May 2 is the anniversary of my mother’s death.

You are dead three years now, and we are still fighting. You say it’s clear I could’ve made you an artist’s website. So why aren’t I? Dad has one, and instead, I’m just airing your secrets.

But you’d never have handled such a project. You’d have had to look at your past work and remember those feelings you’d had when you made it, those relationships, those places, eras, and life expectations. Digging in your painting racks, you’d have gotten dirty with the soot in the studio, covered with the dust that triggered your asthma. You’d have rescheduled with me and found something urgent for that day. Got the shredder going. Made important calls and sent e-mails. You couldn’t organize your life’s work any more than your life’s stuff.

Though, to be fair, there are signs of your higher functioning: the box of labeled slides, the archive submission to the National Museum of Women in the Arts (of later work, only, I notice). The will and power of attorney you managed just before diving backward with elaborate flips and twists straight into dementia’s deep end.

I’m sorry to be so direct. I’m sorry to sound so bitter. But I’m living a distorted life with you now and writing my way through it. Your journals have returned me to 1980, your most difficult year (fighting Dad in divorce court, struggling to afford your artist life). And 1973, your first full year of separation, when you began to go bankrupt on psychoanalysis. Yes, I read them. Because I’m writing.

People told me to burn sage in the loft after you died, and I said I’ve already cleaned out your runes, candles, astrological chart, the letter from your shrink in your sock drawer, the notepaper where you’d recorded your past lives. In later years, you’d invite me to Passover with Dotty Attie, and now I wish I’d gone, but I could not swing with your suddenly embracing the Judaism you’d always rejected.

I’m astounded that I’m still writing about this. That sometimes I feel like I’ve just begun. I’ve got an entire manuscript about you and Dad and us, and I’m still just getting started? But you were always a long slow burn in my person. Your love seared, and I do miss it. No one else gave birth to me and loved me like you did.

This week the weather turns warm. The buds appear on the maple trees, dark blood maroon red before unfurling a tender light green. I see how this time of hope and renewal has become, for me, the haunted season. The date of your death, then Mother’s Day, and a month later, your birthday. Last year I went through it and said, in disbelief, so this is every year now? A sensory reminder of all that life gives and takes away, sometimes simultaneously. Your little painted house construction, blooming inside, became suddenly mine, and it haunts me on the shelf next to your ashes.