Emptiness

I was told before even emptiness is a feeling. It is just the feeling of emptiness. A lack of feeling is also a feeling. It just is.

And I feel it strangely now, coming to the first week after mum passed away. Brother just asked me if I miss mum or think of her. To be honest, not much. I see her everyday in the living room, I prepare food for her (but admittedly, I've not been very diligent, but mostly bought take away, instead of cooking her favourite dishes for her as I should do...). I smile at her, smile when I see pictures of her. Even today, sorting throughout old photo albums and looking for pictures to use at the funeral, I could only smile and laugh at the clothes and hair-dos back then, smile and laugh at the days when I was young, when mum and dad were still mum and dad...

Brother says he thinks of mum when he's alone by himself. When he's not busy taking care of the baby or running around dealing with affairs, he thinks of mum... He wonders where mum is now... Whether mum met up with dad... How mum is doing... He thinks of her. He says he thinks of mum's body lying there in the icebox at the funeral home...

But I do not.

And I feel "guilty" for not feeling, for feeling as if her passing was a non-event. Why that is, I do not know, for she was so dear and so close to me. She was (almost) my everything and what I woke up to every morning for the past few months. When she hurt, I felt frustrated and hoped I could do something, anything to take away her pain... When she was moody, I was sad and agitated, and wondered what I did to make sad and wondered what I could do to cheer her up... When he passed away, I wished her happiness and peace, and other than that did not really feel any sense of loss... But lose someone so dear, so intimate, I certainly did. But I have yet to fully feel the effects of it...

It explains why I've not managed to sit down and write anything about that eventful day. It's been almost a week, and yet I feel this block. I so want to get the words and emotions out, but I can't, I don't know where or how to start. Start from the beginning? Start from the days before when she slowly stopped eating and began to sleep more and more with the morphine drips? Start from when she started to slowdown her rate of breathing...? How do I capture those final moments in words? All I can think of is one word: beautiful. But the details seem to be so vague, seem to be fading with each passing day...

There is this emptiness within. Not that I do not love mum or care about her. Because I know I do, and did, more than anyone else I've come across in my life. And I know she loved/loves me and cared/cares about me more than anyone else ever did (and perhaps ever will...?). Still, there is this emptiness within.

But emptiness is a feeling too.