Super heroes

SUPER HEROES INTRO I have always felt like my life started in that very moment. She was looking deep into my eyes, controlling her tears not to rush out of her crystal clear eyes and over her angelic face. She stood still and said nothing. I was crying "I'm sorry, mom!" as blood was pouring down my body out of every possible limb I had crashed. I felt nothing but regret. Regret that I had to see her crying. Little did I know that I would come to see that quite often, though she would gracefully try to hide it over the next 20 years. That's when it all started.

My life started on the 14th of June, 1994. Though I was born 8 years earlier.

Now when I look back, shredding down my reasoning to pieces, crashing down all rational, forgetting all the western learning, I've come to the conclusion that life is, indeed, a cycle. A different one we all witness and be a part of. It will never look the same, it will never feel the same, but if you open your heart widely, you'll see it coming. The end will always stitch back to its beginning.

As she was sitting on the hospital bed, taking her last breaths without knowing it, as she laid unconsciously with her face strained out of pain, I wouldn't be as strong as she was. I couldn't bare to see her in that state. She didn't deserve so much sufferance. She didn't deserve so many tubes sticking out of every centimeter of her tiny body. My tears would rush over my wreckage face, out of my blurry eyes and I looked nothing like she did 20 years before. I was not the super hero she had been all her life. In front of that death bed, I was the only mortal. Few hours later, she got her cape and flew away.

People don't talk about death, unless it's highly improbably they'll face it one way or another in the near future. You may talk freely at a young age, on a casual talk when all your friends are doing great, after a movie. But you won't talk to people who will face it, or who have someone close dying, or simply to someone ill. Most of these times, death is a silent topic of conversations.

Present in all your thoughts and all unspoken words. Something we would all want to talk about but are genuinely afraid of.

No one talks about what you will go through when someone close to you will die. Yet all of us would want to know. I think there is no precise story to this, no recipe for getting over. I'm not even sure you should get over, but you should move on. This is a book about losing my mom and everything that followed after that. All the things I've lost, all the things I remember, all that is right and never wrong. This is my story. I've written this to cure my soul and hopefully to help others find some peace. Sometimes, we find each other in the most remote stories ever told.

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Sometimes we don't.

CHAPTER 1 - THE STRENGHT They say you never know what you had until you lost it. You'd say when it comes to losing a dear one, this is just stating the obvious. You think you know what you are going to lose. No. You don't. I had to lose my mother to realize I would lose more than that, I would lose my strength.

How was it possible that I had been blind so many years and someone that seemed weak to me was actually the toughest person I had ever met? How did I miss that the strength I have within me, all of it, was hers?

It's been 40 days since she flew away and here I am. In Bali. In a one month holiday I booked months ago. Paid with my own money and work sweat. I'm getting tanned in December. I have all the reasons to feel strong about all I have accomplished up until know, yet I had never felt so weak.

In the last 40 days since she took off, I had contained myself from crying. It would have been the last thing she wanted. When I would cry, she would cry, we were interconnected. But I would continuously look back to the last days and rewind everything we've been through. Then expand the length to the past one year and a half. All the call waiting, all the waiting lists, all the medicine, the pain, the denial. All the ups, the downs, the gift of life given for a few hours and then taken back. All the faith gained and lost and gained again. All the hallways, the results, the hopes and giving up. All the medicine, the hunger, the vicious fight for survival. The competition and the envy over few centimeters of flesh that could save a life.

I would recall the last night before she went into the ICU. We walked along the hallway, it was the first walk after the surgery. She was determined to live. Nurses were mesmerized by her determination, pushing everyone away when they offered to help her walk. She just got out of a previous night spent in the ICU and wanted to live. She had started her day by looking at me in the eyes and telling me: "Honey, I don't think I'm getting out of here". Of course I had shushed her as I 2

always did and told her to man up and keep fighting. Cut. The next morning she was back in the ICU. Cut. Here I am. In the sunny Bali and I've decided she doesn't deserve to be remembered like this. On her late physical state. I would no longer recall the latest memories, but the ones who truly make her what I failed to recognize for so many years. My strength.

CHAPTER 2 - THE LOGIC OF ILLOGIC "Are you there?

I love you.

Thank you for everything."

No reply.

Out of 100 reasons for all the things that will happen to you the next days, 99 will be logical. Yet, you're going to believe the illogical one. It's ok. Let it be. It's not the mind playing tricks on you, it's the heart. You can't order your heart, that's the one thing you will never control. So surrender to it. Surrender to the one illogical reason that keeps you up at night, that keeps your light on, that gives you whatever it is the hope you're looking for.

The hospital my mom died in is the purgatory, the last mile. In a good year, possibly fifty percent make it out of there. I knew what we were up against, but I would never accept defeat. I couldn't. I wasn't structured to be defeated. Yet, I didn't know that sometimes accepting defeat doesn't mean you're going to be defeated. Sometimes we are going to win all batlles but we are still going to lose the war.

In the last days I knew that there was no way back. I had constantly repeated it in my head and to my family living in denial, as if she had 3

just caught a cold: "she was going to die and it's all going to be for the better." I was trying to train my brain to get ready. Over and over and over again. For a while it worked.

When I got the private number call from the ICU in the middle of the night, I felt as if a rock was lifted off my chest. It wasn't desperation, it wasn't denial, it wasn't acceptance, it was relief. She was no longer in pain and that was all I cared for. I was in a taxi, heading home, after I had just crashed one hour before on the carpet of a friend as if my heart stopped for a moment and I said out loud: "what am I doing here? My mom is dying and it feels like I chose to disconnect". I don't know if it was in that specific moment, but it was in that hour of the night when my mother went into cardiac arrest. 99 reasons to call it a coincidence, one reason to believe it's more than that. I believe the latter.

I didn't cry that night. I was extremely calm and it's a calm that would stay in me for a while. I knew I had to tell my father travelling that night to Bucharest, all the way from my home town. He wanted to get to see her. I decided to wait for him to arrive and tell him face to face. That kept me up all night. How do I get to tell him? Will I tell him when I pick him up? In the cab? On the stairs? Or how do I divert all conversations until we reach home? He came to see her, how will he not ask me the first thing when he sees me how she is? ... I decided to call my brother.

The conversation was quick and painfully silent. "It's over. Mom died" "..." "..." "O.K" "Good night" "Good night" When you've fought for someone's life and you lose the war, your heart won't accept it's over. So you're still going to be on a mission for rescue.

If you couldn't trade your life, you will trade your peace, your love, your well being for those close to you. You're on a mission, it's fine, let it be.

You can't just stop your soul from searching, your heart from fighting, your brain for hoping. Let it be. On that very moment, all I cared for was how do I tell my family she passed away. How do I make the call? What do I say, how do I say it? I'm fucked up as I am, how do I do this too?

Don't worry. Just say it. The words you use are pointless anyway. Just say it. Say it. And say it to yourself too. Somehow, someday, these words will come in handy.

They say doing something for 21 days sticks to you. I wasn't able to think of it for the past month. Even though I knew she died, after all I have seen her last, identified the body, knocked on all hospital doors to get her papers out on a weekend, bought her funeral clothes, picked the coffin, carried the coffin 600 km back home, arranged her fragile head in the coffin, fixed the chapel, greeted the family, untangled her feet and hands because they were tied together due to some fucked up tradition, closed the coffin, carried the cross and placed the last flowers at the 4

head of the tomb, even though there was no more room for a death reality strike, my mind couldn't get its way around that she's gone.

People tell me it's because I'm strong. I believe it's because I was still on a mission: I had to bring her home.

In the past month before she died, I got used to not being able to talk to her on the phone while she was in the hospital after her transplant. She was too weak to talk over the phone. So somehow I got used to the idea that even though she's not around, even though I can't see her or talk to her, she's in the hospital. There was always a destination I could point at: the hospital, the ICU, the surgery. And that somehow, the hospital on the other side of the city, that I have cursed until I'd been left out of cursing words, helped me out. Because as I was standing in front of the chapel, surrounded by people crying, I could always point to where my mother is: in the coffin, in the middle of the room, with her mother leaning down and crying, with my brother, with my father, with her friends who just came to pay her last tribute. There was always an answer to that question. That's probably exactly why I lost it when they've closed the coffin.

I had practiced repetition in my head with the things I didn't want to hear before she died. And somehow it paid off. But during the funeral, the one time no one can prepare you for during an entire life time, repetition failed on me. During the entire funeral, I had looked at her constantly and repeated in my head: "Look at her, it's the last time you are going to see her. It's the last time you are going to see her." And even though it seemed like it's working, this time repetition failed on me. All the mountain of strength I had carried on my shoulders crumbled and smashed into pieces when they closed the coffin to take her to the burial site. This is a pain I can't describe, it's a feeling I can't reproduce.

If there was one way to talk about it, I would say this is as close to insanity as you will ever get. You can taste its bitterness with every cell of your trashed body. You can't control it. Don't try to fight it, you will lose it. In this mountain of strength you have to be during the entire time, it's ok to crack when everything around is collapsing.

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