*Sigh*

I’m having a hard time figuring out what’s up with me today. it’s not a ‘bad’ day, per se, but I know it’s not a good one either.  And I can’t explain it.  I’m not weeping, and I’m not being a total byatch to people, so I have no idea what’s up but I’m not happy.  Just not.  I had a dream about my boss, it was weird – we were planning an event at a hotel that she had stayed at and I think it was the hotel she stayed at when her father was sick, which makes no sense because she’s in Italy and I work in America. But that’s how my brain set it up for me last night.  No idea what, if any, significance that has.

I’m just not very motivated today to do much and I’m a little down.  No exact reason, I guess, just a little down.  I guess the passing of time, and having everything be renewed on some level because of what’s going on with my boss has affected me and I’m just down about it.  I wish that I didn’t relate to her right now in this way, but I do.  I work for a fairly small branch of our company – around 100 people work in this office – and we’ve had five deaths of family members so far this year.  That’s a lot in my book.  One was a sibling, the rest were parents.  And no matter how old you are, or how old they are, it’s still sad and it still changes your life.  If I was 10 I’m sure that this would feel differently, but at 40 it isn’t a picnic either.  It’s not that I need my mom to be here; I never really ‘needed’ her or felt like I did, and that’s just the outcome to how I was raised.  But I need to feel like she’s here, and I don’t. I feel a void, I feel that she’s gone, and that’s something I struggle with every day.  Some days I ignore it, some days I push it to the side, some days it slaps me in the head.  Today, I’m not sure what it is but I’m just a little down. I wore what I like to call my ‘happy’ shoes today; they are red patent leather pumps that I bought with the gift card my parents gave me for Christmas last year. I knew that I was going to have a rough road ahead, so I went out the weekend between Christmas and New Year’s and bought these shoes.  I bought them because they made me happy and I needed something to make me happy; when I look at them today, they make me happy but they also make me sigh a bit because they represent a very tough time, a time that became harder than it already was very quickly, and they are also the last gift my mom gave me.  I hope to one day look down at them and smile, thinking that she would have loved them had she seen them, but today I look down and just sigh.

20 weeks

Today I realized that this Saturday will be 20 weeks – 5 months – since my mom passed away.  It doesn’t feel like 20 weeks; 20 is such a big number and we’re getting closer to the 6 month mark which is also very strange.  My boss’s father passed away on Friday; unfortunately it happened before she was able to get there.  When she gets back, if she wants to talk, I’ll be honest with her. This journey sucks and there will be days when you want to scream, there will be days when you want to cry, there will be days when you want to be alone because you can barely stand yourself.  But she should, hopefully at some point, be happy that she didn’t sit by his bedside and watch him deteriorate like I had to with my mom. She didn’t have to help make the decision to pull the plug, as it were.  He died without her and her siblings, which I can only imagine will haunt each of them in a special way for the rest of their days, but at some point I hope they find solace in the fact that their mother was there and that he went peacefully even if it wasn’t with them present.  

It’s never easy to lose someone that you love – be it a partner, a parent, a child or a friend – they leave a hole in your life that will never be full again.  But in time, that hole doesn’t seem as dark or as bottom-less.  There are days when you’d like to toss yourself into that hole, or whoever is around you that’s annoying you/speaking to you/breathing in your vicinity; those are the hard days.  But they do become fewer as time passes, which is good.  Or at least that’s what I’ve heard.

Visiting

I realized yesterday that the thought "I'm going to visit my mom" has very different meaning now than it did, say, four or five months ago.  Last year it meant I was getting in the car and driving south about 30 minutes to a gated retirement community, pulling up to a house, ringing a doorbell, sitting on a couch or at the kitchen table.  Now, it means driving about the same distance but north, pulling through the always open gates of a cemetery, parking in front of a building that houses who knows how many people, and standing in front of a granite or marble wall that has her name and date of birth and death on it.  I can't hear her voice, or share a cup of coffee with her, or hear her talk about whatever movie or event they went to (or didn't go to but she wanted to go to) at the community club house.

I go to the cemetery because I have no where else to go.  I don't know where she is anymore and I miss her, I want to talk to her, but I don't know where she is so I go there.  I stand in front of where she's interred, and I cry, hoping that no one else will enter the building as my cries echo through the hall.  Yesterday I meandered a bit, as I know she would have, looking at the flowers and the names, some of them new.  There was one that stood out - it had at least one, if not two, adults interred and then at the bottom (with no dates) it said "Baby Stephen".  God, what a punch to the gut that was.  For a moment I thought - yeah, this sucks for me but it sucks a hell of a lot more for that baby's family to come here.  And its true; there's always someone worse off than you and it's hard to remember that when you're visiting your mom at the cemetery.

Carrying too much

As I debate over what I should or should not do this weekend, I try to prioritize my tasks.  I need to join a gym – seriously, I must do this because I have gained weight since my Mom died (I never met a cookie I didn’t like and I really liked them the last few months) and I don’t like how I look or feel so I need to pick one of the two that are by my house to give my cash to.  I need to run to Target – not literally, I don’t run (see task number 1 for more info on that).  And I’m debating on going to the cemetery.  My sister and my dad went on Mother’s Day and I feel like I should go.  I know that she wouldn’t want me to go because I felt like I had to; no, wait, I don’t think she would care because she would expect me to go. I don’t know. I know that’s not where she is, but I don’t know where it is that she’s currently hanging out so that’s the closest I have to a place where I feel like I can visit her.  And I  miss my mom.  I miss seeing her and I miss feeling like she’s here so maybe if I go there, I’ll feel some….I don’t know….solace, maybe.

Juggling all of this is hard, I don’t know how other people do this.  I work full-time at a very demanding and sometimes insanely stressful job.  I have a 2 year old that is very demanding and sometimes very stressful, especially when she’s not sleeping through the night or throwing a tantrum every 5 minutes.  I have a boyfriend who is also – you guessed it – demanding, stressful, yada yada.  I have an elderly father who is not in the best of health who I worry about every single day since my mom passed (it was every OTHER day before that).  I have an older sister who doesn’t take the best care of herself at almost 50 years old, who – it seems – represses how she feels about my mom being gone because she never brings it up.  I have a vacation coming up to plan for, a 2 year old’s birthday to plan for (yeah that kid is getting a BBQ in the yard and some cupcakes). I  have laundry to do, cleaning to do, an old cat to clean up after, a car that needs new tires (all 4 – yippee!), misc aches and pains from a car accident 3 years ago that will haunt me until I die, a boss whose father is dying and may be dead as I type this, more work than one person can handle at my paying job and somehow I am supposed to manage my grief, too.  Just fit that in between all the other stuff, I suppose.  When in all reality, everything else gets squeezed into whatever spots aren’t taken over by grief, not the other way around.  I am thankful for the days when I’m not obsessively trolling the internet for every ounce of information that will just fire me up even more; I am thankful for the days that don’t start and end with a big crying session in my bathroom.  I am thankful for the days when I can laugh and not feel guilty; I am thankful for any day when I don’t feel any guilt at all – those can be rare at times.  I carry a good amount of guilt for how things went with my mom and there are times when I just want to kick myself in the ass for so very many things.  Women are built to be good multi-taskers but sometimes, I think the great creator had it wrong, or at least overestimated our abilities because really…look at that list!!  I have too much, I don’t care what anyone – divine or otherwise – says.  Yes, I have a uterus but that doesn’t mean I can carry the world’s problems and my grief in it.  It’s a womb, not a deluxe set of Louie Vitton luggage that comes with its own personal valet, thank you very much

Watching someone else's journey

When the end of someone’s life comes quickly, unexpectedly, it hits you hard.  Even if you know that it’s coming, you are never really ready for it.  I knew my mom was dying but once it happened, or once I knew it was happening, I knew that I wasn’t ready yet.  I knew it was the right thing to do and to happen; if she had lived – well, she wouldn’t have so it’s a moot point really; they couldn’t take her off of the vent and when they did, she lived for an hour and a half, that’s it (although it was much longer than they predicted…I still remember the nurse saying “we don’t think this will go on for very long”).  She couldn’t have ‘lived’ on a respirator, at least not for much longer; they said that if we didn’t turn off the machines she could go on her own at any time.  So I knew it was coming, but as practical and as realistic as I was, I still wasn’t really ready for it.

My boss’s father is at the end of his life, and its come rather suddenly and unexpectedly.  She was supposed to go to Italy a week ago because he was critical, but he started to respond to treatments, started to improve a bit, so she and her sister were going out on Saturday and there was even talk about what the plan would be when he was sent home.  But last night, he took a turn for the worse and now she has to get on a plane tomorrow morning and hope that she gets there before he dies.  My situation was horrible, and I don’t mean to compare but holy shit does it suck to be her right now.  My mom was in the hospital right down the road from my office, so if something had happened I could have gotten in my car and been there in five minutes; when she went into respiratory failure I was at home, which was only 15 or 20 minutes away.  My boss has to get on a plane for hours to get to Italy from New Jersey.  And during that time that she’s in the air, she can’t move any faster, can’t get out and run if she has to and he may pass away without her there.  I can’t imagine what she is going through; when I saw her this morning – she came in just to tie up a few loose ends – as she spoke she started to tear up and her voice started to crack just talking about when she was leaving and who was going with her.  My heart goes out to her, and on some level, it makes me grateful for how things with my mom played out.  Rob and I had gotten very close to moving to Georgia last year in the fall; he was offered two positions within his company and we were thisclose to leaving and I am so happy that we didn’t.  I would have been getting on a plane, I would have been getting phone calls instead of looking at a doctor face to face and I might have missed the opportunity to spend time with my mom before we had to let her go.  I got to see her lucid and alert, being snarky and as rude as she could be with a tube down her throat.  It’s not the best memory but at least I have that.  At least I got to say good-bye and hold her hand at the end, even if she didn’t know it was me.

Just rolling with it

Not a day goes by that I don’t think about her in one way, shape or form.  Whether its about how proud she would be that Emily is potty training, how much she would LOVE hearing Emily say “hi” or how she would make some sort of jab about my dad and/or their marriage on the eve of their anniversary.  There’s always something and today, it’s a lot of different things.  Thankfully, nothing that makes me cry – at least so far (knocking on wooden-esque desk).  Some days I think I’m just too involved with my own stuff to cry, which is a little sad and self-involved if you ask me.  And it reminds me of how “busy” I was to not notice that her situation was a lot worse off than anyone thought it was, and I didn’t force her to go to the doctor sooner; I was always calling her out on her stuff, telling her to go to a doctor and making her go but this time, I didn’t do it until it was way too late.  I live with that fact every single day, not a fun fact to live with.  Maybe if I had pushed her to go sooner, or if I had gone to an appointment earlier than the one where we heard there was a tumor on her kidney, maybe she’d still be here.

And then I try to remember that if she was still here, there is a good chance she would be sick and tired and just miserable.  Treatments, surgeries, experimental drugs and immunotherapies would have made her just miserable.   And that’s not living.  If she was here, she might be confined to a bed or so tired that she could never get out of bed except for the bare necessities.  I didn’t want that then and I don’t want that now.  I want her to be here, but not like that.  I think that would be worse than what it was in January, which was pretty damn horrible.

I am grateful for days like today when I can think of her and not cry, not be so sad that I want to crawl under my desk and bawl my eyes out. These are decent days and have become more frequent lately.  The only problem is that, when a bad day does hit, it hits even harder because they aren’t the norm so I’m just not ready for it to fly in out of nowhere and land square in the middle of my day, of my life.  Yesterday I wasn’t prepared at all; the morning was going well, I had fun with Emily before taking her to school, she was happy to go to school, things were great. And then it all went to hell in a moment and never really rebounded.  That’s the thing with bad days – they last the whole day, sometimes more but I never know.  I know that I need to just go with the flow, which is hard when you’re a gigantic control freak like me, and I do my best but some days my best is nowhere good enough to withstand the waves of sadness that pound on me over and over throughout the day.  I don’t know how other people do it but I know that on my bad days, I struggle to be at work and actually get anything done. Which sucks and isn’t good; I’m lucky that right now I’m not so insanely busy that I can’t slack a bit from time to time, but if this was a different time (like it will be in a few weeks) I’m not sure how to handle it.  I guess I’ll just have to go with the flow, right?

It's okay to cry

Ugh I feel like such an asshole this morning.  I really do.  When Emily was still in the infant room at school, the head teacher – and one of our favorites – fell in the parking lot and hurt her back to the point that she was out of work from around October or November until today.  she’s a lovely woman; sometimes a little ‘know it all’ about the kids but overall very sweet and kind.  She always had positive things to say about our daughter, was always very supportive and thoughtful and she was always so excited when Emily did something new whether it was walking, talking, helping with projects, anything at all. 

Today she came back.  She was in Emily’s classroom when we got there. She hugged us, she kissed us both and said how much she missed us.  and then put her hand on my arm and said “I am so sorry for your loss”.  She remembered.  My mom has been gone for four months and she remembered.  I said thank you, it was very fast and very hard – the entire time trying my best to not let my eyes fill up with tears.  And as she looked at me and said sorry again and rubbed my arm again, I could see that she saw the tears in my eyes.  I’m sure she would have seen them no matter what – Ms. Nadia is very astute. And since then, I can’t seem to stop crying.  I don’t know if it’s the fact that she remembered, or that it’s been a while since I’ve heard someone say it, but something has tripped it and I can’t seem to stop it.  so here I sit, at my desk with tears in my eyes for the umpteenth time in four months.  My parent’s anniversary, or what would have been their anniversary, is this Wednesday.  59 years it would have been, and she’s not here for it.  I thought I would be crying over that, not condolences that are four months old.  But I guess the age doesn’t matter, it’s the sincerity and caring behind those words.

It’s amazing to me that words like that touch me so much and turn my day on its ear, as they say.  Just now I glanced at the clock and saw “11:11”, at which time you’re supposed to make a wish.  I said (out loud, with my office door closed) “I want to hear from my mom, that’s all I wish for is to know that she’s okay.”  I wish for it all the time and I hope that day will come soon.

I will say this – there was a bright side to this morning.  Seeing Ms. Nadia talk to Emily’s current teachers made me proud.  She said “you have to watch out for this one, she is SMART, she always has been very smart and she watches EVERYTHING”.  Makes me proud to know that my kid was one that stood out in the crowd as being smart and observant; makes me proud to be her mom and makes me wish even harder that my mom was here to see her.  She would be the proud, beaming Grandma who would say “of course she is, look who her grandmother is” when told how smart her little girl is.

Not Today

I was the girl crying in the kid’s section of the local Barnes & Nobel today, in case you were wondering.  Yeah, the one that left with tears in her eyes and sniffling up the running snot into her nose so it wouldn’t pour onto her lip. That was me.  and what caused it?  a book that I saw called “Grandma Loves You”.  I was innocently meandering the children’s section after I bought myself a nice coffee, looking for new books that I could get for my daughter and there it was.  And I cried.  I saw it and I don’t even remember what I thought but I know that I would have thought about buying that for my mom to read to Emily, and now I can’t.  Yes, she has another Grandma who loves her very much – that woman adores my daughter – but still.  I saw it and it made me think of my mom who is no longer here and I spontaneously cried; if she’s somewhere, I know she still loves my daughter, but she’s not here anymore and that part sucks.

I don’t expect sympathy, or empathy – whatever the right term is – I don’t cry in the middle of a book store for reaction purposes, that’s for sure.  It’s just like when my friend died five years ago.  I cried in Target when I saw her favorite cookies. I cried at a convenience store as I was waiting for a sandwich because I saw something about chicken with honey mustard sauce, which she used to get extra of when we went out to a diner.  The little things that she loved, the little details that I remember, that’s what makes me cry.  When I see those cookies now, sometimes I pause and look at them, and think to myself “I miss you man” and I move on; there are days that I linger a little too long in front of the bags of Milano cookies and I probably look a little strange as I stand there and smile at them.  And I know that will happen one day with the things I see that remind me of my mom.  But for now, I remain that girl that cries in the book store, the food store, the movies, the Target, her desk, her car and everywhere else in between.  One day it will be better, it will get easier, but today is not that day.

It wasn't THAT bad

Mother’s Day didn’t suck as hard-core as I thought it was going to, which was nice.  We kept busy, which I think made a big difference.  Yesterday was also the 4^th month ‘anniversary’ of my mom’s passing.  I didn’t realize it until I was at my Dad’s house, picking up a CD of pictures from the funeral home, and I looked at the calendar.  That made me feel pretty shitty.  How could I let it pass me by and not realize it?  I guess it’s a sign of progress but at the same time, I really wanted to kick my own ass for that.  I’m sure my Dad knew and my sister knew, why didn’t i?  I thought I would never forget it but I didn’t know the date, I guess I didn’t really want to.

I thought a lot about the women that are missing their mothers on Mother’s Day. It’s not that I didn’t; I miss her every day.  But we didn’t have a ritual or a custom of doing something specific that day.  She didn’t cook – that was a no-no in her book.  So we might have gone out to dinner; although now that I think about it, my dad would have taken her out to brunch.  She loved brunch.  So he would have done that and then the rest of us would have gone over in the afternoon to hear all about the food at the brunch, the people at the brunch and what they wore, the unruly children at the brunch, the service and what they wore and what they said, and to give her some gifts.  I would have sent her flowers from Emily, but I don’t know what I would have gotten her.  Jewelry was always an easy gift for her; I bought her a shamrock necklace for Christmas that had small diamonds in it (I had initially bought her a locket but then remembered, as I walked out of the store, that I had already bought her one for Mother’s Day – she was buried with that locket).  I guess that will end up being mine once we start going through her things.

I feel bad for the women out there, in my social circle and beyond, that truly and deeply missed their moms yesterday.  For those families that surrounded that woman with love and joy on that day, for those families that had real rituals – breakfast in bed, hand-made cards, Mom’s favorite TV shows and favorite activities all day long with Mom’s favorite dinner at the end of the day – yesterday must have been horrible.  I know a number of my friends posted about missing their moms yesterday and how hard that day is annually.  Every day is hard for me, at least on some level, and I know it gets easier but right now, it’s hard to see the ‘easier’.  I don’t know where it is or where it begins and there’s a small part of me that doesn’t want it to start because that will mean that time has passed and the memories have faded and she has faded farther into the past.  That idea makes me sad.  I know that my brain is trying to protect me, which is why I can’t see her in my mind and I have a hard time remembering certain details about her, but I think I need my brain to knock it the f off and just let me remember.  I want to, or at least today I want to, and it would be nice if I could think about her and remember her smile or her laugh or her blue eyes. I think that wouldn’t be the most horrible memory to be able to see her happy instead of some of the images I can’t get out of my mind.

Mother's Day

Today at Emily’s day care they had a ‘breakfast’ for all the mom’s to celebrate Mother’s Day.  Last year I got teary eyed over the gift she made for me – a butterfly picture made out of her foot prints.  it’s framed and on my desk and every time I look at it I smile.  This year, I’m not sure if she made any component of my gift but I still got teary eyed over it.  I got teary eyed as soon as I walked in the door and I saw all of the Mother’s Day swag.  I think it’s two things – it is wonderful and makes me feel wonderful to be appreciated for everything that I do for my daughter by people that don’t even know the half of what I do; they don’t live with me, they don’t see our day to day.  And it’s also the first time that I think I’ve really felt slapped with the fact that all of this appreciation is just for me this year; the commercials, the ads, in my little world it is now all me and it feels weird to not share this day with my mom.  On top of that weirdness, I feel guilty that I didn’t do more in the past for my mom.  I never knew how important this day was until I became a mom and now that my mom is gone, I realize that I didn’t do enough.

I never felt like she sacrificed much to be a mom – she stayed at home, didn’t work, drank a lot when I was a kid, took advantage of the fact that my dad wouldn’t leave (or just didn’t care if he did or didn’t, I’m not sure), and didn’t do much of anything but sit around smoking and complaining; to this day I continue to feel as if I raised myself due to the very little parental involvement there was.  But today, I realized that at least at some point she did sacrifice a lot and I don’t know if any one ever said “thank you”.  She wanted to go to college, she wanted to be an archeologist and she wanted to study ancient cultures like that in Pompeii, ancient Egypt.  But she didn’t do those things; it was rare that a woman continued school after high school back then, most got married and had babies right away.  She got  job, she married my dad at age 21 and when he thought it was more important for her to stay home and cook and clean instead of work, she quit her job at the phone company and stayed home.  My mom was smart, way smarter than I think we gave her credit for.  She was a veracious reader; she would go to the library once a week when I was a kid, get a huge stack of big books and finish them all in a week.  She would buy bags of books at book sales and she would go through them in an amazingly short time.  Her and my dad’s best friend, also an avid reader, could talk for hours about books and what they had recently read.  I wish I had taken the time to say thank you more often because, even if I will never be thankful for the childhood I had, if she hadn’t had made the choices that she had when she was younger to stay home and to have a family, I wouldn’t be here.  And for all of our struggles and our fights and the silence that fell between us when she hated something that I did, I still loved her and I miss her and I would give anything to hear her stories of being a telephone operator (she handled calls for the deaf so it was a ticket-tape machine that she worked on) and to hear her talk about Pompeii and to her hear tell me all about the things that she wants to see in ancient Italy and Egypt but never will because my father is too cheap.  Today, as most days, I miss my mom and all the little details of life that we shared – the good, the bad and even the ugly.  I even miss that.

I hope that those of you that still have your mom can take a moment this weekend and show her some appreciation for all that she has done for you and all that she will do for you in the future.  There will come a day when you can’t thank her anymore, and you can’t laugh at her stories and you can’t listen to her tell you one more time about that thing she loves to talk about that you’ve heard a thousand times and you’ve probably rolled your eyes at or at least tuned out the last few hundred times. But when that day comes, when she is no longer sitting across from a table or isn’t on the other side of the phone you will wonder why you didn’t listen harder and longer and why you didn’t ask her to tell you that story just one more time so you could remember the details, the sound of her voice, the light in her eyes and the joy that you will never see again except in your memories.

Ouch, my brain

I woke up with a horrible migraine, which is probably an indication that I got way too upset last night.  My daughter knocked some jewelry off of my dresser last night accidentally and I was crushed because I believe I have lost one earring of the pair that my sister just gave me for my birthday.  They’re beautiful and they’re the only jewelry I got for my birthday and I am so upset that I will most likely never wear them again.  And, as I looked for them, I kept dropping other things and knocking other things over and getting pulled away by my daughter to go watch something or look at something that she did and I was just so upset.  I kept thinking that if my mom could hear me and see me, she would help me find that one earring and she didn’t help me.  I didn’t know where to look, I looked everywhere but still didn’t find it.  I didn’t know what to do.  It suddenly made me feel very alone and very sad.  If she was still here, she would have made my dad get me jewelry for my birthday, I know she would have.  But she isn’t here, so he bought me a gift card to Kohl’s. It’s fine, I didn’t expect anything big or full of meaning from him because it’s my dad.  She would have gotten me jewelry, which I think is why my sister did.  And now, I can’t wear it and that made me really, really sad.  So I cried.  I ugly cried on my bedroom floor as I looked for the tenth time under my bed and under the dressers.  And I cried and cried and cried.  I stopped, eventually, but I cried for a while and my eyes ached a little this morning so I know I cried a lot.  So, that and the hormones that are involved with the current state of my monthly cycle, I got a migraine.

Mourning has taught me how easily a small thing can change everything and make you miserable.  I was okay yesterday and last night, for the most part. And when that happened, I lost it and there was no turning back.  As soon as I started to think about my mom and how I feel like she isn’t here, she isn’t with me, and maybe she isn’t with me because she hates me or blames me for what happened, I just cried.  I didn’t have a great relationship with her, we weren’t THAT close, but no one wants to think that their mom hates them.  When an ex hates you, when a best friend says they hate you, when a sibling says they hate you, all of that hurts.  But when you think your parent hates you, that hurt runs deep and kicks you in the gut harder than any you could ever get anywhere else.  And the worst part is that if that parent is dead, you will never really know the truth and that uncertainty sucks.

In her honor

Today, my heart is both happy and heavy.  My dad called and left me a message last night as my sister and I were giving my daughter a bath (she came over to drop off milk since I was a total dumbass and forgot to get it until it was WAY too late).  My dad helped to start a Knights of Columbus chapter in the church that we  used to attend; he was a pillar of that community and everyone knew his name.  The current Grand Knight – that’s the guy that heads up the chapter, leads the events, the Grand Poobah as it were – decided to dedicate their next blood drive to my mom.  He called my dad last night to say that they wanted to do the event in someone’s honor, someone that was important to their community and they picked her.  My eyes fill with tears as I type that.  They picked her.  My parents haven’t lived in that community for something like 7 years and yet, they are dedicating an event to her.  It is such a wonderful thing for them to do for her and for my dad, I can’t imagine how much this means to him.  To put into words what it means to me is pretty much impossible. 

This information evokes memories of my mom’s wake and how it felt to be surprised at every turn by people who came that I haven’t seen in years.  So many people love my dad, loved my mom, love my family and came to honor her because of some connection they had to us.  I remember standing in the sitting area, watching the slide show of pictures for the first time and tearing up as I saw how happy she was, how she looked holding my daughter, and knowing that I would never see it again in front of me.  I remember the men coming up to my dad, with such sorrow in their eyes and not knowing what to say; men that he may not have even seen in years but they came because it was my dad.  They were there for him and again, the tears fill my eyes knowing that he means so much to so many people.

It is a wonderful thing to be remembered and memorialized by those that you leave behind – for whatever reason.  I know she wouldn’t be thrilled that at some point she was probably mentioned as “Angelo’s wife” but in the end, I think she would be happy to have her memory honored in a community that loved and still continues to support my family and especially my dad. I think it would make her happy to know that he’s not alone.

The Internet only fuels my anger

I hate that I watched my mom die of something that, had it been caught much earlier, would have just been a blip on the radar of life instead of a total pull of the plug.  My cousin died from it too, back in 1999, just five weeks after he was diagnosed.  No one even knew he was sick, aside from his immediate family; the word hadn’t spread to the rest of us yet when we got the call that he was gone.  And here I am, fifteen years later, living through this again after losing my mom to the same disease that cut his life short in his mid-forties.  It’s not right.

Through some internet searching,  I found that kidney cancer is the second-lowest funded cancer research effort (from the American Cancer Society).  Thyroid cancer is the lowest.  Approximately 60,000 people are diagnosed annually and about 20% of that 60,000 die from it.  That’s a lot of people and now, my two family members are a part of that statistic.  I don’t want them to just be numbers in a very small, and minimal fight.  I want them to matter, I want it to mean something.  Looking at the data on the ACS website, there is very little for kidney cancer but pages and pages for other cancers like breast and lung.  More people die from it, so it’s more important to inform people about it.  But what about those that die from the other cancers? Do they not matter??

I want to start a fundraiser for my mom, well in her honor.  I know it will take work and time but I want to do it for her.  She didn’t have to die if there were actual screening tools for kidney cancer.  But there aren’t any.  Unless you have a disease which is a direct factor in getting kidney cancer, there are no screening tools.  If they find it, it’s typically because they’re looking for something else and they stumble on it.  That’s why they didn’t find it in my mom.  She had no symptoms other than weight loss and to her, that was great.  She loved getting thinner, she prided herself on her shrinking waist-line so she didn’t complain and apparently, neither did the doctors – although no one knows for sure on that one since she saw the doctors alone.  It wasn’t until I raised the red flag and her back pain became horrible that they started to piece together the pieces.  We had 19 days from the results of the first scan to the end of her life. My cousin was 44 and had two young children at the time he died.  How is it that deaths like that do not deserve more research so that another family doesn’t have to go through it?

Why is it okay to underfund one deadly disease and toss tens of millions at another?  Yes, breast cancer is the most prevalent and I know that statistically, at least one of my girlfriends will have it in our lifetime.  But that doesn’t take the sting out.  It’s as if the death of someone with breast cancer is more worthy, more important, than someone with some other and less frequently diagnosed cancer.  How is that okay?  My mother-in-law had breast cancer about three years ago and it was at least stage two or three, and she is still here.  The treatments really are amazing now and they save a lot of lives.  I just wish that was the case across the board, for all cancers.  Maybe my mom and my cousin would still be here too.

I'll keep holding on no matter what comes

In life, I avoid the crazy ups and downs and upside downs that are associated with chaotic events and places, chaotic people, roller coaster rides, etc.  I don’t like being upside down; if God intended me to go upside down He/She would have given me the natural ability to do so any time I wanted. But He/She did not, ergo, I do not enjoy going upside down.  This applies to my emotional well-being, as well.  I mean, really.  I was doing pretty well the other day, as you may have read, and I was happy about that – although I knew it wouldn’t last. And voila, it didn’t.  Not that I’m a mess today because I’m not.  I’m doing pretty well at keeping the messy cry at bay.  But I drove past the hospital on my way to Starbucks and it just made me start to think and remember.  I saw my dad yesterday; he’s having lunch with his best friend and my mom’s best friend’s husband next week.  That thought brought tears to my eyes.  I know what it’s like to suddenly lose your best friend; you lose a sister, not just a friend and it is a void that you will always feel in your life.  That’s how that woman feels right now, and my heart hurts for her.

I cringe a little bit every time I drive past one of those damned hospital signs.  I do my best to ignore them but it’s pretty hard when they’re sitting right next to or below a stop sign or a street sign. WTF.  As if someone who is on their way there in an emergency will notice the sign?  Please.  I don’t think so.   People use GPS, not those stupid blue signs.

For some reason, I am holding onto a few physical things from those days at the hospital and I have found it pretty impossible to put them in the trash.  Receipts from the hospital cafeteria, the business cards of two of the doctors that saw my mom – including the one that managed her case.  I don’t need any of it and it’s just a reminder of what it was like to sit in that glass enclosed cafeteria, eating not very good food, giving my dad time to sit with my mom alone; not good memories. Although there was that guy at the next table that one time, with the jacket that had a HUGE picture of Scar Face on the back and was covered in a pattern of hundred dollar bills – looked like camouflage from afar, but it was not; he made my snack time a little more bearable.  I hold onto it because I don’t want to let any of it go.  Letting it go is like letting her go and letting go of the last time I was with her and she was alive.  Well, I guess I use the word ‘alive’ loosely.  She wasn’t really alive those last few days.  She was alive when she was responsive and bitching about the tube down her throat and asking when she could leave. That was my mom when she was alive.  The body, the shell, that laid in that bed and didn’t look at anyone and didn’t make not so nice gestures when trying to say how she felt about being there, that didn’t feel like my mom anymore.  I’ve heard that, when it gets to that point, the spirit leaves the body and remains close to it because they are still tied together; I never felt like she was in the room after there was no sign of life any more.  But who knows, maybe she was there.  And if she was, I am pretty sure she was rolling her eyes and had her hand on her hip saying things like “you have got to be kidding me” and “sweetheart, why are you still here” and “at least when I wasn’t on this damned machine they let me eat something, this liquid stuff is crap”.  I hated her bitching and moaning when she was alive but now, there’s a part of me that misses it.

Why don't I feel it?

This is very strange and I can’t explain it – I don’t feel sad.  I feel like I got all of my grief and sadness out on my birthday and I’m okay now.  I’m not sad, I’m not thinking about my mom all the time, I feel some level of peace for some reason and I really have no idea why.  I haven’t felt this since before we found out she was sick so it’s been months; we found out on December 23^rd so it’s been a long time. I have no idea why I feel like this now.  it’s not like this is over, by any means.  My parents’ anniversary is in a few weeks, Mother’s Day is two weeks away, my sister’s birthday, my daughter’s birthday, my dad’s birthday…they are all approaching and yet, I’m not sad.  I do feel some pang of sadness when I see the Mother’s Day commercials – the flower and chocolate commercials get me since that’s what I used to get her before Emily came into the picture – and I know I will be avoiding Hallmark stores and the aisles of cards at the stores for the next week or two but I’m not sad.  I’m just not and I can’t explain it.  I probably shouldn’t try.  This may be the quiet before the storm.

It’s not like I am totally devoid of emotion, just not full of it right now (I’m sure there’s a joke in there somewhere).  when I think of my daughter, who is talking more every day and getting into imaginative play all of a sudden, that’s when I lose my stuff and cry.  It hurts so much to think that my mom is missing this; she waited so long to be a grandmother – I didn’t have Emily until I was 38 – and she only got to enjoy her for a year and a half, a little over 18 months.  That makes me sad.  Every time I tell my dad an Emily story that makes him laugh, I think of her and I hope she’s laughing too where ever she is.  I wish I could know, I wish I could hear it.  But she’s not with me and I don’t know if she ever will be.

Resolve

Resolution is good; I hate when things linger.  I am not one to sweep issues under the proverbial carpet and let them fester.  Conflict is uncomfortable and makes things awkward so I would much rather deal with issues head on, discuss them, solve them and move past them.  Rob is not exactly of the same mind-set, although he’s getting better at it thankfully. Last night he actually started the conversation with me, and for that I am impressed and proud.

Apparently I wasn’t “raining on everyone’s parade”, I was raining on his personal, fictitious parade.  He wanted to have a good day, go out and do whatever I wanted – he had forgotten that I asked that he figure out what we were doing – and enjoy the day and have some cake.  I was unhappy, I was sad, I didn’t want to celebrate and it upset him because that pretty picture he had in his head wasn’t possible.  He didn’t know what to do so he backed off; unfortunately he back off so much that he isolated me. He is also a bit resentful, it turns out.  I didn’t think of it but my grief causes reactions in him; he has a failed marriage under his belt that included children – one of which is a teenager and who was moved out of state by his mother so she could be closer to her family.  He grieves the loss of the relationship he once had with his son, the ability to see him any time and the ability to spend holidays and birthdays with his children – all of whom now live out of state with or near the ex.  He is not as open as I am though, so I don’t know when he wants to talk about something or how he feels about something because he never talks about it.  I don’t stop talking, so we are different in that respect; when I’m upset and want him to check in on me, hug me, be supportive that tweaks something in him that says “I’m upset too, I have sad stuff too”.  So – we both need to do a little learning and growing in this area. He needs to be okay with my bad days and not be afraid to approach me, hug me, ask if he can do anything; I know that I’m a bit of a bear on those days, which is why I tend to sit in my office with the door closed a lot on those days.  I need to recognize that, although he doesn’t say it, he has his own grief and I need to ask if he’s okay, what he needs, if he wants to talk.  If I’m sad because I’m missing her, that may cause him to miss his family too. Even though they’re not gone, they’re not here and that’s hard for him too.  It’s hard for me to consider them similar situations – he can see his family, he can talk to his family, I will never see or talk to my mom again – but I need to accept that it was a loss, and a loss is a loss no matter how it happens.

This has made me realize that it doesn’t just hurt me and that it doesn’t just change me.  It changes other people and it changes relationships with those people. Rob didn’t know my mom that well, and he thought we had a pretty bad relationship – which we did – so her death really didn’t impact him personally, but I hope that with better communication and being more open that he can understand why I am dealing with it the way that I am and in turn, I can see why he deals with his grief the way that he does and I can help him to open up a little bit more to me.  I don’t want my grief to get in the way of having a successful relationship and I can easily see now how that could happen.