Milk

Written sometime in 2021.

The whiteness of the liquid had the sell-by date stamped onto the clear, plastic container. I always looked at the dates because milk spoils so quickly. I could rarely finish a half gallon before the sour set in.

The tall letters and numbers read a sell by date in the first week of March. I paused in the aisle and couldn’t decide if I should take the container. How could something as perishable as milk likely last longer than my mother.  

I was hanging onto the end of February with all my might.

Time expanded although only seconds passed. Should I take the milk? Would it change anything if I rejected that date and that white liquid? Would it then not be a witness to the fragile nature of life? If I left it and shut the glass door would it somehow put off the now-inevitable moment of losing my mom?

 It wouldn’t. It couldn’t.

Just minutes before, on my way into the grocery store, an employee smiled at me and asked how I was.

“Good,” I replied without thinking.

It was an automatic response that I knew he wanted to hear. But, I wasn’t good. I wasn’t okay at all. Shards of grief were lodged in my soul, digging deeper and deeper each moment of every day. I was exhausted, and my body was barely functioning. But, he didn’t want to hear that. He wasn’t really asking how I was anyway.  He was just acting as normal people do. The rituals and patterns we create that support our reality. We go to the store for food on a regular basis. We greet people with hello’s, and how are you’s. We go home and live our lives, eat our food, and then we repeat. We repeat the smallest of things so many times that they become background to everything else that happens. I looked at all the people around me, and I wondered how they could be moving through the day in such normalcy. I searched to see if anyone had exhaustion in their face or in their movements. Was anyone so broken as me? Could they see my brokenness?

I didn’t know how long we had, but it was looking more like days and not weeks, definitely not as long as the milk. The thing that always spoiled would still be there and she would not be.

She died days later. The milk lasted another week and a half.

Being with my mom, talking to her, emailing her, and just knowing she was there had been the background of my life. She never felt perishable. She was always there.

Then, one day, she wasn’t.