I need to go see my Uncle George and Mike in Florida again soon. They just wrote me an email:
Now you didn't hear this from me....but huggy bear said word on the street is that john and his wife ( sorry I can't think of her name ..my mind is a complete blank..) is going to have another baby ...a boy ... due in august... How do you think they will be able to take care of this one??? Is Vickey old enough to take care of the new one??? Hope your all doing good and we miss you and think of you all daily...
stay healthy and happy ...Love always George and Mike
I heart my Uncle George...and Mike...One month after my mom died, he came up for a week to help prepare for and attend my mother's memorial. At that time and again with the help of Mike afterward, he filled a void that has been in my soul since Mom left me.
I've been having a rough time of it with the grief thing lately...I've been aware that I've been at bottom for some time.
A description of chronic depression that has always resonated with me is that of cliffs and oceans. Most people experience emotions as peaks and valleys--some have steeper hills than others and tumble faster down into the valleys of being depressed, and they have a harder time trying to climb back up to the peaks of contentment (a term which I prefer to happiness, which I believe sets an unrealistic goal of a feeling that we cannot achieve frequently enough nor hold onto for a long enough duration; contentment, on the other hand, is more easily accomplished and therefore comes with more frequency and longevity...but I digress...). Most people only experience short bursts of being depressed, and some (those with the steeper slopes) experience occasional mild depression (sometimes affectionately referred to as The Blues).
And then there are those who experience moderate to severe depression. We fart in your peaks' and valleys' general direction ("Monty Python and the Holy Grail", for those of you who aren't hip enough for that reference...) We experience cliffs and oceans. When we fall into depression, we step off the edge of a cliff; we fall farther and faster, and when we hit the bottom, we fall hard into an ocean of sad. It surrounds and overwhelms us so that we can't see a way out because it's so big and all-consuming. Most of us can tread water and get through our daily lives while trying not to choke as the waves of depression crash over our heads; most of us can ride it out. We're the Moderates. The Severes I can't explain as well because I have been lucky enough not to have to experience that, but I would venture that they are in far choppier seascapes; they probably cannot see land anywhere, not even behind them, where the cliff they fell from used to be. They probably swallow a lot more water with those higher, harder waves, and we all know some of them drown...so it's no wonder they often get to the point where they cannot get through their daily lives anymore. But I digress...
I fell off the cliff ten and a half months ago and have been in the Ocean of Sad ever since. I can figure it to the day, because it was the day I went on my first date since I had returned from England. It was the night that date was interrupted with a phone call followed by a trip to the Emergency Room to see my mother be admitted for what would turn out to be the last time. It was the beginning of the last two weeks of my mother's life.
The night (a Wednesday night) before what would be the last night of my mother's life , the boy I had been dating for two weeks jumped off a roof to prove his love to me. Then, of course, on Friday morning just before 8 AM, she died. I wrote her obituary. I directed the days that followed for my family, and after three days of mourning with them, I found the energy to end things with Crazy Andy. I spent two weeks in a daze, a good portion of that at two of my best friends' house in New Hampshire (hiding out in case Crazy Andy decided to show up at my apartment to slice his other arm open to further prove his love to me--the first arm having been sliced open a year earlier to prove his love to his ex-girlfriend who cheated on him with her cousin).
The first day back from New Hampshire, I went to the funeral parlor to pick up my mother's ashes. Then my nuclear family and I made our first social appearance since my mother left us at the wedding of my cousin Jamie. Jamie and his family--especially his mother and my mother's sister, Mary--are our second nuclear family; Mary is the closest thing I have to a Godmother, and Jamie is like a little brother of mine.
The Big X attended the wedding as Jamie's Best Man, and brought along his girlfriend the slut with whom he cheated on me and his father and stepmother, who were the equivalent of my in-laws for eleven years. It was the first time he and I had seen each other since the night we broke up two and a half years previously. He did not approach me or any member of my family to express sympathy for my mother's death which had occurred just over a week before that day. His parents came to me and spoke with my sister and I for a long time; his gay best friend Matt who I always knew was secretly in love with the Big X approached me at the bar to express his sympathy and share some kind words about my mother. But the Big X didn't have the balls. And that was all the closure I needed on that relationship. Dad, Stacy, Kristy and I had our first picture taken as a family without a mother.
I had forgotten that picture existed until just now.
Stacy, Kristy, and I were to spend the next two weeks cleaning the basement (a promise we had all made to my mother in her last years) but after my first day of cleaning (and heavy lifting), I came home newly inspired to rearrange and clean my bedroom and moved the mattress on my own, throwing out my back. A fight with my sisters ensued over my not pulling my weight with the cleaning despite my bad back for the next few days (during which the first of my financial troubles began to occur, along with the realization of the fact that I would fail to complete my thesis in time to graduate in August). My back got better and I had my niece over for a couple of days, on the last of which we were heading out the door to go to my dad's house and begin my first day back at cleaning when I fell down an entire flight of stairs, cracking my elbow, snapping a toe, and spraining an ankle (and of course re-throwing out my back). My niece had to come to the ER with us, where I witnessed her terror because what she knew of hospitals is that her Nana went there and got very sick and eventually died. I comforted her and got her to understand that I would not die on this particular day in this particular hospital because of that particular accident. More than that specific promise I could not make. But I digress...
The next week or so I spent healing from the fall and recovering from what would be the first of many minor illnesses like colds, bronchitis, and sinus infections, each of which lingered with me longer than usual. The end of the week was the beginning of Uncle George's visit. He came and pulled my sisters and I out of our feuding, helped clean the house for the memorial, and filled a hole that had been in our family since just before 8 in the morning on July 20. The memorial was held on August 25, a little over a month after my mother died, and it was the best and worst day I had had since that awful morning.
My mother's entire family (over 40 sisters, brothers, brothers-in-law, nieces and nephews, grand-nieces and nephews, her mother, her husband and children) and over 30 friends of the family came to my parents' house, which was filled with displays of her artwork and writing. There was the memory book we gave to her for her college graduation (which took place six months after her diagnosis) that was filled with love letters and happy memories from all who cared for her. There was the music video montage with pictures of her throughout the many stages of her life, at the conclusion of which a choir of 50 of her loved ones sang Amazing Grace as her friend Paula accompanied on the piano. My father's brother Jack and a few of my father's friends formed a makeshift folk band and played for awhile as small groups shared memories over wine and food. I do believe it was the best way my mother would have liked to be remembered.
But I digress yet again...
The rest of the month of August, and then September through December were marked for me by continued sicknesses, mild hermitism (yes, I made that word up), the wedding of my dear friends Whitney and Jake, and a lot of wallowing in grief, financial troubles, procrastination of my thesis work, frustrated failings with training Ginny the puppy, and a few bad dating experiences (see the Musician, the Republican, and, of course, the Whore Looker, the story of whom has become legend among my friends, a story that I am begged to tell at parties). In early November, I took a road trip down to Florida, where I picked my sisters up from the airport and we spent a few days visiting Uncle George and Mike. The purpose of the trip was to bring some of my mother's ashes to be placed in a memorial garden he has been creating on his property. Those days with George and Mike--and the solitude of the drive down and back--were the most peaceful I have experienced since my mother died.
I returned from the trip in mid-November and prepared for and hosted our first Thanksgiving without my mother. It was a surprisingly okay weekend--weekend because our family spends the entire day together, followed the rest of the weekend by some combination of Black Friday shopping, traveling to the tree farm to chop down a family Christmas tree, and decorating my parents' house for Christmas. The hangover between Thanksgiving and Christmas was filled with trying to figure out how to buy Christmas presents for family and friends now that my bank account was officially just about dry. I also met J (formerly known as the MF) during this time period, and after a few days of talking, our first date was on December 1.
This ends the first half of the story of my ten and a half months of grief, and since it's 4:30 in the morning after a long night of partying after a long day of cleaning after a slightly less long night of partying on Friday, I'm going to pick up the second half of the story later on.
Posts
