lived through the things I have, because once that happens there’s no going back. There’s this fear you have to live with, this knowingness that just because something bad happened one time that doesn’t mean it can’t or won’t happen again. It all feels…extremely unfair. Which, of course, is not to say I haven’t been enormously privileged throughout my life in other ways, or that there aren’t people who haven’t been through worse, because I know they have, but I lost years of my life during my mom’s illness and in the wake of her death. And see - this is why I can’t shake the feeling that I’m actually a monster, because anything I lost pales in comparison to losing the most important person in my life. And she’s the one who actually had cancer and died.

Sometimes it feels like the fact that my mom died overshadows everything else about her. Like that her dying is the most interesting thing about her, when really, it’s the most universal. The fact that she died says nothing of the kind of person she was or the life she lived. However, I do suppose in some ways, that is a tell: Her absence is just as profound as her presence.