*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.