How?

I don’t understand why it doesn’t really feel like she’s gone.  She’s dead, I sat with her as she died.  I saw her face change color, I saw her last breath.  And still, it doesn’t feel like that was my mom.  She looked like an old invalid, (they had taken out her dentures when they put the tube in so her lips were all caved in as she breathed, and her mouth was wide open so it just didn’t look like my mom) who had reached her final days and I felt like a hospital worker that was there to be with someone in their final hours because there was no one else to sit with them.  I didn’t feel like I was watching my mom die.  And I still don’t sometimes.  I stood in front of her spot in the mausoleum and cried because it just didn’t feel real.  How could I have been standing there, looking at my mom’s name up on a wall, where I saw them put her casket that held her body?  How could I have stood next to her casket and said goodbye to her?  How could I have gone to her wake and cried, watched my dad and my sister cry, as we all said goodbye to her?  How is it that I walked into a church and saw the faces of my best friends, as they sat in the back and cried with me as I tried to grasp how this all was real?  How could Rob have stood by me the way that he did, physically and emotionally, and continues to do so because my mom is dead?  I so vividly remember leaning over, with my mouth covered by a tissue, crying uncontrollably when they played the Irish hymn in church and him rubbing my back (my sister and I picked it out on purpose, knowing that she would have loved it but I knew it would break me into pieces which exactly what it did).  And standing at the casket, in the middle of the church, trying so very hard to not cry my eyes out in front of everyone, with his hands on my shoulders.  How did all of this happen?  One of my mom’s best friends reaching out and holding my hand at the end of the aisle, in some effort to give me comfort as I said goodbye to my mother.  As I remember it, it seems so horribly real and painful. 

 

 

There’s a part of me that wants to go through my mother’s things and just get it over with, but there is another part of me that knows once that process starts it will break my heart into even smaller pieces – if that’s possible – because it will be real.  Her things in my house make it real.  Even now, it’s what makes it real.  The day to day doesn’t do it, but it’s her plastic containers that I won’t bring back to her and it’s her coffee creamer that she never got to use and it’s the lemons that were in the drawer of the fridge that she never got to use.  That’s what makes it real for me.  It’s the things that used to be hers but are now mine and that is just too much for my brain to take some days.  How will I do it when it’s not just lemons and containers but jewelry and teddy bears and actual things that I remember her having and using and wearing.  I don’t remember, typically, that her bag from the hospital is in my closet at home.  I try not to think about it.  And I don’t think about the pictures that I gave to the funeral home to use that day because I know I should look at them, but I can’t.

 

Before this happened, I can remember thinking to myself – how do people do it?  How do they do all of the things that they need to do when someone so close to them dies.  My best friend’s father died just two months before my mom and I remember thinking that these things come in threes…please don’t let me be number two.  And I was.  I didn’t know how he did it; his father died very suddenly so they had no time at all to process what had happened.  Maybe that was for the best.  I think even then, before I knew for sure that she was sick, I knew that it would be her.  I don’t know how I got through those days at the hospital, knowing that she would be gone at any time, feeling on some level that she already was, and then once she was going through and doing all of the things that I did. Calling the funeral home, picking out flowers, telling my friends, my family, picking out something to wear.  And amid all of that, making sure Emily went to school and had food and had her clothes match each day at school.  Making sure that my dad was okay, my sister was okay, we all knew where to be and when.  Getting pictures together.  Holding myself together. There are still days that I wonder how I do it; I don’t know.  I’ve been told that I’m strong and I’m one of the strongest people that some others know; but I don’t feel that way very often.

 

I threw her lemons out the other night.  They were very old – probably were bought at the end of December – and they needed to be thrown out.  Rob said he was going to do it, but didn’t think he should and he just waited for me to do it.  I get it.  They weren’t just some lemons that we bought to add to the chicken we were having that night.  They were my mom’s.  My dad bought them for her before she went into the hospital and she never got to use them.  So they became mine.  Ours.  And we used a few, but there were at least four left in the drawer.  I opened the drawer a few times, meaning to throw them out, but I closed the drawer because I couldn’t do it.  I couldn’t throw away my mother’s lemons.  How did I get to the point where I was this person, holding onto old and wilted lemons because they were my dead mom’s and lemons make me think of her.  She always had them in the house so she could put them into her iced tea.  She used to sit in the corner of our old living room, on the love seat, with a big glass of iced tea with a lemon in it, and she would smoke and read and watch TV. That was it.  That was her life for many years. So many nights I would sit on the couch, right by her, doing my homework as she watched Wheel of Fortune or Jeopardy.  I hadn't thought of those times until recently.  Just now, actually.

 

Sometimes I hate the memories and I wish they would stop coming in, especially at unexpected moments when I’m not doing anything even remotely related to her or to my grief for her.  Sad songs have become sadder, even if they have nothing to do with dead moms.  Rainy days have become more depressing; snow days make me sad because they remind me of just how much it snowed that first night she was in the hospital and how I left before her dinner came and my sister stayed because I didn’t want to drive home in more snow than I already was going to have to drive in.  Sunny days seem to make me sad sometimes because she isn’t here for them.  Anything can make me sad because she’s not here and I hope that changes.  I’m so very tired of being sad.  I’ve been sad since that day at the doctor’s office, right before Christmas.  She walked in the door and I knew.  I knew it was cancer and I knew it was bad.  Maybe I’m a pessimist, maybe I’m just a realist.  But I know cancer when I see it and I knew it was cancer that day, and I knew her time was getting cut short.  I had hoped for at least a few months, we had 19 days from that date until she died.  Not even three full weeks.  And in that time, I did research on hospitals and oncologists and treatments and it did nothing for her.  It didn’t save her and it didn’t even give her more time.  That makes me sad, too.  I couldn’t save her.  Nothing I did saved her.  Nothing I did made it any better for her.  That sucks.

 

It’s a very strange feeling to only have a dad.  Not that I was very close to my mom; my sister had a better relationship with her than I did. But when she died, she was still my mother and there is still this gap or hole that will never be filled again.  It’s very strange to say things like “my dad’s house” or “my dad lives….”.  It’s my dad’s house now, not my parents’ house.  I call my dad, not my parents.  It’s my dad that is here, and my mom who is not.  My father is not in the best of health and everyone, I think including him, assumed he would be the one to go first.  Which I think is part of what makes him sad; he thought he would go first and he wouldn’t have to mourn her.