I haven’t called my mother in six weeks.
Not because anything happened. That’s the part I can’t explain to anyone. Nothing happened. She’s fine. I’m fine. Six weeks just went by and I didn’t call and now it’s been long enough that calling feels like an event, something that requires a reason, and I don’t have a reason except that I miss her and I’m shit at saying that.
I am, apparently, shit at a lot of things that matter and excellent at things that don’t.
I can prepare a deck for a board meeting at 11pm on a Tuesday. I can hold it together when everything around me is falling apart. I can absorb an unfair situation without flinching. I have learned — over years, through repetition — to carry a lot without showing that I’m carrying it.
Nobody taught me to put it down.
That’s the thing they don’t tell you about strength. They show you how to lift. Nobody shows you how to rest. So you just keep lifting, and lifting, and eventually you stop being able to feel the weight because you’ve been carrying it so long it just feels like your body.
I have been carrying my mother’s mortality since I was in my thirties, when a doctor used the word chronic about something, and I drove home and didn’t say anything to anyone and just went to bed and lay there in the dark thinking about all the things I hadn’t said.
That was years ago.
I still haven’t said them.
Fuck.
There it is. The real thing. Not the board deck. Not the pressure. Not the performance.
The real thing is that I don’t know how to be a son in the time that’s left, and I’m burning it, week by week, in the currency of things that feel urgent and aren’t.
Marcus Aurelius wrote: “Perfection of character is this: to live each day as if it were your last, without frenzy, without apathy, without pretense.”
I have read that sentence fifty times. I have nodded at it. I have recommended it to people.
And then I didn’t call my mother.
This is not a piece with a resolution. There isn’t one yet.
What there is: I’m going to call her today. Not because I worked through something. Not because I’ve earned it or figured it out. Because six weeks is already too long and I know — with the same clarity I know anything — that there will be a last call, someday, and I will not know when I’m making it.
Seneca wrote that we act as if we have unlimited time. He meant it as a condemnation. I keep reading it as a description.
The weight doesn’t go away by not looking at it.
Call your mother.
