by Randy Vaughan

Created on: August 29, 2008

my mom never told me that she loved me

Like a setting in a Gothic horror novel, the bloated gray clouds race overhead, forced along by the howling winter wind. But the only ghosts lingering here among the cold marble monuments and barren trees are memories. And these rattle their tin cups against invisible bars deep inside my soul where I am their cellmate.

In life she kept an icy barrier between us and the freshly-packed dirt separating us now testifies that she has, at long last, found peace. Having lived within an invisible shell of stubborn self-reliance and now resting six-feet beneath me, the heavy chains and shackles of trying to have a relationship with me is something she's never known. But now she is free from even the illusion of such material bondage. I, like Sisyphus, must strain at the boulder of her memory.

A bitter gust blasts across the frozen mounds and crackly grass. I start to huddle within my coat, then stop. "Toughen up," I hear her saying. "Life can be pretty cruel sometimes." And she's just as correct in death as she was in life.

There was the time I tried out for, and made, the eighth-grade basketball team. I was the only kid to show up for every practice, and she took me to every game. Sitting alone in the bleachers she watched as I maintained my bench-warming vigil. Only twice did she get to see me play, and this was for a combined total of less than one minute divided between two games which we were winning by such a large margin that even I posed no serious liability to the "winning effort."

But knowing how my soul churned with the bitter taste of rejection, she never said a word, never put her arm around me and hugged me reassuringly, never lectured me about life's often unfair ways, never encouraged me to try harder in order to prove to the coach how wrong he was, never reached into her past to try to console me with her own childhood stories of heartbreak and dejection.

She knew something, my mom, about life, that it's a path you trod alone, and sometimes in great pain. No, she never tried to tell me everything was going to be all right. But my mom never lied to me, either.

There was the time I shot out my front tooth with my BB-gun. I was as proud of that rifle as a first-time parent. But when that tiny copper ball bounced off the beer can and split my front tooth almost perfectly in half, my mom, in her unique fashion, wasn't there for me.

I had raced through the front door, hand cupped tightly against my mouth in the futile effort

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