Like most kids, I learned and perfected English grammar in elementary school. Including the use of tenses.
I can easily say I had a sandwich for lunch or I went to the library yesterday.
So why is something so fundamentally simply so absolutely difficult when it comes to talking about loved ones we’ve lost?
I cringe when I say things like:
My mom used to call me everyday, my mom was so funny, my mom loved me..
Today on the phone with my grandmother I found great comfort and also great sadness in realizing she is having the same problem as me. She had said, “I think you’re more like me than your mother likes to think..” and their was an awkward pause as she quickly corrected herself by saying “liked to think.” We carried on our conversation without discussing it, but we both knew. We knew that when we make a mistake like that… When we refer to her as though she’s still here with us and then have to take it away simply by changing a letter, it’s like losing her all over again. Maybe not in it’s entirety, but it hurts just the same.
One letter, it’s as simple as changing an S to a D. But, it means so much more than just one letter would have you think. I went twenty one years referring to my mother in the present tense, twenty one years with having her by my side and it’s hard enough to have to grieve her loss than to have to talk about her in the past.
I learned in my cultural anthropology class the other day about some cultures that don’t have tenses. Not that they don’t perceive the past, they just don’t have specific tenses to dictate time.
I wish I was apart of a culture like that.
That I would never have even learned about stupid tenses.
And more importantly, I would never have to speak of my mother in the past.
