[€uroMeinke]

It was an obligation. You know what obligations are – those things you never really want to do, but feel you have to do just the same. Sometimes they’re the things you do because its “the right thing to do” and while you should want to do those things, you never really do.

My mother’s become one of those obligations, though I’m not sure how. Mind you, I love my mom, and she’s still healthy, living on her own. There was a time when every visit was filled with delightful tales of her immigrant past. I loved to listen to her stories and loved to bring people to listen to them. I’m not sure why that changed.

Perhaps I’ve heard all the stories and have grown bored with their retelling. Perhaps it’s because she’s abandoned those stories and replaced them with stories about her cat. Perhaps it’s because my mother has seemed to stop living with purpose, and has turned instead to waiting to die.

So the guilt sets in. Is it my fault? If I called or visited more often would it make a difference in her life? The Obligation grows – and I wonder when I last talked to her, last week? Oh, maybe last month? She told me about going shopping, the sex lives of my nieces, the latest antics of her cat, as well as the cats of my sister, my cousin, and aunt who live in Switzerland. Then I feigned interest while surfing the internet. “uh-huh,” I said - repeatedly.

I should feel guilty, as well as shame for even confessing this. Yet it’s still an obligation. Dinner, on a day that isn’t even Mother’s Day. I’ll go even though I don’t want to. I’ll go because it’s the right things to do. I’ll go because maybe it will make a difference in her life, so she can stop the business of dieing. But it remains, an obligation.