By Claudette White, Contributor 
Contributed
MY MOTHER died nearly 40 years ago and I am still crying. In a life that has been touched by tragedy a few times, the death of my mother is the single greatest trauma that I have experienced so far.
Mine has been an endless grief, a palpable part of my existence that rises and wanes as it corresponds with other events in my life, but never leaving. For at least 30 years I ate, slept, walked and communed with a sorrow that was indescribable.
I cannot recall my mother's physical characteristics and no known photograph of her exists, so, as soon as I could connect the dots, I peppered family members with questions. Steeped in superstition and dread of the dead, my maternal relatives viewed my curiosity as abnormal: "A wah yu waan know dat fah? Yuh dream si har? Nuh worry yuhself bout it! Look how long she dead and gone!" My grandmother, too bitter to recognise what I needed, fearlessly pointed out those who had "set duppy and worked obeah" on her first child. In other words, I was still in the dark about my
mother.
I could never understand the relationships that existed between my friends and their mothers: those tensile bonds that were tested continually but never broken. I felt locked out. Robbed and cheated out of an experience that ought to have been mine as a matter of course, I was set apart from everybody else by my motherless status.
Yet, I never developed a relationship with a surrogate. Perhaps that was part of my problem. Maybe if I had allowed another woman to step into the breach, however inadequately, my despair would not have seemed so complete. In any case, I can remember only one or two overtures, which were quickly pulled back. I was too aggressive and intense, too hard to figure out, they said. But I truly didn't care. I needed my own mother. Special days like her birthday, mine, Christmas, the anniversary of her death, Mother's Day, became nightmares to which I submitted without a fight.
Time crept along. I wasn't healing. The void was becoming a canyon. I realised that I needed to know my mother in order to get a grasp of who I was. To understand me, it was necessary to know her. I retraced her life and discovered snippets nourishment to my hungry heart of her kindness, zeal for education, independence and ambition. Still it wasn't enough. I needed to know what part, how much, of me was attributable to her? Did I get from her some of my pronounced qualities love of laughter, loyalty, vindictiveness and the difficulty to forgive and forget? And what about the baffling moodiness did it come from her? I couldn't validate my existence without knowing my mother and she was out of reach.
I approached my father. If anybody else could, he ought to be able to fill some gaps. And, aware of how important it was to my emotional well-being to hear something anything from him about my mother, he said "I'll tell you later. I am busy now."
Later never came and in 1999 just before he died he told me that he had been and still was very offended that I had asked him to speak about my mother nearly three decades earlier. He had viewed it as a slap in the face to my stepmother who had raised me "as her own". Why did I want to ask about a woman I never knew, who died when I was little more than a baby? I cried openly.
Having nowhere else to look, I lost myself in literature and eventually found respite in Nancy Friday's My Mother, My Self.
Then one day I met the most self-less man a woman could ever dream of. Our connection was instant, helped along by the fact that he was warm, charming and very easy on the eyes. He was my alter ego, my pink diamond, and I knew I could should stop looking when he said that he too had lost his mother when he was a baby and that, "For the first time in my life, I have met somebody who
understands."
Ditto, I said, and stopped crying over my mother, at least for a while.
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