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

[pbray.livejournal.com]

Yeah, there are some things that never quite go away. My Dad's been dead for seven years now, and the other day I saw something that I knew he'd want to hear about, only to become upset seconds later as I remembered that he was gone.

It's like a papercut that never quite heals--most times you can ignore it, but then it catches on something and the pain takes you by surprise.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

Pulling together last year's tax stuff, and finding things. The receipt for the last time we went out to lunch. Last Mothers Day gift. There are photos on my phone of bathroom rugs--she had wanted green but it had to be the right green, so I took pictures to show her because she couldn't go shopping anymore.

I need to delete those pictures.

[excessor.livejournal.com]

I don't think the hurt goes away, but it softens as time passes. I still look at the photos I took the last time I visited my mom in the hospital, not knowing it was the last time I'd see her alive. I don't cry as much anymore, and instead just miss talking to her. The sharp pain has become a dull ache of remembering something dear that is forever missing.

We were watching the “Faith” episode of Battlestar Galactica the other night. It involves the President, as a cancer patient, talking to another patient in the hospital. It was real enough to make it seem like yesterday, another wound yanked open when I thought it had healed enough.

I sometimes wonder when it won't be that way. I suspect Never as an answer.

[msagara.livejournal.com]

I have tried to write something six times in response to this, and I'm full of fail.

I was off-line this time last year, and the year before it, and I missed this; I didn't realize that it had been less than a year since you lost your mother. I know people who couldn't write a word for a year -- a full year -- after the loss of a parent (in many cases, two years), and the fact that you're writing -- even slowly -- fills me with respect and admiration.

I can't understand your loss, not truly; it's left for my future. But, she had you, there. You were there.

I only hope that you had people there, for you, while you were dealing with all of this.

[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.

[pbray.livejournal.com]

I still have the last gift that I bought for my Dad-- an autographed book of train stories. One of these days I'll donate it to a book sale. There's no time table for these things--when you're ready to delete the pictures you will.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

There were some things that were easy to give away. But there are some of her favorite things that I will always keep.

And I still have a half dozen or so of that last cookies she made--I think she made them last May. I stashed them in the freezer in July--they were a basic sugar cookie that could keep in a cookie jar for months, so they were still in decent shape when I froze them.

I'm just going to keep them in the freezer.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

A friend lost his Dad over ten years ago, and he said it still hits him at times. He was watching a sporting event on TV with his kids, and as they struck up the national anthem, he started crying. His kids all asked him why, and he said that their grandfather always sang along with the anthem, and he always sang off-key.

You are taken unawares, by things you don't expect.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

I know people who couldn't write a word for a year -- a full year -- after the loss of a parent (in many cases, two years), and the fact that you're writing -- even slowly -- fills me with respect and admiration.

The thing is, my Dad passed away in late 2003. After that, I didn't write for almost two years. May 2004, and I still couldn't pull phrases together, much less sentences. There was nothing there, and I felt sure I would never write anything ever again. Mid, late 2005, I started coming around. I will always remember WFC-Madison fondly because of the reinforcement I received. People wanted stories from me. They still wanted to read what I wrote. It helped. But even so, it was Summer 2006 before I really started picking up steam again, writing a couple of short works, then working on ENDGAME in earnest.

I realized eventually that my inability to write wasn't just because of my Dad. I don't know how this will sound, but after he passed, it hit me that Mom was 83 and there were no nonagenarians in her family. I knew I'd be going through the same thing again in a few years, and I think I did much of my mourning ahead of time. I can't say that was the best frame of mind to be in--my BP ran a little high during that time, and there were other indications that I was under constant, low-level tension. But I spent time with Mom, and even when the words started to come back, the urgency didn't follow. Not for a while. Writing took a back seat.

[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.

[e-moon60.livejournal.com]

Partly because of where we live, and quite a large part(ly) because of our son's autism (autism is a very isolating condition, in that it's hard--or was hard--to find empathetic people), we had become isolated, more than I liked, but there was no time....

Then my friend Kathleen got cancer. And for the months until she died (18 months, about) I was part of her support group and saw what a support group really could do--for her, for her husband, for each other. We (as many as could cram into the room in the hospice) were there when she died; some of us had the honor of sitting in bed with her, holding her in the position she felt was most comfortable, taking turns...we sang, all of us, her favorite hymns, over and over. And it was, while painful, one of the most rewarding things I've ever gone through...something most of us said to each other at one time or another (not to her or her husband, of course.)

It really made me think. My mother had had a lot of friends; she outlived many of them and then moved up here, and I was with her when she died, in her house, as she wished...but she had made friends here, people I barely knew. And I hadn't. And I didn't want to live the way I had been living--had started making some changes even before Kathleen died.

You're right. If you want them, you have to accept them, and they have to accept you. There has to be give and take; there has to be passing that bubble of friendship, of shared joy, back and forth, before there can be that shared cup of sorrow. It's so easy, in a busy life, and perhaps especially a writer's life, to become a solitary, resenting "interference" and "interruptions." But we do need one another.

You did not make your mother's choices. They were hers to make. But her choices don't have to control yours. (Says the daughter of the very organized engineer whose study looks like two tornados and a paper blizzard had a fight in the middle of it.)

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

It's so easy, in a busy life, and perhaps especially a writer's life, to become a solitary, resenting "interference" and "interruptions."

And I do so love solitary weekends, because I am able to get things done, and putter at my own pace. I even resent the odd appointment because I want to have all that time to call my own. Not by nature a people person, so I need to force myself to step out the door.

You did not make your mother's choices. They were hers to make. But her choices don't have to control yours. (Says the daughter of the very organized engineer whose study looks like two tornados and a paper blizzard had a fight in the middle of it.)

This is true. Just need to work out the plan. Because I'm not in the right place yet. The last few years, and this last year especially, have been one long transition, with the accompanying sense of restlessness and uncertainty.

I know I need a major change. Just need to figure out how to go about making it happen.