Ozzy Osborne

On How Watching Your Mother Die is Like Watching A Shakespeare Show

The queen and her blood.

Hermione and her statue.

An unnamed wife and her fever.

My mother only ever played villains.

Night after night she died on stage.

Night after night she pictured what she could not know would be.

The first time I watched my mother die I could not yet speak and my father held me close as

her body slumped to the ground and it was so loud and she stopped moving and the lights

did not come back up.

And in the impossible quiet of a dark theatre I had mistook my mother’s death for my own.

The second time I watched her die- as the blade slid so perfectly in between her ribs it seemed as if

a hole was carved into her specifically for opening night- my father said

“it’s only pretend,” but.

When I grew and I hugged her goodbye in that windy alley I touched the place in between her ribs

she had been stabbed all those years ago and my hand plunged through her chest and I could feel

how she was failing.

And when my hand came away clean I wondered how the prop department had managed that.

These days I cover myself in clay and ash and haunt the stages she once did die upon.

She remains there acting for an audience who is let in on the greatest secret of all time.

The dramatic irony of a mother’s death.

An aside to the audience, isn’t that what Shakespeare wanted?

I could not have possibly known she was dying until

her body slumped and the

lights did not come back up.

Then all of a sudden it was pervasive. Because hadn’t the theatre always smelled this way?

Of rotting wood and loss and the inevitable.

Theatregoers spill out onto the slick street, looking for a nightcap.

“How could she not have seen it coming?”

Orpheus, how could you have looked back?

Well. I was not in the audience.