A woman with tattoos

She leaned over a faucet to pour water in a vase, the woman dressed in gray blue scrubs, a thin screen of ehu hair falling over her glasses. I asked if I could see the tattoos on her arm, take a picture of them (that came later). "Those are my children's names in Filipino," she said. Her other arm was inked, too. And she pulled her scrubs up a bit to show me a botanical drawing on her lower right side. "My 19 year old daughter made that; she's the one with talent. I can't even draw a stick figure!"

 

She was visiting her father's grave on the 25th anniversary of his death. Not by natural causes, she said. We both paused, then she said he'd been murdered with a gun. She'd asked for the day off but was denied by her manager, so she'd get to work late. When I noted that businesses are cruel, she said the owner was kind and family-oriented, but the manager had let things get to her head, and she'd hired someone else who'd done the same. She could have been manager, but work is her place to rest, and she didn't want more responsibilities, what with raising five children on her own. 

 

"I was the black sheep," she said. Her mother had survived her husband's death by focusing on the grandchild she had not long after, her oldest son. But they don't talk now. She goes to therapy, but her mother thinks she should have been fixed already. She knows her mother won't validate her, but it's hard. She knows her mother is suffering.

 

I told her some stories back, about my mother's refusal to grieve for my father; about the therapist who told me to stop trying to have a conversation with her; about trying to get my father's ashes out of Arlington, about my workplace. We hugged, and I told her I would be thinking of her. I am and I will be.