You are loud and I am quiet.

You are loud. Your ruckus love of life of the “buy a dog while your father is out of town” and paint the living room yellow or red variety, the volume of TV brought up to accommodate your lifelong hearing impairment, the way you yell when you argue and wail when you are sad, but especially, your devil-may-care attitude and your heavy-handed care. 

Loud, the lavish praise you heap onto my brother, attempting to solve your jealousy by instigating mine. 

“I can’t compete with an angel,” I hear you tell our father, of the mother that you could never be. It is easier to say I prefer him to you because my other mother is dead. Much harder to see that the loud life in you scares me. 

I am quiet. In the quiet of my bedroom, I sort coins for pleasure before I learn how to count them, make my bed, and organize a collection of sea glass by color. I want you to like me. I don’t know how to interpret your noise, except to say that the more you make, the less I should.

Will I be sent back? Is my mother really dead? How can I get to her?

My grief goes unspoken. I am quiet in my room, in our house, as I find corners of refuge from your loud want. A silent terror of abandonment, amidst your loud complaint that I don’t love you as much as you hoped.

I am loud and you are quiet. 

I am loud in my perfectionism, my need for control, my desire for love, my confusion about how and where I acquire all three. 

Loud, the teenaged way I dress, the makeup on my face, my insecurity. Loud, my disappointment in you, so loud that Dad calls me hysterical when I throw my candy-bar phone on the floor in a fit of rage, until I decide I will be good again, decide to quiet down. 

Am I living? Or am I just not dead?

Loud when, a few years later, I begin to walk with my heels and reclaim the ground I walk on. It is a gracelessness, born of inexperience. So loud that years from now, my neighbors will complain.

You are silent, silent as you listen, empty of words, a disease that has changed you from a bull-in-a-China-shop to someone dependent upon wheelchairs and catheters and iPads, typing into your tablet that you did the best you could. Silent about your relentless ambition, the conflict you one day admit this causes between what matters and what doesn’t over text messages sent in the middle of the night. Silent in your loyalty, silent when it comes time for apology. Silent with regret. Our silence binds us. 

You are loud and I am quiet. 

You are loud about your pain, which swallows years of too much and not nearly enough, but also gives us back to each other in ways I could have never known or expected. Loud, even as you no longer speak, even as you steeply decline. Months before you die, your eyes speak without sound, loud, loud, loud. It’s all I hear, even after you stop typing into your phone, even after you are gone.

I am quiet, quietly grieving a mother I have tangled feelings over. Feelings that snag in ways I am unprepared to explain when someone tells me they are sorry for my loss, that my mother was a complicated woman. Only you and I will ever know how complicated this loss is. I have never not known this mother grief. 

Now I watch my son, quietly, and wonder, what is a mother, anyway, but a gateway to life?