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.

To post or not to post....

I debated on whether or not to post this - it's not an uplifting or positive post in the least. But it's real and I think it's something that not only I struggle with; my relationship is not that unique. So I'm posting this - the ugly is real and painful but you deal with it and move on. I'll post how this was resolved later on. This was written yesterday.

Apparently, being sad because I have to celebrate my 40^th birthday without my mother is not acceptable to some people.  some people being the man I live with, the man I chose to spend my life with, the man I intend on spending the rest of my life with.  Granted, I was not a happy camper yesterday and I don’t do a very good job of hiding my feelings so I wasn’t all sunshine and happiness on the outside; when he started to sing to me in the morning something about being the Birthday Girl I said “I really don’t want to talk about my birthday, unless you want me to cry” which was the truth, I was on the verge of tears as he sang.  But still.  I shouldn’t be made to feel like it’s not allowed to feel the way I feel, and that’s how I was made to feel yesterday.   I was made to feel like my sadness, my difficulties, my grief were insignificant and that I ruined the day for everyone else; I should have sucked it up and been happy for the sake of everyone else around me.  I “rained on everyone’s parade” is what I was told.  What parade??  There were no plans, no party, no anything.  There weren’t even flowers or wine.  So what parade was rained out due to my bad mood is totally unknown to me.

What do you do when people don’t understand why you are grieving the way that you are, and they react in a negative way?  Everyone’s journey is different and no one deals with things exactly the same way; someone else may have celebrated yesterday because they were still here and because their loved one would have wanted it that way.  Someone else may have drunk themselves into a stupor so they forgot what day it was altogether.  But I chose to just be however I was going to be, and how I was was sad.  I was just sad.  Sad that I wouldn’t talk to her, sad that I wouldn’t hear some stupid joke about still being here and how it was better to be 40 than 80 and that when she was 40 she had just had me and to hear the story of my birth again and how ironic it was that my daughter was also born on her due date at almost the same time I was (just 12 hours earlier). It’s not like I sat on the edge of my bathtub with a razor in my hand, looking longingly at my wrists all day, I was just sad.  I don’t expect people to understand it, I really don’t.  what I expect is respect for me, for my feelings and for my process and what I have to go through to get to the other side.  But how do I get someone to just be respectful, to not take it personally and to be supportive?  That’s all I wanted – support.  Comfort would have been nice too.  But instead, he backed off to the point that I felt ignored, I felt insignificant and ignored. He never offered to hug me, he never offered to hold my hand, he never even offered me cake – cake that he had bought but thought I wouldn’t want since I was upset.  I didn’t even get wine!!  I should have been given wine, damn it.  When did grieving for the loss of someone you loved become a personal insult to those around you? When did grieving become unacceptable??

I don’t even know what to say to him tonight.  The last words I said to him last night before I tearfully went to bed were “I shouldn’t have to apologize to you because I’m sad”, so tonight should be interesting.

Tomorrow has come too soon

I am dreading tomorrow. As the day has moved forward and tomorrow has gotten closer, my mood has fallen further and further down the proverbial toilet. My dad, I'm sure, will want to come over tomorrow and its the last thing I want. I would like tomorrow to just pass with no acknowledgement. No candles on a cake, no happy wishes. I would actually like to go to the cemetery tomorrow and cry. Right or wrong, it feels like that's what I need to do. But I don't think I'll be able to do that.

Birthdays should be about the person who's birth is being celebrated but too often it's about everyone else. It's about the party, who bought what, where to get a cake. Even if the birthday girl doesn't want to celebrate, if everyone around her wants to, she's expected to just go along and be happy. Even when she's crying inside and waiting on a phone call that will never come

My time away

We got back yesterday from Florida with his family. I think Emily had a great time; it was so nice to see her with her cousins, playing and coloring and running around. She's the smallest one, except for an infant, so it was hard for her to keep up all the time but she did a pretty good job of it! And her grandparents just adore her, which is also nice to see.

They made me feel so.....I don't know. So much a part of the family on this trip. We were all together one night at his sister's house and his other sister and his parents surprised me with a birthday cake. All twenty-something people surprised me, stood around the kitchen and sung Happy Birthday to me. I almost started to cry when I realized it was for me; at first I thought it was for his brother in law's birthday, which was last week. But it wasn't. And for them to do that, especially now...this year....I can't describe what it meant to me.  They have welcomed me with open arms and this just made me feel like its official. I am part of them and they are a part of me.

The 25th was the five year anniversary of my best friend's passing. I can't believe it's been so long. That's how I know this will all be okay. I know how it feels to cry in the food store or the Target because you see their favorite cookie or ice cream. I know how it's feels to cry every time you see their picture, knowing you'll never see them again. She went too quickly, too early. Donna was 35, and in a horrible car accident, so it was different. But it was still too quick, came out of the blue, and I feel that void still. But, I don't cry as much. I don't cry every time I think for her. I don't randomly cry over Milano cookies. I still cry sometimes, especially when I need her to. It's her the most. So I know that I will still cry for my mom. I know that I will stop crying all the time, randomly, like when I see her coffee creamer or think of her with my daughter. Eventually, I'll smile and laugh again. I'm not quite there yet, but I guess this is a work in progress, a journey, and this trip is far from over.

Maybe I'll start keeping score

No idea why but I just thought of my mom’s voice saying “hello, sweetheart” and I started crying.  GOD what I would do to actually hear her voice again, with that Brooklyn accent that sounded like she moved out of the city 4 months ago and not almost 40 years ago, although I guess I should stop that counter now that she is no longer here.  I wasn’t even thinking of her and suddenly I just thought of her walking through my office door, saying that.  What I would give for her to do that right now.  (and of course I’ve run out of tissues…damned allergies) 

This is the stuff that really sucks – the sudden pop-ups of memories, thoughts, ideas, things that make me remember that I will never hear her again or see her again.  It can happen at any time (I was just reading a business requirements document), at any place and it can be of anything.  What in the hell made me think of that??  I have no idea but I did and now, I have to work on not crying and not looking like I’ve been crying for the meeting I have in half an hour with my department and my boss.  GREAT.

I know I could, technically, hear her voice if I wanted to.  I have that voicemail saved from my birthday last year and I could listen to it if I really wanted to.  But I can’t.  not at work at least.  I did once, or at least I started to but had to stop after the first few words.  I can still hear some of it in my head and it just brings back the tears and the lump in my throat that has become way too familiar. 

I was so happy that I hadn’t really cried today, at least not very much.  One brief moment, one tiny memory changes that in an instant and I am now battling myself to stop thinking about it, to stop hearing her voice in my head so I can stop crying.  Brain-1, Me-0.