One week from today marks seven years since my mother died of pancreatic cancer. This winter, I have been struggling more than usual with the shadows and cold of the season, but it wasn’t until the middle of this week that it occurred to me that this phenomenon is linked to the above-mentioned anniversary.

Grief and emotions are strange things. The older I get, the more I realize that I’ve never really understood–much less mastered–them as deeply as I thought I did…

Come here, pretty please
Can you tell me where I am?
You, won’t you say something?
I need to get my bearings
I’m lost and the shadows keep on changing

And I’m haunted
By the lives that I have loved
And actions I have hated
I’m haunted
By the lives that wove the web
Inside my haunted head

Don’t cry, there’s always a way
Here in November
In this House Of Leaves we’ll pray
Please, I know it’s hard to believe
To see a perfect forest
Through so many splintered trees
You and me and these shadows keep on changing

And I’m haunted
By the lives that I have loved
And actions I have hated
I’m haunted
By the promises I’ve made
And others I have broken
I’m haunted
By the lives that wove the web
Inside my haunted head

Hallways…
Always…
I’ll always want you
I’ll always need you
I’ll always love you
And I will always miss you

Come here, no, I won’t say please
One more look at the ghost
Before I’m gonna make it leave
Come here, I’ve got the pieces here
Time to gather up the splinters
Build a casket for my tears

I’m haunted
(By the lives that I have loved)
I’m haun–I’m haunted
By the hallways in this tiny room
The echoes there of me and you
The voices that are carrying this tune…

–“Haunted,” by Poe (from the album of the same name)

I’m getting married in three months, and as the multitude of details surrounding this event are tended to–sending invitations, securing the venue, finding an officiant, etc–the pangs of awareness have increased in me, that neither of my parents lived long enough to see me marry, much less meet the man who I shall wed.

My mother always understood the value of my happiness. She supported my decision to drop out of college. When I left home and moved to Atlanta, she acknowledged after her first solo visit (when I exposed her full-throttle to my openly gay lifestyle) that I had done the right thing for myself to strike out and build my own life, even if it looked nothing like the one she or my father had imagined for me. She loved to go out to the clubs and bars with me. She loved drag shows. When I decided to move to San Francisco, she convinced my father (with help from my brother Doyle) to give me money to help me move.

She would have loved the man I’m marrying.

I was always a huge Mama’s boy; so much so that when I was starting sixth grade and had to get booster shots, my crying caused the nurse who administered the vaccinations to cluck that my mother needed to “wean that boy”. I remember asking my mother as we drove home what “wean” meant; she calmly explained that it was a reference to breastfeeding, but metaphorically meant that the nurse thought I was too dependent upon her.

That car ride and that conversation haunted my thoughts throughout the school year. I’d just started attending public school after spending my first six years of school in a private Lutheran academy. I was overweight, awkward, and already flamingly queer, which translated to daily and even hourly torment by my fellow students. Although I came home in tears nearly every day, I didn’t tell my mother why, more often than not. I didn’t want to be a little boy any more; I didn’t want to be a Mama’s boy.
It never occurred to me at that time how much my pushing away must have hurt her.

Nevertheless, she remained my most enthusiastic cheerleader as I developed from a prepubescent child into a strange, gangly teenager. Every year for Halloween, she would sew a full, professional-quality costume for me, based off of my sketches. She went head-to-head with faculty members of my High School whenever I was treated poorly. She defended my self-expression against the criticism of my Father. She helped me to do and to be all the things she was never allowed, and then when I moved away, her visits allowed her the freedom to do the same.

The last time she came to visit me in San Francisco was on SF Gay Pride weekend in 2007; that was the closing weekend of my adult “legit” stage debut. She was so proud that I had at last found my way to the musical stage, in spite of being a theater school dropout.

I rarely shared this thought with other people, but I had often told myself that, if I hadn’t made it onstage in New York City by the time I was 30, I should probably reconsider my theatrical ambitions. Yet in September of 2008–almost exactly one month shy of my 31st birthday–I found myself playing Captain Eddie in the original revival of Pearls Over Shanghai at the Bleecker Street Theater. I was a freshman member of The Thrillpeddlers, and the company was rounding out its very first “Ridiculous Revival” when the New York City HOWL festival invited us to bring our bill of shows to the East Village, along with the addition of an original Cockettes musical.

I will never forget sitting on the stage at The Hypnodrome with my castmates as Russell (the company’s founder and artistic director) announced that we were being paid to fly to New York City and perform. I cried. I think most of us did; as a performer, this is one of the most exciting opportunities one can receive.

I called my mom almost immediately. She was elated. She told me she wished she could fly to see me in New York…but at that point, she was already too weak from the cancer which would claim her life in a matter of months. Still, she lived to know that I fulfilled one of my ultimate dreams.

If you were here, I know that you would truly be amazed
At what’s become of what you made
If you were here, you would know how I treasured every day
How every single word you spoke
Echoes in me like a memory of hope

When you were here, you could not feel the value that I placed
On every look that crossed your face
When you were here, I did not know just how I had embraced
All that you hid behind your face
Could not hide from me, ’cause it hid in me too

Now that I’m here, I hear you
And wonder if maybe you can hear yourself
Ringing in me now that you’re somewhere else

‘Cause I hear your strange music gentle and true
Singing inside me with
The best parts of you
Now that I’m here

I hope somewhere you hear them too
Now that I’m here
I love you

–“If You Were Here,” by Poe (from the album Haunted)

I feel a tremendous amount of guilt around my mother’s death. The last few years of her life, I was not present for her the way I should have been. There’s one major reason for that, and it is a thing that fills me with remorse: I was addicted to crystal methamphetamine. That addiction spiraled out of control as her health declined and I tried to numb myself from the reality of losing her, and reached its first crescendo when, on the night of her death, I contracted HIV from a trick I had over while high. My addiction reached its second crescendo a few weeks after my 32nd birthday, when I was arrested in Long Beach, California for possession of narcotics.

Barely a year had passed between one of my life’s proudest moments, and one of its lowest ones.

As I sat in a holding cell in LA County Jail, looking through the bars at my own mugshot on a computer screen, I realized that I had spent the entire year punishing myself for her death, but where this had ultimately led me was the opposite of what she would have wanted. She was proud of me; she wanted me to be successful, and happy. I had hit rock bottom, and I was neither of those things.

Rebuilding my life took a lot of time and a lot of mistakes. It took a heavy effort and a lot of fumbling through the darkness.

It took a difficult process of trying to remember what my happiness looked like.

I wish my parents were alive to see me reach this milestone in my happiness, when I marry the man I love.

I wish I could forgive myself for failing to give my mother the love and attention she deserved.

Which brings me back to the present. Somehow I’d thought that, after seven years, the pain of this approaching, somber anniversary might be lessened; in fact, the opposite is true. Perhaps all of those feelings and thoughts that I tried chase away with rails of powder and clouds of chemical smoke are finally rushing back in to fill the spaces of my consciousness, now that my mind is clear and I’m at a place in my life where I can safely sit with those emotions. I think I’ve always known, somewhere in the back of my mind, that I couldn’t put off experiencing this forever…and in this cold, wet, dark season, I find myself being forced to simply sit with these thoughts: guilt. sadness. loss. absence.

I’m haunted.

That’s about all I can say about grief, right now.

I miss you, Mama.