When I was a kid, my mother was the strongest person I knew. I remember having the memory of never having seen her cry throughout my whole childhood (except for this one time when one friend of the family died). She was always so strong, I admired her deeply. I told her that a month or so before she passed away.

I used to be afraid of many things when I was a child. Ghosts, for example, terrified me. But sometimes I would be afraid of something that I was always too terrified of thinking: death. I would think about death. I would think about how would it be to not be alive anymore. I can’t explain it better, but the thought of being in eternal sleep and never waking up was the scariest sensation, and the OCD would make this type of thought not go away. So I would run to my mother’s room and ask her for me to sleep with her. She would never deny or complain, as she would tell me on her last years that she always loved to sleep with us. I would run to her room because I was scared of dying. Suddenly, lying with her, I couldn’t think about death or ghosts anymore. I could sleep peacefully.

When she died, my aunt told me that my mom “was the most scared person she ever met” when they were younger. She was scared of everything, from bus rides to job interviews to random men walking near her on a sidewalk. I always thought it was funny that when I got to meet her, she didn’t seem scared of anything. She seemed so brave that my foolish mind thought she could do something against a sudden ghost attack. But even though she had never cried while I was a child, I saw her cry once on a day that changed her life forever. From that day on, she would cry very regularly. She had found something she was actually afraid: death.

I heard her crying on the room next to mine, talking to my brother about her cancer diagnosis. She locked the room, but I could hear her cry while she whispered with him. She was afraid. I saw her being afraid for several years after that day. Knowing that you will die soon must be one of the most terrifying things someone must feel. But she told me some things before she passed away.

She told me that, just like in the MCR song that pains me so much to listen to, “the hardest part of this is leaving you”, referring to me and my siblings. And I knew she meant it. She would even later say to me that I was the one she was most worried about leaving because, since I was the youngest, she felt like I was the one who needed her the most. The one who would feel it the most, the one who just wasn’t prepared for it. For the world, for her death.

But when she said those things, I realize now something that she made very apparent. When she was scared about death, she would run to us, just like I ran to her when I was afraid of it too. And she would find the comfort in us she needed to try and accept the fact that her existence would be the way it was, short and poor. But it didn’t look like it mattered when we were together. When I used to make her laugh and she would say “only you can make me laugh now”.

When I feel particularly awful, I like to listen to “I Know It’s Over” by the Smiths, like most boring people my age.

But I have a particular attachment to it. The first time I listened to Morrissey sing “Oh, mother, I can feel the soil falling over my head” after my mother had died, I felt like a child again, trying to look for her to make me less scared about something that is haunting me. I have spent whole days listening to this song on loop after a heartbreak or some sudden lonely feeling. My heart was so heavy it could burst, and all I could think of was to look up above and tell her that I felt the soil falling over my head, and that she had to come help me.

Is that pathetic? Maybe so, since I’m becoming too old for this. There are so many things left unresolved in this mess of traumas.

I’ve always been attached to songs that have phrases where the singer repeats them over and over, increasing the loudness each time (Limousine by Brand New is the best example, since it does it with my favorite phrase on any song ever). And when Morrissey repeats it so much and practically screaming and begging at the end, I’m always so close to crying because the only arms that I want to sleep in have gone away forever.

For what does the dead live on the hairs of the living? For what does a fleeting moment of peace mean on the presence of forever? And can you ever be as peaceful as you were when there was an entity to which you could run to when you were too scared and they would make you feel safe? The time will come for when I’ll have to be that entity. Little old scared-cat me, being the pillar to repel the fears of an other. But when I do, will I need them to be my pillars too? How scared of the end will I be, and how will my fear scar my pillars? Will I haunt them with my love when I am gone, for I have terrified them when I protected them? After all this time, death has the face of my mother, and it is the only body I can run to when I feel too scared of it.