Books & Picture Day

Last night, coming home with Emily, I started to cry.  Emily’s school was doing a book sale – your typical school book sale but on a smaller scale since these are smaller kids with limited book choices.  And Emily picked out three to take home (aka, Mommy got hosed for about 25 bucks); there were two  more she wanted to bring home but I said no, we had enough books.  There was a mini-fit but she was happy in the end with her books on the way home. And it made me cry.  My mom was SUCH a book lover, she would have been beaming to see Emily sit on the little make-shift futon they have set up as a reading corner; she sat there and looked at each page of the books she picked while I either sat next to her and watched or stood and talked to another parent (and watched her out of the corner of my eye).  My mom would be so proud to see Emily love books as much as my sister did when she was her age and as much as my mom did.  I bet my mom would buy her book after book after book….you could never have enough books in her eyes. 

My mom will also miss out on the annual school picture; I gave my parents a framed copy of the one from last year for Christmas and my mom thought it was so pretty. I thought she would be here for a few more of them, to smile at them, brag about them, show them off. I didn't know it then, but now I know how important something as mundane as the annual picture day and having a picture in hand to give to someone means. It brings tears to my eyes knowing that she's missing it. 

How I wish she was here to see this.  How I wish she was here to wrap her arms around Emily to tell her how proud she was of her.  How I wish she was here to sit on the couch and read to her, hear her pick out letters and pictures.  I can remember my mom reading the Wizard of Oz to me; it’s one of the few memories I have like that – I wasn’t read to very often as a child but I can remember many times sitting in the living room with my mom as she sat reading, drinking her big glass of iced tea and smoking (that last part stopped at some point when I was in college and she had a heart attack).

I hope she can hear me, I hope she can see Emily.  I know that I will never know either one of those things, but I can hope for it.  And I hope for it every single day.

I Don't Enjoy Being a Bitch. No, really.

This weekend I was a miserable bitch. I did all that I could to stop – I even went so far as to go into the bathroom, look myself in the eye (in the mirror) and say “stop being such a bitch already, wtf!”.  I seriously did that because I couldn’t stand myself anymore.  I also walked out of a room to breathe and to get myself to calm down because, again, I was being an uber byatch and couldn’t stop.  I don’t really know why.  Well, I guess underneath it all I know why – I have a dead mom and I’m pretty pissed about it, pretty sad about it, pretty upset that I can’t think of the holidays without wanting to cry.  I know how this process goes.  I’ve been down a similar road but still, that history doesn’t help me now.  You’d think I would somehow be able to tap into those memories and get myself grounded by knowing that there are better days and the light at the end of the tunnel is NOT a freight train. But no.  I can’t seem to apply that experience to this, even though that experience sucked too and I know that it gets better but right now, it doesn’t seem to matter.

I can’t stop myself from thinking about her, and that’s making my day-to-day difficult.  I think it’s because I can’t stop thinking about my dad, and how hard the coming months will be for him and how much harder that will make it for me.  I know that I shouldn’t fixate on anything like this – it’s all out of my control and it’s in the future, albeit the not so far off in the distance future.  But it’s hard not to.  It’s hard not to think about what was going on right here, right now, a year ago and what will not be going on right here, right  now in the present.  It’s hard to not think about her because she was a part of my every day, whether I liked it or not.  Especially a year ago, when all we did was argue about stuff like her eating habits and changing Emily’s diaper enough during the day when they watched her and no I didn’t introduce juice yet and no I’m not planning on it, and when are you making that doctor’s appointment and what did you eat for breakfast and lunch today – do you actually think that’s enough food??  But in the end, no amount of food could have saved her.  Who knows, if she did eat more it might have fueled the cancer and it could have spread faster, she wouldn’t have been here for the holidays.  When she was on the feeding tube in the hospital, they were giving her plenty of nutrition but she couldn’t put weight on because of how quickly the cancer was spreading; she would gain some, and then lose it as soon as they backed off of the fluids they were pumping her with.  It was in her bones in that last CT and it hadn’t been there a week before. A week.  19 days before it was just nodules in her lungs.  That last CT showed a huge mass in the front of one of her lungs that wasn’t there just three weeks before.  Three weeks.  It amazes me how fast something so horrible and devastating moves around in your body.

But today is a new day.  And I need to look at it that way.  Yeah I’ve been pretty wretched lately, but that doesn’t mean I have to be horrible today.  Right now, as I type, I don’t feel overly horrible which is an improvement and right now, I’ll take whatever I can get.  And with that, Sarah Bareilles’ “December” comes onto my iPhone…..gee, thanks for making me sad(der) Sarah, awesome timing!! (Quickly reaching out to phone to change song to….Little Black Dress…that’s about a stupid man, so that’s better.)  Must stay focused on the upside of things and not think about the downers – the holidays, her clothes in my house that she never got to wear (which I washed this weekend – fun times), my dad.  Yeah, not going there right now.  As my toddler would say “Momma, NO NO”.  Complete with crossed arms and a foot stomp for good measure.

Get Yourself Together, Woman!

We meet every day at work for a 9ammeeting; leadership gets together and discusses priorities for the day, policy changes, operational challenges, etc.  And here I am, yet again for the umpteenth time this year, trying to get myself together so that I don’t look like I’ve been crying for the past 10 minutes (even though I have been).  When I dropped off Emily at school, most of her friends were already there and playing with the teacher so she immediately put her stuff away and went to play.  When I told her I was leaving she came over and hugged me, and then went back to play.  She saw me walking to the door and she ran over with her arms out, I stooped down so she could kiss me, she said “bye bye” and ran back to play.  I was SO HAPPY to see her so happy, and to see her just walk off independently and be okay without me and to just jump in and play with her friends; I’m not a helicopter mom AT ALL.  I want her to be independent and not need me 24/7.  And to see her do that today was just a wonderful event to see and how I wished in that moment to tell my mom.  I wanted to pick up the phone from the parking lot and tell her all about it.  My mom would be so proud of her; my mom wanted Emily to grow up to be independent and fierce.  My mom, although she didn’t always act this way, wanted me to be independent and not depend on some man for everything.  She was happy that I could pay my bills, keep a roof over my head and food on my table without the help of a man; she never understood why my sister got remarried because to my mom, she didn’t need to.  I think secretly, it was something that she had wanted for herself but was never allowed to.

It broke my heart to walk away from that classroom knowing that my mom wouldn’t hear the excitement and pride in my voice when I told the story of this morning.  It broke my heart to know that she’s not here to be proud of Emily, to hug her and to tell her what a wonderful job she’s doing and that she’s “Grandma’s Girl” – that’s what my mom used to call her.  It breaks my heart over and over to know that she wasn’t here long enough for Emily to remember her and to not only remember who she was but to also remember how much she loved her.

Pissed & Disappointed

Today, I’m still staring at my phone.  I thought by now I would be able to pick it up, ask the questions and book the date but I haven’t been able to get myself to tell yet another person about why I am doing this fund-raiser.  I thought I could do it because this is what I ‘need’ to do – I need a distraction, I need to feel like all that crap that happened – that was happening a year ago right now – was for some good reason and not just to drive me to the brink of looney-tunes emotionally and mentally.  I need to feel like something positive came from this because so far, there hasn’t been a silver lining.

But I’m just still staring.  I know what I want to do in terms of marketing the event, reaching out to people, organizing the donations, etc.  I know all of it and I even have a plan written out.  But the first step, making it a real thing and giving it a name, I can’t bring myself to do.  I can’t do  it because it would mean that she really is gone, she really is dead.  Even now, I have a hard time using that word and it’s been over 8 months.  I’ll say “passed away” but I won’t use the ‘d’ word.  It’s just too real, too harsh, too much of an ending.

I’m angry at myself for staring, for standing still, for not pushing myself forward like I feel like I should but can’t seem to do.  I know that I need to do things at my own pace, (insert misc. bs here that people tell you) but I feel guilty for not doing this all already.  I should have been done and over with this whole fundraiser by now, technically; I had the idea to do it over the summer or really late in the Spring so why the hell haven’t I done it yet???

Grief really makes you reach across the gamut of emotions, doesn’t it?  I’m sad, I’m angry, I’m self-deprecating, I’m back to sad, oh look here comes anger around the bend mixed in with some selfishness just for fun.  No one can prepare you for the journey that is the grief after a loved one dies; there is no self-help book that has a title with your name on it (how cool would that be though??).  If there was a map I could buy at the Barnes & Noble when I go to pick up a latte, I would pay any amount of money for it at this point.  Just when I think I’m starting to turn a corner and feel ‘normal’ again, I get hit with something – these days it’s the looming holidays and the memories of how she was last year this time.  I look forward to next year at this time when it’s not so fresh, and maybe the guilt won’t be such an overbearing pain in the ass. 

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.

Coincidental Music

This morning on my way to school/work, I heard a Stone Temple Pilots song, a Rick Astley song, and then a Third Eye Blind song oh and a Goo Goo Dolls song.  STP was one of Donna’s favorite groups; my mom loved Rick, TEB was a band we listened to in college and at the bar after we graduated, and the Goo’s song was one that reminded me of a friend that was killed in a motorcycle accident almost 19 years ago.  I know that there is a very high probability that this was all just coincidence and it means nothing, but deep inside me I feel like it wasn’t.  I feel like it meant something; what, I’m not sure.  Maybe it means that they have all met, they have hung out and they are all okay.  When Donna died, I hoped that she would meet up with Billy who was young and cute and fun and smart and a tiny bit edgy – she would have liked him.  And when my mom died, I hoped that Donna would find her and help her, show her the ropes (per se) and hang out with her and introduce her to her mom –I think her mom and my mom would have gotten along.  So maybe that’s what this morning was….some message from beyond to say ‘we’re together, we’ve all met, and we’re all okay’.  I hope that’s what it was.  I hope and pray that they are all okay, where ever they may be and they have met.  Each of them was pretty cool in their own way and my mom loved Donna, she would be happy to see her and I hope she’s filled her in on everything that’s happened since she left us 5 years ago.  Or I at least hope they’ve had a good laugh over the things that she’s watched from a far for the past 5 years…there have been some doosies…..

I miss each of them very much, even though I don’t think of Billy every day.  Although at this time of year, as the anniversary of his so very untimely death approaches, I think of him more and more.  And as the holidays approach, I think of my mom and of Donna and her mom more and more – if that’s possible – because they won’t be the same this year; they will never be the same again.  Today I will do my best to not cry in my office, but my best may not be good enough.  There are too many people gone, there are too many people missing this wonderful thing we call life.  Just too many.

13 years/8 months

Today is a particularly hard day, for so many reasons.  13 years ago, thousands of people died as I watched it all unfold on my tv.  I still remember seeing the first images of the Towers with smoke rising around them and thinking “why are they showing this….that bomb went off years ago” and not knowing that it was new, it wasn’t a bomb, I knew people in those buildings who would not make it out.  Today, I remember them with sadness and I remember who we were as a country at that time. We were together, united, we were there for one another. Here in NJ, there was kindness all around; you didn’t know if the person in front of you at the red light or in line at the store had lost someone or was waiting to find someone.  There are still some that are lost who will never be found; my cousin’s husband and his brother worked for Cantor Fitzgerald, they were not found.

And today marks 8 months since my mom passed away.  8, in this sense, seems like such a large number.  8.  It’s close to 10, closer to 12 than 7 or 6.  As the days and weeks move forward quickly, I am forced to come to terms with the fact that the holidays will soon be here.  Halloween means another costume and cute pictures of her one and only grandchild.  Thanksgiving means that we’ll try to recreate her meal without her help this time. And Christmas.  I don’t really know what to say about that day.  I knew that she would not be here for this one, but it doesn’t make it any less difficult to think of celebrating without her.

Today, I remember everyone that is gone, not just from 9/11, not just from 1/11, but anyone I’ve known and cared about who is gone.  They are all missed, I have memories of them all, and I hope to see them all again.