Thursday night, wondering where May went

[ksmith]

It's almost June. How did this happen? Received a letter from the local women's health center reminding me that it's time for the annual 'mash 'em in the copier' appointment. I thought, dammit, I just went through that. Then I remembered that I had gone around the time Mom entered the hospital last year, so yeah, mid-June.

It will be a year on 21 July that Mom died, and the weeks leading up were varying degrees of horrible. I'm good at putting things out of my mind, but every once in a while, something sneaks up and bites. She'd be loving the way the Cubs are playing. She loved late Spring flowers, and the weather before it got too hot.

Like a number of folks, I've been following jaylake's good fight, his victory. Cheering him on. But what struck me was how many people he had around him to help him through, friends and lovers and child and family. Because of simple attrition, and circumstances, Mom had me. That was it. There were other people who loved her. Other people who cared. But Mom didn't want them to come until it was too late, and she did realize at the end that maybe it would have been better if she'd asked them to come earlier, maybe even years earlier, even though she didn't enjoy long distance travel herself and usually just wanted to be alone so she could do her work and watch baseball and cook. The thing with people, though, is that there has to be give and take. If you want them to be there, you have to take them as they are. Take them when they're annoying. Aggravating. Scream-making. Take them when they come, sometimes when you don't want them around. Make time. Make room. Make an effort. Even when all you want to do is close the door and get on with your little sliver of life.

There should have been a roomful of people there at the end. It will always bother me. It will always hurt.

Comments

[mevennen.livejournal.com]

It is grim. Both my parents are still with us, but yesterday, while cleaning, I broke a ceramic chalice that belonged to my late partner. It was a pretty ordinary cup, the sort of thing you'd buy in the 1970s, but he didn't have many possessions and this was like another little link with the past, snapped.

And I echo Msagara's thought: that you had people there, for you.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

Photos never meant much to me before, but they do now. I want to collect them in albums. The sad thing is, though, that I don't know who some of the people in them are, and there's no one left to tell me. I think that's what brings me up short most often, the fact that I have questions that will never be answered. When someone passes, they take this fragment of existence with them, and there's nothing to fill the hole.

I had friends. On the phone, via email, and in person. Tears and sympathy from unexpected quarters. At times, I didn't know how to accept it. Mom and I both prized our self-reliance, our ability to do things for ourselves. But you reach a point where you need to stop pushing people away. It's not an easy lesson to learn when you prize independence.