a letter to La Mama
Dearest La Mama -
So it's been a while since we talked. You may have noticed this. I certainly have. And while what's getting in the way - namely, the fact that we're in kind of different places in our lives (so to speak) - represents, I think, an understandable impediment to communication, I figured I'd give you a bit of an update here anyway, just in case.
First things first. It's seven months to the day today since you died, ten days after your forty-second wedding anniversary and two days before your sixty-eighth birthday. It's also Mother's Day. And I have to tell you: I still miss you. Every day. So much it hurts. I'm told by people I trust that the initial period of intense grieving and remembering is one to cherish - that while the feelings don't vanish, they abate over time, and that eventually one misses the strength of the connection to the loved one who's died. And I believe that's true. But I gotta say, I'm not there yet. You were my best friend, Mom, and hands down the truest, kindest, most loving person I have ever known. And I find that at some very basic level, under the long hair and the big mouth and the talking of various reasonably good games, I'm not entirely sure what to do with myself without you. I didn't see that coming. Maybe I should have. Maybe it's just as well that I didn't. It'd've been like Arlo Guthrie and the Huntington's chorea thing: knowledge hanging over my head with no clear way to use it helpfully. Either way, it's a moot point now.
Anyway. The point I'm trying to make here is that I miss you so much my chest hurts.
Moving on.
Speaking of anniversaries: as of a month ago yesterday, I have a new knee. (As the kids you never quite met these days are prone to say, I can haz bionics!) I think you'd already stopped making new memories when my right knee hit the tipping point and began going irretrievably south. Turned out to be degenerative osteoarthritis, exacerbated by that old singing injury (remember that picture of me on crutches on the steps of Seva, my hair still sticky with grey stage silvering from playing yet another of Gilbert's Old, Non-Dancing, Plot-Explicating Dames?). Last spring, my orthopod (getting his law degree online at sixty-mumble - you'd have liked him) told me both knees needed replacing. (Or, as they say around here, needed replaced. I know. Don't ask.) I put it off to late summer because I didn't want to wrestle with my ignorance about the medical choices involved, and I postponed it again in August when you went into the hospital for what turned out to be the last time. In November, the week after we celebrated you with a truly astonishing number and variety of friends, family, and tribe, I made an appointment with a surgeon. He pissed me off (him you would not have liked), so I made an appointment with a second surgeon. That one went better, so we scheduled the surgery, and on 9 April I had a total joint replacement of my right knee. I've got a handsome thirty-staple scar running across eight inches of my leg with three good-sized chunks of metal and plastic underneath it, and I walk straighter and hurt less than I have for three years. It's quite miraculous, really. The sistergirl came up for ten days to take care of me, and - aside from one rather embarrassing breakdown on my part just after I got out of the hospital when I found myself abruptly overcome by a terribly strong feeling of wanting my mommy (literally) - we had a remarkably good time.
I think you'd be proud of the SG and me, actually: we work damn hard at being friends, doing our best to accommodate our significant and deep-rooted differences rather than using them to slash at one another, and by and large I think we've done pretty well. I do wish you'd been compos mentis by the time the Barely Tolerable Brother-in-law entered her life, so that you could have helped her figure out how not to rush into "yes" until she'd actually learned a bit more about who he was and how they might - or might not - work together. They don't, as it happens, and it's not a good scene; I'm actually kind of glad you're not around for it, for your sake. For the SG's, though...well. Send them some compassionate wisdom, Mom; you always had loads of that, loving and understanding and listening, and they need it.
Dad came up to visit me last week and stayed for three good days. We ate out and saw movies and spent a lot of time sitting in the local Barnes & Noble (I know, I know, but there isn't a Borders in Workville!), drinking expensive coffee and talking about history and law and family and what I want to do when I grow up and how that might differ from what I do now. It was a wonderful visit, honestly - much to my surprise and, I think, to his, though not, I suspect, to yours. He's not doing too well physically - one kidney's down for the count and he's been slow to follow up on that, he's got blood pressure problems, he gets dizzy when he stands up too fast, and his sleep cycle's completely inverted. He never was the caretaking one of the two of you, of course - not in the concrete, eat-now-sleep-now-don't-fret-child way - and I must say he hasn't gotten any better at taking care of himself since you stopped being able to do it for him. I don't imagine that surprises you much either. The SG and I take comfort in the fact that at least now it's only him that he's not taking care of. That sounds cold, I know, but it's truth.
There're various work things going on as well - as when are there not? But my back's gone a bit knotty and my cauliflower's almost caramelized (yes, Mom, I eat cauliflower now - will miracles never cease, eh?). And I think I've spent enough time living in this place of mourning today, writing this brief (!?) update and listening to the playlist the SG and I put together for your memorial gathering and looking through all those great pictures of you that we showed as slides at the memorial Mass beforehand. (One of these days I hope to be able to look at the pictures I took of you during the three days leading up to your death, which we did not include in the slideshow. Today is not that day.) So I'm going to end this here. I'll pick it back up at some point; I know you know that.
In the meantime, I might be telling some Mom stories here in the next few weeks and months. If you've nothing better to do, come on by; meet my friends; laugh and cry with us. I think you'll like a lot of the folks I've met, and they you. And to have your company just once again would be - you should pardon the hackneyed expression - a dream come true. Think about it, eh?
--love, your Q
To those in my circle who are mothers of any kind: the happiest of mothers' days. To those in my circle who have lost their mothers: you are in my thoughts and my heart. To all the rest of you: be well and be loved.
So it's been a while since we talked. You may have noticed this. I certainly have. And while what's getting in the way - namely, the fact that we're in kind of different places in our lives (so to speak) - represents, I think, an understandable impediment to communication, I figured I'd give you a bit of an update here anyway, just in case.
First things first. It's seven months to the day today since you died, ten days after your forty-second wedding anniversary and two days before your sixty-eighth birthday. It's also Mother's Day. And I have to tell you: I still miss you. Every day. So much it hurts. I'm told by people I trust that the initial period of intense grieving and remembering is one to cherish - that while the feelings don't vanish, they abate over time, and that eventually one misses the strength of the connection to the loved one who's died. And I believe that's true. But I gotta say, I'm not there yet. You were my best friend, Mom, and hands down the truest, kindest, most loving person I have ever known. And I find that at some very basic level, under the long hair and the big mouth and the talking of various reasonably good games, I'm not entirely sure what to do with myself without you. I didn't see that coming. Maybe I should have. Maybe it's just as well that I didn't. It'd've been like Arlo Guthrie and the Huntington's chorea thing: knowledge hanging over my head with no clear way to use it helpfully. Either way, it's a moot point now.
Anyway. The point I'm trying to make here is that I miss you so much my chest hurts.
Moving on.
Speaking of anniversaries: as of a month ago yesterday, I have a new knee. (As the kids you never quite met these days are prone to say, I can haz bionics!) I think you'd already stopped making new memories when my right knee hit the tipping point and began going irretrievably south. Turned out to be degenerative osteoarthritis, exacerbated by that old singing injury (remember that picture of me on crutches on the steps of Seva, my hair still sticky with grey stage silvering from playing yet another of Gilbert's Old, Non-Dancing, Plot-Explicating Dames?). Last spring, my orthopod (getting his law degree online at sixty-mumble - you'd have liked him) told me both knees needed replacing. (Or, as they say around here, needed replaced. I know. Don't ask.) I put it off to late summer because I didn't want to wrestle with my ignorance about the medical choices involved, and I postponed it again in August when you went into the hospital for what turned out to be the last time. In November, the week after we celebrated you with a truly astonishing number and variety of friends, family, and tribe, I made an appointment with a surgeon. He pissed me off (him you would not have liked), so I made an appointment with a second surgeon. That one went better, so we scheduled the surgery, and on 9 April I had a total joint replacement of my right knee. I've got a handsome thirty-staple scar running across eight inches of my leg with three good-sized chunks of metal and plastic underneath it, and I walk straighter and hurt less than I have for three years. It's quite miraculous, really. The sistergirl came up for ten days to take care of me, and - aside from one rather embarrassing breakdown on my part just after I got out of the hospital when I found myself abruptly overcome by a terribly strong feeling of wanting my mommy (literally) - we had a remarkably good time.
I think you'd be proud of the SG and me, actually: we work damn hard at being friends, doing our best to accommodate our significant and deep-rooted differences rather than using them to slash at one another, and by and large I think we've done pretty well. I do wish you'd been compos mentis by the time the Barely Tolerable Brother-in-law entered her life, so that you could have helped her figure out how not to rush into "yes" until she'd actually learned a bit more about who he was and how they might - or might not - work together. They don't, as it happens, and it's not a good scene; I'm actually kind of glad you're not around for it, for your sake. For the SG's, though...well. Send them some compassionate wisdom, Mom; you always had loads of that, loving and understanding and listening, and they need it.
Dad came up to visit me last week and stayed for three good days. We ate out and saw movies and spent a lot of time sitting in the local Barnes & Noble (I know, I know, but there isn't a Borders in Workville!), drinking expensive coffee and talking about history and law and family and what I want to do when I grow up and how that might differ from what I do now. It was a wonderful visit, honestly - much to my surprise and, I think, to his, though not, I suspect, to yours. He's not doing too well physically - one kidney's down for the count and he's been slow to follow up on that, he's got blood pressure problems, he gets dizzy when he stands up too fast, and his sleep cycle's completely inverted. He never was the caretaking one of the two of you, of course - not in the concrete, eat-now-sleep-now-don't-fret-child way - and I must say he hasn't gotten any better at taking care of himself since you stopped being able to do it for him. I don't imagine that surprises you much either. The SG and I take comfort in the fact that at least now it's only him that he's not taking care of. That sounds cold, I know, but it's truth.
There're various work things going on as well - as when are there not? But my back's gone a bit knotty and my cauliflower's almost caramelized (yes, Mom, I eat cauliflower now - will miracles never cease, eh?). And I think I've spent enough time living in this place of mourning today, writing this brief (!?) update and listening to the playlist the SG and I put together for your memorial gathering and looking through all those great pictures of you that we showed as slides at the memorial Mass beforehand. (One of these days I hope to be able to look at the pictures I took of you during the three days leading up to your death, which we did not include in the slideshow. Today is not that day.) So I'm going to end this here. I'll pick it back up at some point; I know you know that.
In the meantime, I might be telling some Mom stories here in the next few weeks and months. If you've nothing better to do, come on by; meet my friends; laugh and cry with us. I think you'll like a lot of the folks I've met, and they you. And to have your company just once again would be - you should pardon the hackneyed expression - a dream come true. Think about it, eh?
--love, your Q
To those in my circle who are mothers of any kind: the happiest of mothers' days. To those in my circle who have lost their mothers: you are in my thoughts and my heart. To all the rest of you: be well and be loved.