A mother's day

Today is Mother's Day. My stepbrother is dead.

It's a day for giving mothers obligatory, strained phone calls or taking them out to dinner or giving them that Hallmark card you scribbled your name inside. A day to clean the house for once or try to make a terrible breakfast with toast that's a little too burned or tea that's got too much sugar, too much love making the attempt more consumable than the actual drink itself.

My own mother has been up since morning, getting a big lunch ready since she knows we can't cook and it feeds her soul to feed our bellies. Her other little helpless one, our pup, she spent a few hours with by the vet because that's how it is for a mother: it never really ends. Not when there's a whole life completely dependent on yours.

The giving becomes an exchange. Symbiosis lets care become affection, and her life becomes dependent on yours too. Your heart is hers. It'll be the end of the world for her if anything happens to you.

So I don't know how my stepmother is dealing with this apocalypse.

Today her son should have woken up, maybe groggily slurred "Happy Mother's Day" and given her a kiss on the cheek. That's what should have happened. Instead she's got to find some sanity somewhere to put her little boy in a hole in the ground.

Because even though he's a man, he'll always be her little one. And he'll always be my brother.