I’ve been awake since somewhere around 4am. I can’t be sure of exactly when I woke up because I refused to look at the clock; I thought by not looking I would go back to sleep but that did not work in my favor at all today. And then Emily woke up as Rob was leaving, that was around 5:15. At least she was in a good mood this morning, even as I discovered she had ripped apart the lining in her diaper and all of the little wet white pieces of who knows what fell out all over the carpet that I tried to vacuum up but I am pretty certain it’s still in there and will be for a long, long time. (At least it wasn’t poop, right?) Yeah, it’s been a fun day so far….
Being this tired, especially since I think on some small part I am still adjusting back to this time zone, just makes me a zombie and it makes me prone to emotional outbursts. I hit my foot with the door to the refrigerator this morning and it brought me to tears. There was something else this morning that almost made me cry – oh, I forgot my coffee at home. Both of those were worthy of tears and once I start these days, its hard to stop because there is always something I can cry about. Work is okay, home is okay, but there is all of this other stuff that isn’t – besides my foot and lack of caffeine. And those thoughts and images crop up on their own without exhaustion being a factor so on days like this, they seem to come fast and furious. Earlier this morning, I checked my pay-stub on line for something, and they keep a running account of what your time was charged to for the year on there. Right there, second line, was my bereavement time. 40 hours of bereavement. It’s hard to believe that it was almost three months ago that she died; it doesn’t feel like it. Three months sounds like it should feel much longer than it actually does. Three months is a quarter of the year, but it doesn’t feel like it. A quarter of my year has been spent mourning my mother’s passing, but it doesn’t feel like a quarter of my year has passed let alone that much time between now and the time she left us. It’s still really hard for me to say that she’s gone or that she died. There’s this part of my brain that still doesn’t believe that it’s real; this happened to me when my friend Donna died, too. She was killed in a car accident, so in a moment I went from knowing she was in this world and boom, she was gone from it. I would never hear her voice again, or her laugh, I would never see that weird thing that she did with her hand when she walked. And even though I was there when they lowered her casket into the ground, it still didn’t feel real; I still remember saying on the phone “Donna? Donna who?”, because there was no way it could have been her and there are some days that still feel that way. Maybe this is the way my brain is protecting me or maybe I’m just in denial. Let me tell you, denial (at times) ain’t so bad.
I know that things happen for a reason and people come into and out of your life for a reason. I really do believe that and I also believe that you may never know why something happened, or you may not know for a long time. And I think the only reason I can come up with is that it’s brought us closer to my dad, but that’s a pretty crappy way to have that happen. There are way better avenues than this one, I would imagine. Other than that, I have yet to figure out why it happened, when and how it did. I guess the how isn’t all that difficult – no one should really suffer through that fight if the end result will be the same, and maybe, in order to save my dad some grief and pain, we didn’t know until almost the end. He didn’t have to sit by and watch her go through surgery, treatments, more pain than she had already endured by the time it was over. He didn’t have to become more of a care-giver than he had already in the past month or so of her life. She didn’t have a very enjoyable or happy life overall, so maybe that’s why she was spared the ‘fight’. I just want it to make sense in some way, somehow. I need it to have a reason. I need to know that she is in a better place and that’s why she isn’t here. I need to know that she’s okay, that she’s happy, healthy, that she’s okay and it was the right time for her to go. I feel robbed. I feel robbed for myself and for my daughter. I need to feel like it had some meaning, some reason.
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