Feeling like a broken record

There's an entry I started a couple of days ago that's still in the draft stage, but as it's hopefully going to be one of the more upbeat posts, at least all things considered, I decided not to mix it with tonight's writing and thus taint it.  Hence the broken record part - this is more about how I hurt.  I'm sorry, but it's not like I know much else right now.  I wish I did.  Part of the reason for this blog in the first place is to try and work through it, since to write about it, I have to organize my thoughts somewhat.

So, I'll have to ask the indulgence of you, my reader friend, though if you're taking the time to follow this, that's quite an indulgence anyway.  I'm finding that although the initial shock and pain of my mother's death was absolutely brutal, it almost seems easy now when compared with trying to deal with the loss.  Granted, part or all of that may simply be perspective, and trouble dealing with this loss is nothing new, but I've been pondering the immense breadth and depth of it a lot more lately.

You see, my mother and I shared a tremendous amount and were an integral, daily part of each other's life.  While we each had our own friends and our own interests, we also had some of both in common and spent a majority of our time with each other.  We shared meals, did the shopping together, went to movies, etc.  While some people may not be able to understand that fully, I can only say that I was blessed to have my mother also be one of my best friends.  Perhaps it's not common, but being different is certainly not new for me, nor was it for her.  She was the person who I could always count on, who always loved me, and who was always there for me and I was that person for her.  

Given this, her death not only leaves me without a mother, but without my closest friend with whom I shared my daily life.  So, in short, life as I knew it, as I have known it for years,  has been smashed into fragments.  I literally have wandered around - in my house, at the grocery store, anywhere - just feeling lost and not knowing what to do.  My weekends have no structure or purpose anymore.  I haven't cooked for myself since my mom died.  At some point, I'm supposedly going to be creating a new routine for my life, but how or when that is going to happen, I have no clue.  I don't have another person's schedule to take into account, and since my boss is jerking me around at work, I don't even have that for a framework.  I'm just ... floundering.

I don't know if this is normal as a part of the grieving process, though I wouldn't be surprised to find it was.  But the feeling of being lost extends to making it so that there's nothing I'm looking forward to right now, big or little.  This would normally be my favorite time of the year, and of course the holidays aren't too far off either.  Instead, I don't care what day it is, assuming I even know, and if there were some way to avoid December entirely, I'd take it.  Right now, I'm just taking each day as it comes, as empty as they all are, and muddling through.  People say I'm being strong, when truly I'm just managing to survive, and only because there's really nothing else to do.  Some irrational part of me still hopes, desperately, that I'll wake up from this horrible, hellish nightmare than I've been trapped in for six weeks.  In the meantime, I deal with things as best as I can, however good or bad that may be, and hope that it will all even out one day. 

But damn ... feeling this lost and this empty hurts more than I can possibly describe.

I miss you, Mom, so very, very much.

More random thoughts

Trying to think of little bits of trivia about Mom is much more enjoyable than thinking about the void she left in my life (as if I don't do that enough) so I'm going to do that again.

• She always had to have popcorn at the movie theater.
• Reese's Cups and Three Musketeers bars were her favorite candy bars.
• Her dream car was a white convertible - the exact model varied.
• She insisted everyone open one present on Christmas Eve - and would laugh at me for never picking the "big" present first.
• I remember her singing around the house when I was little and thinking it sounded wonderful.
• She had beautiful handwriting.
• When pregnant with me, despite being told that no girl had been born into my father's family for fifty years, she refused to ever believe anything other than she was having a baby girl.
• She was the middle of three children, and had both a brother and a sister.
• She liked to be home when it was storming outside as it made her feel more relaxed.  She especially loved it when it was raining when she was trying to go to sleep.
• Purple was one of her favorite colors and she wore amethyst jewelry.
• She could somehow read, sleep, or even crochet in a moving car.  I can't do any of that, so on road trips with her, I usually drove.
• We had made a tradition out of making goodies for some of the judges, staff, and baliffs at the courthouses and she was (in)famous for the rum balls.
• She almost always salted her food before she tasted it.  (Which drove me crazy.)
• She loved having flowers in the house.  Simple bunches of alstroemeria from the grocery store would make her happy.
• Fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and butterbeans would be a perfect meal to her.
• She didn't like cold weather.  
• She lived in Florida almost her entire life.
• She could talk to anyone and would make them like her without even trying.

If you are reading this (and to my shock, people actually are) then I ask that you go find someone you love and hug them.  Be grateful that they are there to hug.  I never thought I would lose my mom this soon and tomorrow is never guaranteed.

I love you, Mom.

Ever-changing grief

In the course of just one day, I go through so many moods in dealing with my mother's death.  Last night, at the grocery store, I finally saw one of the main managers whom I had been looking to speak with for weeks now.  Although most people aren't aware of it, this particular location has a true florist in the floral department, and he did most of the arrangements for Mom's celebration.  They were gorgeous - cherry alstroemeria, stargazer lilies, and yellow roses - so I wanted to pass my compliments and thanks to management. 

The manager I spoke to was one both Mom and I knew by sight, and vice versa.  We were in this store, singly or together, two or three times each week.  He'd often stop to speak with us.  Actually, a lot of people did that with Mom.  She was amazingly friendly and able to speak to anyone.  At any rate, I predictably began to tear up while speaking to him.  At least I was ready to check out at that point, and was in my car shortly thereafter, when I proceeded to lose it entirely for a few minutes.  I suggest not trying to drive while sobbing hysterically, for the record.

This happens at random, though at least more infrequently now.  I don't expect it to stop anytime soon.  There are usually also several moments in the evenings, when I have to simply stop, take a deep breath, and will myself not to start screaming or crying.  There's still some part of me that wants her back so badly, even though I know it's not possible, that the grief and need just become overwhelming.

As if there isn't enough to deal with, I'm in the midst of wrapping up her financial affairs and working with the insurance companies, which is another of the very hard things. It was terribly important to Mom that she leave me with as much security as she could.  I never, ever thought I'd have to be claiming any of it this soon.  She'd bring it up periodically, and I'd always shy away from it, telling her that I'd much rather have her alive.  Now I feel badly for the way I would try to evade talking about it, and I certainly know that I don't deserve it.  Mostly though, I'd give away every single bit of it in a heartbeat if I could have just one more hour with Mom.  More than anything, I wish I could tell her that I was happy to have shared my life with her and that I could tell her that I loved her one more time.

Still here

It feels like it's been five years, not just over five weeks.  Missing Mom is now settling into my bones as a fact of life.  I still cry, and in public, but not quite as much.  I guess it's progress.

As I've said before, there are unfortunately a number of things about which I could be supremely bitter, but I've largely managed to avoid it.  I know that it won't do me any good and that it won't bring her back.  Health care, though ... it makes me want to throttle some of these ignorant, selfish, and uncaring people who rant about not needing health care reform.  

All that insurance companies and managed care has done in the past twenty years is to turn medicine even further into a money-making service, completely warped from the purpose of caring for people.  Greed - from the greed of those who make money off of suffering to the greed of those who have no thought for others - has made the current system a travesty.  The small businessmen like those Mom and I have worked for claim not to have the money to provide insurance.  The have second and third homes, fancy cars, and maids to clean their houses, but no money.  If you work and own a home, like I do (and Mom did), then you don't qualify for any help.  

And since Mom already had high blood pressure, she was turned down from private insurance (that would have been horribly expensive) because under the system, you couldn't already be ill, because then, gods forbid, the insurance company would actually have to give you some of the care you were paying for.  It's a truly pathetic commentary on American society to have some of the best health care in the history of the world theoretically available, yet inaccessible by a large part of the population.  

Health care is NOT supposed to be the privilege of the wealthy.  While in all honesty, I can't say for certain that even the best care would have saved my mother's life, it is a horribly bitter pill to even have the faintest thought that, if we have been rich and could have afforded all the tests, scans, and  hundreds of dollars of medicine each month, she might still be alive.  I devoutly wish I could impose that feeling on every opponent of health care reform, with the person in need being one of their loved ones.

And yes, that is a digression, of a sorts, but it's part of what I deal with.  My mom deserved so much better, and I can only pray that she is now freer and happier than she was on this plane.  As always, Mom, I miss you so much.

Random memories

So things are still very much day to day.  I could say a lot about how things about going now - how work is driving me crazy when I couldn't care less about it, how it's starting to feel like people are now expecting me to be okay, etc.  Instead, I'm simply going to jot completely random things down about Mom - things she said, things we did, things she liked.  There is a ton of "trivia" that I want to remember.

• She liked plain potato chips only - nothing flavored.
• We both had a distaste for overly flowery, overly fussy ("frou frou") things and would jokingly mock them when out shopping with each other.
• Jimmy Buffet was one of her favorite musicians.
• "Happy Feet" was a movie she loved - even to the point of getting a stuffed Mumble.  I can remember the day it came out on DVD because she had been waiting for it.  I had gotten it for her a lunch as a surprise and had it ready to play when she walked in her door that evening.  She had had a bad day at work and when she heard the movie playing, she thought it was a commercial, remembered the release, and wanted to go get it.  It was fun watching her realize I had it for her.
• She drank her coffee black.  Her Mother's Day gift this year was a Keurig coffee maker, which she absolutely adored.  She often told me how much pleasure it gave her, for which I'm grateful.
• She screamed in the theater during the original showing of ET (when the government agents were searching the house in space suits.)
• She knew how to sail and how to fly a small plane.
• She would fearlessly jump into projects, just like her father did, especially ones of the DIY variety.  Where I'd want to go look things up, do test cuts, and the like, she'd already be applying a saw to things.  
• On a related note, I gave her a couple of power tools she had wanted one Christmas.   The joke thereafter was that I never thought her favorite presents would be from Black and Decker.
• She collected elephants - but only the ones with their trunks up, as she had been told those were lucky.
• She'd always sneeze in multiples.
• When she used my first name and a shortened version of my middle name together, something fun was up.  If she used the full version of both, I was in trouble.
• Peanut butter was an absolute staple for her.
• She hated unloading the dishwasher.
• Keeping a pretty lawn was important to her because it had been important to her parents.
• She hated driving in the rain and didn't like it when I did it, either.
• She'd go through cycles of letting her hair grow out to her shoulders, then cutting it short, and then letting it grow again.  It almost, but not quite, matched the seasons.
• She loved to read and we shared our fantasy collections.
• She liked her fried eggs sunny side up.  I like mine hard, for which she coined the term "frambled" at some point when I was little.

Not a lot for now, but it's been good to think about her.

The prelude is done

Well, I really didn't mean to let this many days pass without an entry.  It's certainly not that I haven't thought about making one, though I was usually not anywhere near the computer at the time.

I spent my first "normal" weekend without Mom this past weekend.  Normal in this case meant that I wasn't traveling and didn't have anything special planned.  I had hoped that I could get caught up on household chores and at least make things look a little more usual.  As it turned out, that was a vain hope.  I continue to underestimate the effect of grieving and now, depression, on what I can manage to do.  The weekend found me completely adrift and sandbagged by the absence of anything resembling a normal routine.  Mom and I shopped together on the weekend and Saturday night was our night to cook a really good dinner for ourselves if we didn't have other plans.  Also, she would have been watching my alma mater's football game with me this week. Instead, I had an empty weekend where I'd either wander around aimlessly or try to occupy myself with minutiae so I didn't have to face the void Mom left.

I don't think anyone can really understand how very, very lost I am right now.  There have been precious few things or people in my life that have ever been constant, and chiefest of those was my mom.  With her gone now, there is no certainty in my world.  The new constant is that I am utterly alone and scared.  I also fear that people are going to soon be tired of me being sad and depressed; that they'll be telling me to get over it and move on.  I need all the support I can get and I'm bad enough as it is asking for it.  Somehow, I hope people will stick with me.

They say grief is a personal journey for us all.  All I know is that at just under four weeks, mine seems to have just begun.  The shock and immediate pain has faded, but I am left in a featureless nowhere, not knowing where I want to go, let alone how to guide myself there.  The rational part of my brain has accepted that Mom is gone, but my soul is torn and bleeding.

Feeling lost after loss

I traveled to my uncle's this weekend and it was good to be around family.  It felt very weird to be there without my mom, though.  College football started this weekend as well, and I'm a big fan of my alma mater's  team.   Watching their first game without Mom was just another in the increasingly long string of jarring notes that my life has become.  She had given in to the lure of football finally, and had been enjoying watching the games with me these last few years.  I'm grateful to have those memories, and in time they will make me smile, but right now it's yet another thing I miss.

My grief is settling in now, from a sharp, keening note to a low, steady pulse that fills my waking world.  I cannot count how many times each day it hits me that my mother is gone and I'm by myself  We won't share dinners anymore, or the weekly shopping trips.  If I need someone to bring me medicine when I'm sick, she won't be there.  I won't get to tease her anymore when I have to help her with the DVD, the DVR, or her computer.  Since I don't have a spouse or children to help me through this, I find myself very alone and intensely aware of the fact.

I had planned to get the house in order for the first time since Mom died.  The refrigerator is full of food that needs to be thrown out now.  The ice dispenser in the door didn't close properly over the weekend, causing the ice inside the bin to melt and coat everything in the lower two-thirds of my freezer in more ice, so I need to thaw all of that.  There's laundry to be done, dishes to be washed, and a whole host of other mundane household tasks that I need to see to.  I thought I would start to tackle it today, but I barely made a dent in it.  It seems that I can manage things to the extent of taking care of my immediate needs, but no more.  I don't know how to move through this empty world I'm in now. 

I know Mom would want more for me, and I want to make her proud of me.  I want to be worthy of all the legacies she left me, but I don't know how to start.  It's still a situation that can only be managed day by day.  I find myself casting around for plans on how to do things, but no matter what thought I first have, it always leads to the fact that my mom is gone.  And there I stop. 

Never the same

I'm just going to make a brief post tonight - I'm exhausted in more ways than one.  My mom was very close to her brother, and Labor Day was always a time we went to go visit him and my aunt.  Since being with family sounded like a good thing, I made the trip by myself.  It's a long drive, and even more so solo.  I was accustomed to making this trip once every few months with Mom and I can tell you it has changed almost beyond belief now.

I'm used to being here at my uncle's house.  One of the things my mom especially liked about us visiting is that everyone was comfortable enough with each other that they didn't feel like they had to have things planned to entertain us.  We just enjoyed spending time together.  It's very good to be in their company, but we were all hyper-aware of who was missing.  My aunt had commented that it was odd not to think of Mom sitting there with her crocheting. It made me think about the fact that my life is not the only one with something missing.

I wish you were here, Mom.

A long road

Two weeks.  I still can't quite wrap my mind around the fact that my mother is gone, even though it seems like there's a reminder in front of me every time I turn my head.  Her love is still with me, along with many memories, and I'm trying so hard to firmly establish them in my heart for the rest of my life.  I miss her voice, I miss her hugs, and I miss her company. 

My world is completely awry, and I don't know how to set it straight.  Some times, I don't even know if I want to set it straight, because nothing seems to matter.  There's an emptiness past the sadness of grief that is somehow even worse.  

Did she know how much I loved her?  Was there something I could have done better that would have allowed her to still be here?  What did I do wrong?  I try not to torment myself, but sometimes when I'm faced with this senseless, gaping void in my life, there doesn't seem to be a limit to the questions that can be asked in hopes that something might somehow make sense.  

I look at the little tag line for this blog and it strikes me that it's improbably optimistic.  Maybe in some number of weeks, or months it won't; with some passage of time perhaps it will seem obtainable.  Right now I'm reeling and the only goal is to make it from day to day.

I miss you, Mom, and I love you.