Homecoming.. in Musings

I feel like I’ve been living this life for a while now… I don’t think the pain of my mothers absence is going to subside and I just need to manage it better and come to the realization that it will never get better… I will never stop missing her and all I can do is remember her, commemorate her, live my life the way she raised me to be…

We arrived in Puerto Rico at 6 AM to Luis Muñoz Marin airport in San Juan… my siblings had already gotten there the day before I did, but they waited for me because I was carrying her ashes with me.

Liam is grabbing my suitcases and I’m really pale, sullen, I’ve lost close to 30 pounds of weight from this ugly depression…
I hear the soft murmurs of the coquis and the aching warmth of my mothers land… I am too tired to see or feel anything other than the impending thought of releasing her ashes into the ocean by the town she grew up in…

We got to Ponce by 8 AM… I kept throwing up bile and stopped several times…

Liam checks us into the hotel… we have a private driver for our stay, who said “don’t worry brother, just take him upstairs and I’ll be waiting for you guys when you get back”

I break down crying in the room, holding her urn. And Liam is scattered and unsure of what, when, why to say anything and he just drops to his knees and holds my face into his chest… he slides off my clothing, and detaches my hands off of the urn and showers me…

I am detached.
My brother comes into the room and lays next to me as I am curled up in a ball in my mourning clothing… “you look so handsome in all white baby brother” he said as he held me into his arms.
I start to cry and feel more vomit in my mouth, but I swallow.

I met all of our family by the beach… all dressed in white… all of them seeing how pathetic I looked… how emaciated I’ve become, how distraught and hideous this pain has physically affected me…

My sister gently pulled the urn away from my arms as she cried, my brother couldn’t contain his breath and sobbed on my shoulder.

I opened the urn. My sister pulled out the bag of our mothers remains. My brother dug a hole in the sand… I unfastened the bag…

We poured her ashes into the hole in the sand… and water started to come hungrily on the shore, wetting us 3… as we cried, watching her ashes return to her home…

From the ashes we are created, to the ashes we return…