Baby Steps

Today, I moved forward a little bit.  I picked up the phone and called my parents’ old parish, asking if I could rent space for the fundraiser in my mom’s honor.  I left a message, so now I just wait.  I am hoping that they say yes, but we’ll see.  If whomever I talk to isn’t receptive to the idea, I might go right to the top – the pastor has been a friend of my dad’s for years and in his eulogy for my mom said “I didn’t want to welcome you home like this, but you’re home now and this will always be your home” (yeah that didn’t make me cry like a baby).  I think I need to do this now, I need to feel like I’m doing something for her now that the holidays are coming and I have these horrible memories and thoughts and I need something positive (aside from the vacation I’m taking with a friend in a few weeks).

Moving forward and trying to turn a horribly negative experience into something positive, I hope, will make me feel better.  Something has to give.  It’s not that I’m sad all the time, but I’m sad more often than I would like and my sadness is triggered by things way too often for my liking.  Maybe if I have this to work on, plan for, focus on, I won’t have so much time to remember how she died and how………responsible I still feel.

UPDATE…..I can’t use the space at the parish, but I did get to speak to the Pastor’s Assistant who adores – well adored I guess – my parents.  She’s a wonderful woman who cried, and cried, when my sister and I went to make the selections for our mother’s funeral mass.  She shared with me that her mother also passed away, it will be 3 years this December.  And she told me this – “It doesn’t get easier, it does not get easier, but it does get tolerable”.  That struck a chord with me and made me realize that I’m not crazy thinking that this will never be ‘easy’ again but the light at the end of the tunnel will bring some normalcy, for lack of a better word, to things again.  She said that strives for tolerable some days, because she knows that’s as good as it will get.  And I can live with that.