As the time passes (10 years)

As the time passes, it gets easier, and harder. Easier because there's less pain. Harder because you've been gone longer. Why does grieving get easier, anyway? (This is a lie, by the way, I'm not sure it ever gets easier.) Is it only because we forget? Or because we're more used to it? Like the initial shock has worn off, and the gnawing hole of you being gone is now just a hole, like a piercing, once red and raw and swollen, now flesh formed in a circle, smoothed over. When I cry over you now, I no longer feel like I'm going to vomit. It may hurt less to miss you, this forgetting, but in a way it hurts more, realizing I'm losing the feel of you, the what it was like to have a mom, more and more year after year. The feel of what you were like as a person. Did I ever know? Or did you die right when I was at that border between needing you as a guide and learning to love you as a friend?


If we hadn't forgotten the you of you, would it hurt more? The dream I had about you the other night, that best, saddest dream, it was like the prick of a needle. I felt the grief that's been dormant all this time. I remembered you as you were. I remembered the hurt like a searing, branding pain. And you weren't sick! You haven't been sick in a while, I think. I just realized it. Though I don't suppose you'll ever stop being rail thin in my dreams, the thin you got when you got sick, though not the bundle of bones you were at the end. At least you're not sick anymore. For years I dreamt of you that way, slowed down, clutching at furniture. Resting. Or worse, coming back to tell me you had to die again.


When it happened, it was so hard to absorb everything. How frail you were, how we knew what was coming, all the memories of you in pain that didn't go away just because your pain went away. The more years that pass, the more I'm able to remember without shying away and shutting down. The more I can handle. Now I think of your parents' beautiful home in the hills without remembering how sick you were when Grandfather died, how you were barely keeping it together, borrowing your stepmom's skirt and suddenly seeming like an old woman, hunched over with pain, your abdomen swollen. I remember small moments, like the time we saw two tiny sweet little owls perched on the dogwood just beside our driveway at dusk, just minutes from full night. I don't remember what we talked about, just that we talked all the time.

Last night, I was thinking about you in the last month, how chemo is a monster that makes cancer pretty by comparison. I came home for a visit, too late. I should have known. You didn't tell me. Stupidly selfless till the end. Was this after you called to say you had only months left, and I cried into the sink and felt like that moment was forever, that that ugly yellow rental sink was the rest of my life? It must have been. You rocked back and forth like you could rock yourself out of the moment. Your head was too large for your body, your temples and your jaw so pronounced, your diaper visible through your cotton pants. The pain was your world then, we were peripheral. I didn't even stay. I went back to Chicago and came home again a few weeks later, when your doctor said come home now, come home for the last time. You were too tired, too fuzzy to talk. You lay in the hospital bed in our living room with a blue blanket. I played the guitar, a piece of you I could hold onto. The leaves outside were such a bright, vivid green, the days flawless and blue one after the other.

You ate graham crackers by the halves. You cradled a little blue tub for when you got sick. Your insulin machine fell away from your body, got tangled in the sheets. Hospice came and went. Your last night came and you were crying because your tongue hurt. We had medicine for that, but it didn't work. We had morphine, but it didn't work. We slept in sleepless shifts, full of twitchy dreams. My brother woke me to tell me you were worse, calling out. I sent him to sleep on the couch. You kept crying out, help, Mia. I felt so bad for you, not just that you were in pain, but that it must have been a horrible, morphine dream pain, that you didn't know what was happening or why, or possibly even where you were, just that it hurt. I called Hospice and said, I don't know what to do. They told me to give you more morphine, so I did. Your cries calmed into whimpers then into little grunts. Your eyes fell to little slits. Your breathing was ragged and slow. Then slower.


I woke up my brother and told him to come, that it might be time. We sat on the couch and watched you, not knowing what to expect. Death, I guess, is something you learn, just like everything else. The one thing the passage of time has done is dull the memory of those final moments, when black bile came out of your mouth, like a tide rushing forward, like it wasn't even you, but something else hurrying to try to get out of your body. Muddy water poured out of your mouth, hit the sheets, splashed onto the carpet below in big round stain that made me think of cliches of detective shows. We sat there openmouthed and horrified. More liquid came out of you than could possibly be in you. We knew this was probably the end, so we went upstairs to get Dad. What a blessing that he didn't have to see that happen. He came down with us. The night was just beginning to end, the house was a blue-gray color, peaceful, like day would never come. I was content to stay in the in between time, for over to be the future, for us all to be still like you. You were so still. For every moment that passed, we didn't know if you'd gone or not. 

You would have appreciated those last few moments, not just for how we banded together as a family, but the humor of it. We took one another's hands and watched you, saying, is she dead? Is she dead? How about now? Wait, I think she'd dead now. No, now she's definitely dead. Wait, no, I see her breathe. (Laughter.) No, now she's definitely dead. Your breathing slowed like a coin spinning on a countertop. We weren't sure until the moment it actually happened, and then we were sure.


I'd say most young Catholics have a complicated relationship with God, and my spiritual sensibilities stray more toward the pagan and theist than in the direction of moldy old men in marble halls, but we all wonder about the human soul, what connects us to our bodies, what makes us alive. The moment you died, it was like that animating force evaporated instantaneously. What was left, it wasn't you, it was just a wax sculpture. Before you began that inevitable march toward decay, in the second you died, your skin was already different. I realized how when you were alive, even in total stillness, you were still animated, still producing light, still moving. The second you left, the stillness was different, fake. There was no you. I had to believe that you'd been inside your body and then gone, swooping up toward some celestial after party (which would hopefully have aspects of Maine and all your favorite cities, rolled into one).


I guess it's weird that all this time has passed, a year and a half since I started this blog, and this is the first time I'm talking about you actually dying, instead of what happened after. I hope that's a good thing. Half the reason to do this is hoping that writing to you and about you strains out some of the muddled bits in my heart so that I can live stronger and better. It sucks that you suffered. I hate that it happened, but thank god it already happened. You're okay now. You're safe. Do you remember that song I wrote and played for you? I said, I think it might break me when you're gone, but I know that if I sing your song, someday you'll come back to me, radiant and new, and you'll reach out your hand and tell me that I'm coming home with you.


Well, it did break me. It broke me until I thought I wouldn't survive. I'm not the same person I was before. I don't know whether that's good or bad, I'm just here. But I still love you. And if you're out there, you know, hanging out with all the cool dead people you've met, I know you still love me too. As long as there's love, the sun will keep shining. I'll keep trying to do the right thing. To live my life. And you enjoy yourself, but don't forget to come get me when I'm ready to go. I'll be waiting.

I had the best, saddest dream about you last night

I had the best, saddest dream about you last night

You had shorter hair
You were in town just for the day
I said, please don't go, a year is too long, and cried
Everyone wore holiday garb, dorky seasonal earrings
Susan and Betty were there, and Jim, and Dad and Bro
I knew you would be there,
I felt you when I walked in the door

Earlier in the dream,
I had a Groupon for trees to climb--I guess the company was going under or just starting out; not many purveyors of climbing trees out there (a damn shame in my view).

The man brought a selection; redwoods, birches, trees I'd never seen. They were all taller than my field of vision and all the width of a telephone pole, I was supposed to pick three to climb. They'd planted them all though; they'd take away the ones I didn't want, but I wanted them all, they were growing in a lush green backyard, tall and straight and lovely in a line and I wanted to keep them. I attached a tire swing and you came to the yard and sat by a criss cross fence draped with white flowers and watched me make huge parabolas in the air. We were happy, but we wondered if the trees were too close together, that when they grew, their roots would intertwine and they would strangle each other.

Later, I left the trees and was walking through the city, pushing against a great wind. People were cupping their hands around birds, gathering them to safety indoors so they didn't get blown away, gathering them from ledges on buildings and cafe sun decks. It was slow going and strange, a strange hilly city I've dreamed about before. Dusk was falling, the sidewalks were turning grey. I lifted my feet from the pavement and floated forward, thinking flying might be faster. I knew I had to get home, that you'd be at dinner. It was Thanksgiving, I think. I don't know how I knew you'd come, I just felt it.

Your hair was so much shorter--it was cute, manageable I guess. When you were alive, you always refused to grow it out even though I always wanted you to. Back to your old tricks! I felt your presence like you can feel someone watching you on the back of your neck, and I walked into the dining room, and there you were. I walked across the room and we hugged. Everyone there knew what it meant, that you'd been gone for so long, that this was a reunion. We were sitting at the table, about to start our meal, people saying things they were thankful for, little blessings. Sam said, does anyone want to add something? I looked up and met your eyes, your hair still black, poking out from under your ears in little tufts, your red and white sweater, your broad shoulders and big dark eyes. I thought about how much I missed you, how the time spent not seeing you was a killing time, a reaping of the heart. I thought to myself that I wouldn't see you again until next Thanksgiving, but the pain was the same. I think part of me knew. I looked up at you and said, "Please don't go. A year is too long." And I don't have the heart to miss you.

Sorry...

Okay, okay, I'm sorry about what I said in my last post. Maybe I was a wee bit harsh. I mean, it wasn't your fault you died. You didn't want to die, right? You didn't kill Dad. But you know me. You produced me, after all, so I guess when I'm like this, it's not unexpected. Were you surprised when I popped out like that? You always knew I carried an armadillo shell to cover a sensitive interior (and we can all imagine what armadillos look like underneath), but it's more than that. I walk that line between honesty and cruelty--I guess they call it brutally honest for a reason. I don't mean to hurt people, I just don't know how not to be that way. You'd be proud though, I've really tried to be better in the past few years, kinder I guess. Your dying helped with that. Husband helped with that.

But when you died, I told myself I wanted to live my life to make you proud, to make your legacy honorable, that I was something that came of it and could add to it by being the best human being I could be (no, I didn't join the army). I told myself that I had to tell the truth, no matter what. Have I really done that? Or is truth-telling a new euphemism for sharpening (your tongue with) your spite? Do I reserve my "truths" for fights with my husband? For slagging off my boss? For judging strangers and friends? Sometimes it's hard to tell what truth to tell. And what is telling the truth anyway? Does it matter if no one hears you? Does it count if it doesn't compromise the comfort of your own life? Is it brave if it doesn't challenge what people think?

There are so many truths worth speaking. I want us to have the courage to talk about fixing our environment now, before it's too late. About how women should be fighting to keep from being ground back under the heel of conservatives and men and other women. I want to ask questions: Are we, as humans, fundamentally unkind? Is there hope for us? I feel like no one knows how to fight back, how to say it, how to make people listen. How to tell the truth. I don't know. I wish I had your answers. The older I get, the more I wish I had your advice to rely on, your wisdom. The way you had of imparting those few gentle words that I could trust and carry with me like a little guidebook. Man, I miss you. I'm just guessing my way through life. Everybody does, but it would be different with you by my side.

the dead don't dance

the dead don't dance
or if they do
it's not for you, child
it's not for you

the dead stay dead stay dead stay dead
no respite
they don't have sick days, or time off

but they demand of you
yapping in your ear all the time like patrick swayze in ghost;
did you know he died at 57 just like you?

here are the things your ghost asks most:
why did you let yourself get so sick?
didn't you know you had a family history?
why didn't you get the test?
were you scared?
surely you knew you should, didn't you?
you're not the ill-informed statistic to whom the word hasn't gotten out
wealthy, white, well educated, didn't your doctor tell you when you were 50?
didn't your brother (the psychiatrist)?
at 50 if you'd had a colonoscopy, maybe you'd be here today
instead of having cocktails with dead actors at cancer casualty get-togethers on the other side
are famous people famous over there too?

i mean, what were you thinking?
your mother, first
then you, a structure of cellular inevitability
and yet
no doctors until the tiredness said
in three years you'd be _____ be _____ be _____  be _____

if, i argue,
because one must always present one's case with logic,
if you must be dead (stubborn even in your repose), then fine
but why so uptight? live a little
let's have a visit or two
water down this millenial absence, won't you?

why can't you be dead for, say, five years at a time? five i could bear. or ten? it will be ten in july.
surely after ten, a winner anniversary, we can have a party!
no really
let's celebrate your deathaversary
a theme just macabre enough to be a hit in a two-horse town
could you not get time off for good behavior? be the guest of honor?

or if not, perhaps we could congratulate our father
on the ten years without you, grey before but stooping more now
looking up with rambling eyes and a spine like a dried stem

you killed him, you know
(his body he's done in on his own)
but that light
the one that makes us alive
it started off strong
maybe like me, hoping you'd return
but years of weathered hope and he's gone 

matchstick brittle

and yellow wan

so anyway, think about it for a day or two. i don't require an immediate response
though i can't imagine you've got much going on
i'll be waiting at the other end of the phone line
should you choose to come through

Technology 2oo4

Dear dead mom (I find it hard to even capitalize your mom name, it's so awkward from lack of use),

How are you today? I know you're dead and you may or may not watch over us, but if you do happen to be watching, are you paying attention to how much technology has changed and how quickly the world is moving forward since you died? I mean, in 2004 I had a flip phone. I was very impressed with its ability to take pictures. Now I have an iPhone that I'm looking at photos if people's houses on in an app for a website called Houzz. When I flip the page to the next photo, the gimmicky little green price tags on the items that you presumably find for sale via the app swing to and fro as though you've really taken the whole scene, grasped it and pulled it sideways. They swing and then the swinging calms down and eventually stops after a few seconds. When you trash a picture, it slides diagonal down in crumpled waves in a way that I find quite trippy and entertaining. What is the technology that allows this to happen? When did they find it? Who invented it and where was it first used? I mean, this is crazy! Imagine taking this app back to 2004 and being like look at this thing that I think nothing of opening up and using on the L train on the way home. It would blow people's minds! And yet now it's commonplace.

I know you would be just as curious and excited about all this stuff as I am. I know you would love to have an iPhone, you would get such a kick out of it! We could iChat each other, wouldn't that be fun? Dad is too old to have gotten on board with texting, and anyway, he has huge fingers. I love how you were so into email when Dad was still trying to figure out how to use the CD player (and still doesn't know). Dad inherited your cell phone when you died, did you know that? It was so weird, for the longest time after, I had your name saved in my phone so that it would say "Mom calling." I had to change it because it broke my heart with hope a little bit every time he called, like this time it was really you checking in to make sure I was okay. I had all these voicemails from you saved too; you calling to thank me for a Norah Jones CD, pleased with my Amazon.com note that said "a little bit of sun to brighten up your winter," your voice husky with chemo treatments; you on the way to New York to visit Grandfather, in the hospital again. He would die just less than two months before you. You said it was "white knuckle" driving in the snow but that he was in good spirits. You sounding cheerful and warm, Hello, my Mia, I got your message, just wanted to call…. Every time the voicemails came up to be deleted, I would dutifully save them. For 8 years, your voice was on my phone, and then I got an iPhone in 2011, and plugged it in, and it automatically updated everything, deleting you forever. I called the Verizon guy and actually told him my dead mother's voicemails had been on my phone, but it was no use. I climbed out of bed and went into the kitchen with tears streaming down my face, and my fiancé said, what's wrong? I had kept telling him I wanted to play him those voicemails for him, but it never seemed like the right time.

This summer I was scouring the web again for evidence of her (how hard it is to speak directly too you! I've switched into the you're dead voice already) and I found a video clip of her speaking on public television in 1981. I realized with a start that she was my age in the video, which was such a bizarre recognition, like I'd discovered the existence of math, or the moon. Parents are so…parental; we don't let them be human, or young. I never thought about her being my age until I was this age. A kid sure, but not a person I could envision in a similar place in her life, thinking some of the same thoughts, having some of the same struggles. She, too, was married, and she'd just had me, and she sounded so professional, so sure of herself, so knowledgable about her field. She looked so young and beautiful. I wish I could go back there and say, you were great, I really enjoyed watching you, you sounded so smart. I'm so proud of you. Like I'm her mother. Someday I will be older than her though. The day I turn 58, I"ll lap her. 

a moment aside

Suddenly the air is full of a sweet and whimsical floral smell and I become aware of the sound I've been hearing for ten minutes but haven't registered; the tearing of paper. I imagine the person behind me, a magazine open in her (?) lap, finding a scent she likes. She tugs at the ad and the fold of glossy paper rips through at the soaked tab. Perfume explodes into the air like a memory cloud of summer, grows more sweeter and intense, dissipates. My spirits lift for just a moment before the spell breaks and I remember where I am.

Remember to be! Remember to grieve

When did I forget how to be myself?
I was reading on the car trip to LEX for T-day this blog post in which the author mentions it being her "Jesus Year" (http://happydeadmomday.blogspot.com/2013/08/happy-dead-mom-day-22-can-you-turn-into.html) and I guess that really resonated with me because I've been thinking about what that means ever since. I've been thinking about turning points this whole year without thinking of it as a Jesus year. I just started my new "save my sanity" job in River North after nine months of commuting to Glenview, and I am grateful for the space and the time and the sleep and the feeling of relief that rushed into my life and the tiny blips of happiness that appear every once in a while. Why am I not actually happy? Is it the dark Chicago winter? The coming of age dilemma? The fear of the aging of my one remaining parent and what that will do to my life just when I'm beginning to feel like a person again? The obsessing over stupid tiny thoughts like this? Recap: I am thirty-three, the year my mom was when she had me. I am ten years a motherless daughter, at least I will be this July 20. To me, thirty-three= pressure to have kids and make a GD decision about the path your life is taking and all that pressure is hanging over me like the sword of Damocles, or a cartoon piano/anvil. I want to do something cool, something big, something kind, and guess what, I can because TOMS shoe guy says so in his book (which I did NOT buy :) I don't know why these entrepreneurs are all so taken with sending me their books, Zappos sent me one too last time I complimented them on customer service). But I feel hemmed in by my inability to know what's brave and what's easy. That should be easy, right? It should be, if you trust your own brain. But is cutting and running the hard thing to do? Or is it the easy way out? How do I know which voice is the universe telling me what the right path is?

^

^

^


So this above was the depths of the Chicago winter. If I'd known how snowy and arctic it was going to be, GAH! I'm glad I didn't. But it's March! Yay spring someday! Every now and then, there's a foggy day where you can smell that chlorophyll hint of spring in the air under all the gravelly cigarette-and-trash-ladden-exhaust-tinted crystal castles of snow and ice that line our proud big shouldery sidewalks. Since it's my birthday month, my so-called Jesus Year is almost over for this year, but not by a long shot for my so-called life. That's what we call 90's humor, y'all. But seriously, Kenyonite John Green wrote “What is the point of being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable?” What is the point? I mean, I don't think remarkable has to be big or even loud, but it should feel remarkable to us, on our level, right? I personally think it's remarkable that my husband knows which of my clothes to take out of the dryer (especially since I've shrunk 2 of his favorite shirts), so I'm easily held in thrall, but I do think you can have quietly remarkable moments, and sometimes it's those things instead of the loud things that reset your foundations in subtle and permanent ways. I'm still trying to figure out what that means to me.
 

All this snow, all this cold, speaking of shifting foundations, has actually moved our apartment. The husband is running around taking pictures of the newly-formed cracks, the doors that no longer shut properly. If winter can move something so rock solid as this 100-year-old brick house, then it's no surprise that it should be able to move me too, crocus-like and grouchy as I am. Winter is an opportunity, for those of us who live their lives in varying stages of grief cycles, to be stuck indoors and confront yourself in a way that doesn't permit running away. Sometimes I just need to lie in bed and cry and feel like an orphan for half-hours at a time, and without that downshift and battery recharge, I'm not good at being whole. Sometimes I forget that I need to lie in bed and cry and feel like an orphan, and then I get mad at The Husband for not being a husband and a dead mother too, which is not his job. 

It's been almost ten years. My 93-year-old great aunt said a year or so before she died that she was as old as she was and still missed her mother. Revelation! I don't know what I thought; that that pain would ever actually go away just because the shape of your body changed? How silly of me! I'll be missing my mom till my dying day, and probably I'll still need to do my orphan rain dance as an octogenarian. Grief never goes away. It just changes shape like we do. 

So, personal voyage, self-discovery: music, words, and organization! I realized that when you start forgetting who you are, you have to go back to the basics. This week, I pulled out my box of music that I've written since the year before she died. Some of it doesn't even have the guitar chords written down, but I still know them from heart. Revisiting the songs that took me through her loss and various heartaches and heart breaks along the way has been like seeing an old friend without any of the shyness or initial pretense. I love these songs; they're part of me, even the embarrassing ones, the clichéd ones, the not so good ones. They make me remember being that age and feeling those things. And it makes me want to beat myself on the head for not keeping a regular journal, because nothing is more useful or entertaining when you are trying to recreate the past in your mind. 

So I try to reconnect and to stay sane by filing all my little papers ways in those delightful legal-sized boxes from The Container Store, making my life more colorful and less clutterful because clutter in your house leads to clutter in your mind (at least in mine). Thanks, Mom, for not only giving me your guitar, but taking it to have it mended and leaving it for me to find, all whole and glorious and full of promise, giving me an outlet for music, but also a key to surviving your loss. Thank you, Husband, for believing in me and letting me be a little crazy sometimes and dead-mom it up when I need to.