Mom

I left mom's home over 20 years ago. I left her town—and her continent—13 years ago. We don't see each other often. True, we talk on the phone and we exchange emails. Sometimes we send photographs, but we age separately, each bent at the altar of time in our separate corners of the world.

Each time we meet, there's another part of her melted away. Each time she is smaller, gnarlier, wrinklier, slower. Almost as if life hurries to leave its many marks on her, cutting and carving her viciously.

It took me a long time to realize that she's not going to be around forever. Though we all know the ways of Mother Nature, we somehow perceive our mothers as immortals. And we are shocked when, one day, a veil falls from our eyes, and we see the diminished, bent and wrinkled creature which towered over our childhoods so mighty and strong.

Mom's set in her sometimes annoying ways: she snores, she smacks while eating (bad dentures), she talks a mile and never stops, she knows everything best and she's never wrong. But, if I look carefully, I can see a fear in her eyes—a fear of time slipping away, of missing the last few life's gifts, of what's to come and of facing it alone. There's such tremendous fragility in her, that I want to scoop her like an old and peckish little bird exhausted with a long flight, and give her comfort, like she used to give me when I was a boy. I want to tell her that everything will be fine, even when we both know it won't. I'd like to reassure her, but I don't know how. The time had bent us the opposite ways.