I lost my Mom ten years ago today. The phone call woke me from a Sunday afternoon nap, and the moment I heard my Dad’s voice I knew nothing would ever be the same.

And it hasn’t been.

These people, these friends of ours, they are staring at me as if I’m a pharmacist. My drug of choice is music and for each of them I have a song, for every mood, for every moment, there is a song. See, these friends, they are power ballads, fugues, improvised drum solos, rhapsodies, electronica-enhanced remixes, and they're at that age, late twenties early thirties, when drugs become less a recreation and more a necessity.

She doesn’t expect him to jump up or anything, rush to her side, for God's sake; she knows that those days are over. She places her palms against the window and pushes with all her weight; another gust of wind slams against the other side of the glass. Not that he’d take advantage of this view of her.

“Look,” I said, staring at the dealer’s car-shaped name tag, “Doug. I’ll make this easy. I want you to sell me the biggest lemon on the lot.”

I was six, maybe seven, the first time I felt pain for another person. Not quite heartbreak, but something like it.

It was late in the year of the fog, first spring after 9/11, those days of ER visits, of endless Xanax and chain-smoking. The unemployed era, when I stared at a blinking cursor, hour after hour, blank-brained and absent, incapable of doing much of anything. 

Five years on and I grapple more with the month of January than I do her death. It’s PTSD, or something like it, and the very moment midnight hits on New Year’s Eve I expect all rights to go wrong: the ringing of every phone call is a death march, a soft cough is a collapsed lung, each honking horn the final beat, the final beep of the lifeline. 

This isn’t the story of how, at age 34 and two days into mourning the loss of my Mother, I found out I was half Jewish. Let’s stay on track, okay? This isn’t about that, not yet at least. It’s about the funeral.

The bell just rang and Frank’s fried eggs are up with Faye’s broccoli omelet. Marco watches you stumble, these old feet two steps slow.

Call me crazy, but have you noticed how men who drive Saabs always look like John Denver? It’s true. Look it up! Next time you see a Saab, you’ll see John. Even the women who drive Saabs manage to look like John Denver.

I cannot help how I’ll misrepresent this place to you. I’m afraid I know no other way. I’ll try, I will, but I’ll fail, as I always do, to explain why the closer we get to Cleveland the more awkward I’ll become. I’m ashamed of this shame, I am. Mine was a happy childhood- I was so well raised and loved that I’ll stop at nothing to provide to you the same. Yet the rising heaviness returns time and again, leaving me full of inexplicable and intense bitterness.

No matter the disappointment, no matter the ridicule & rage, you’ll thank me for what I pass to you – this losing record, that last second folly, the endless blooper reel that will be your life as a sports fan. You’ll have moments, no doubt, bursts of pure hatred. Heartbreak will become your most stable relationship.

I avoid sleep. I run from it as if it holds a knife because, in a way, it does. It’s where fears comingle with regrets, where failures meet insecurities. It’s where nostalgia lives, where my Mom dies over and over again, where all of life’s cruelty resides. It’s where I’m helpless to fight back. 

Play your life backwards as you would an old vinyl record & perhaps you’ll hear a hidden meaning. Premonitions. Timelines. Lost opportunities & endless regrets.

That moment, it changes you. Not like those other big events, a first kiss, that broken bone, a high school graduation, the ‘stay in bed for weeks’ breakup. This moment, it’s different. It sends you into shock and then destroys you, puts you to sleep and then haunts you harder. It shape shifts, fades in and out, but never leaves you. You’ll dream on a loop and wake up shaking. Terror is animate.

When mourning, everything stands still. Life stops- how could it not, for at least a little while, to regroup, take inventory before beginning again.

Let’s face it: we’re good. Four months in and we’ve got this parenthood gig down.

You’ve already heard the A-Side, the story of the sheltered Presbyterian-raised Midwestern boy who leaves behind his insulated world and moves from city to city, adept at avoiding conflict, at ease amongst strangers, and in search of anything and everything. You’ve memorized that story- if not this one then some variation.