In Memory of My Mother...

It's been two years since I lost my mother. It was a Thursday evening, and I had just finished screening the film Match Point for my Dostoevsky seminar, when the text messages began to come in. My aunt texted me the following words: "Hey I am so sorry. You need anything let me know", and the dread overtook me. I knew that something very bad must have happened, not just because of the tenor of the message, but also because my aunt very rarely texts me at all. Then I heard my wife pacing outside the classroom, and it was ultimately my wife who told me that she had passed. Two years later, and it's still such a strange feeling. The sense of loss and of absence - that sense of a hole in one's identity - never really goes away (or at least it hasn't for me yet); you just get more accustomed to it. 

                                               ‘…Je vous aime et vous souris d’où que je sois.’

                                      ‘… I love you and am smiling at you from wherever I am.’

                                                                    —Jacques Derrida