5 Things To Do Today

1. Step away from the coffee pot.  Seriously.  I started out today feeling rather lethargic and now I’m still yawning but my mouth is doing this strange tic-like thing.
2. Decide whether or not I’m going to get sucked into watching the new “90210″ tv series.
3. Figure out what I’m going to wear to work tomorrow/this week and launder accordingly.
4. Find something to make with all the tomatoes I’ve been gifted with from my dad, neighbors, and co-workers.  Salsa? Roast them? Check out canning options?  (Ehh…it’s 86 degrees today.  Fuck that, maybe next year.)
5. Be grateful that I have a job to labor at.  And a job I actually like, to top it off.  I feel blessed.

Today’s Mini Illumination: 8-26-08

An authentic life is the most personal form of worship. Everyday life has become my prayer. ~ Sarah Ban Breathnach

The way things are

My weekend consisted of the following: drinking lots of Chai tea, sneezing, weeping, coughing up some yellowish (but mostly clear) phlegm,  listening to an unusual amount of Natalie Merchant songs, reading books by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross that I happened to already own, watching tear-jerker movies like “What Dreams May Come”, “City of Angels”, and “Elizabethtown”, reminiscing, longing, weeping, moving in slow motion, ordering take out that had no taste to me,  noticing my bottom lip is chapped and realizing the tube of chapstick I have in my purse is the one I’d been using on my mother right up until the day before she died, weeping, sighing, dozing, cuddling my cats, listening to the non-stop rain, weeping…

I talked to my brother today.  He told me he’d had a dream about mom the night before the funeral.  She was lying in her casket in the funeral parlor, but she was alive and talking to both he and I.  She asked us both if it was ok for her to go.  We said it was.  She smiled and closed her eyes.

My dad has been hearing her voice in the middle of the night.  The sound of her crying or calling his name wakes him up.  He tells me he gets up and goes searching in different rooms of their house for her, but she’s not there.

The day after mom passed, I dreamt I was talking to her on the phone and I think she was calling me from the hospital.  Her voice was all raspy and high pitched like it had been when her respirations were poor.  I don’t remember what she said exactly.  Then I was in my parent’s house and she was there.  I was packing up my things and telling her I’d be going away for a long time.

I wish I could have the kind of dream where I’d get the sense she is ok, wherever she is.  I need some reassurance right about now.

The overly analytical part of me is trying to figure out what “stage of grieving” I’m currently in.  I think I vacillate between denial and sadness.  Then I start to think stages of grieving are a probably bunch of crap.

It’s interesting that I ended up getting sick right at the end of this week, immediately following the funeral.  It’s almost as if my body is purposely serving to keep me focused on my own physical ailment at the moment thus keeping me from having to really look at all that has happened other than in short intervals.  I’m too crapped out to really “go there” and acknowledge the various losses I soon will have to face.

I don’t look forward to any of it, but it is necessary to move through nonetheless.  It looms and hovers and waits for me.

My angel

The worst week of my life is coming to a close.  All of the stress, sadness and overwhelming events have taken a bit of a toll on me; I woke up yesterday feeling a cold coming on and today it’s full blown and I’m a fucking mess in more ways than one right now.  The other day one of my cousins pulled me aside at the funeral home and said to me, “You’re the strength of this family now”.   Right now I feel nothing at all like strong.   I know this will pass; it always does.  But for now I’m just wallowing because that’s all I have the energy for.

My mom’s funeral went beautifully.  If one can even say such a thing about a funeral.  My brother and I both gave eulogies.  Here’s an excerpt from how I memorialized my mother, angel that she was and will always be to me:

Many of you here today know about the tragic, sad beginning to my mom’s life-when she was just two years old, she lost both of her parents and an older sister in a horrible accident. It was New Year’s Day 1935 and my mom was asleep in her crib when the apartment building she lived in exploded and caught fire. It was her crib that ultimately saved her, as it flipped over and she was trapped underneath it, and all of the debris fell on top of the crib instead of her. Some people believe in luck or coincidences, but I know better. My mother survived that accident for a reason.

Each of you here today meant something to my mom. And every single one of us can say with certainty that our lives were blessed beyond belief for having my mom be a part of this world. My mother was the kind of person who never asked for much and would go out of her way to help and care for her family. The word sacrifice had no meaning to my mother; she did the things she did with love and kindness because that is who she was. She taught me that genuine caring comes from the heart, not out of expecting something in return… Her philosophy on living is something I’ve embraced and will continue to carry on for the rest of my days, as my prayer to her...

I feel extremely lucky that I was able to spend as much time as I did with my mom over these last weeks. She’d been through a lot physically and medically, yet her emotional and spiritual endurance was literally amazing. As sad as I am that she is no longer here with us, I got to witness the beautiful inner strength that lived inside of my mother; I saw a part of her I didn’t even realize was there. What a gift she gave to me in showing me that. This past week, I’ve talked with some of you about how she passed away, so very quickly on Monday. One minute she was talking to us and suddenly, she was gone. It was the most terrifying and beautiful thing I’d ever witnessed. It was heartbreaking to let go of her, but at the same time, it was a miracle that her children and husband got to be there with her in those final minutes. It’s something I will never ever be able to forget. I think she wanted it that way. And like I said earlier, there really are no coincidences.

Mom, thank you for all the smiles, laughter, love and joy. My heart is breaking but I take comfort in knowing that now I have an angel who will always be at my side, watching over me.

Loss

My mother passed away on Monday, after about six weeks of being in and out of the hospital.  She broke her hip and arm at the end of June and from there, one medical complication after another followed.  She acquired pneumonia and had a heart attack last week.  Her poor little body had been through so very much since that fall.  She ultimately surrendered to respiratory failure the other day, with my dad, my brother and I all around her.  It was such a quick transition; one minute she was complaining about how her breakfast was late and then she got restless, her pulse-ox plummeted, and she was gone.

It’s all still so very fresh in my mind and what hurts me so very deeply right now is that she never gave me the sense that she herself was “giving up”.  She still talked about coming home, finishing rehab physical therapy and being back on track by Christmas.  I don’t think she knew how sick she really was.  It hurts my heart so much right now to think she might have had no idea what was happening to her.  Then again, maybe it was better she didn’t know.  Or maybe she did know and didn’t want us to realize she did.

I go through waves of grieving and non-grieving right now.  I can laugh and joke with my family, talk matter-of-factly with the funeral director, and then be sitting in a restaurant talking about the weather and suddenly the tears will start.  I know all of this is normal.  I just can’t believe what is happening to me emotionally at times.  I just can’t believe how nothing will ever be the same again.   I wonder what it is about crying, the response itself.  Is it a universal human response to sadness and loss?  I mean, I know not everyone cries at exactly the same things.  But, why is it one way raw sadness is expressed and not something else?   I think it’s odd sometimes.

I’ve been working on a couple of things for the funeral.  I’m doing the eulogy and also have been collecting quotes to put into a little memorial booklet to give out at the service tomorrow.  Here is a quote that I keep coming back to that I think is just beautiful:

My mother is a poem

I’ll never be able to write,

Though everything I write

Is a poem to my mother.

~Sharon Doubiago

I’m so going to miss her.  I can’t believe how empty my world already feels without her in it.

Ani DiFranco on the soul of Place…

Ani DiFranco recently talked about how various places and cities have a certain feel…and how she finds herself connected to the history and soul of Places like Buffalo and New Orleans:

I gauge places on how much soul you can feel in the air…that’s why I’m so in love with old buildings. They have soul. They have history. People’s lives have been led in them, and you feel it. You feel connected to the past and therefore aware of the future.

This is a great clip from Ani’s DVD “Render”.  It’s a song titled “Subdivision”; in an undergrad presentation I once used this very song in a slide show to depict issues of race and class.  I’ll never forget Professor C’s praise afterward, telling my partners and I “That was fucking awesome!”.   What can I say, a little Ani goes a long way…

Illuminations of The Week

Illuminating Moment: This moment really belongs to an old friend of mine, but it is such a touching story, I feel I have to make mention of it. 34 years ago, one of my oldest, closet friends was born. Her mom was still in high school at the time and needless to say, the whole “teenage pregnancy” scandal didn’t bode well with any of the families involved. The father, originally born in the U.K., was about to be drafted into Vietnam and so to avoid that clusterfuck, he and his family moved back to England, leaving his girlfriend (my friend’s mom) behind in the U.S. At some point after he left the country, my friend’s mom found out she was pregnant. For whatever reason, she decided not to inform the father that she was pregnant and didn’t let him know he had a daughter for some time. My friend grew up never knowing her dad and it seemed like this would be a part of her life that would always remain a mystery to her. I could never quite wrap my mind around what it might be like to not know about half of who you are, but my friend and her mom did ok in life. So, fast-forward to a few weeks ago…on a whim, my friend decided to peruse one of those websites where you can track down people from various high schools. She saw a name she thought might be her fathers and sent a note, and then promptly forgot about it. What she didn’t know was that she had inadvertently contacted her fathers sister and that this woman (her aunt, in actuality) had been emailing her back. Somehow the information got passed around. And a couple weeks ago, she got a call from England and for the first time in her life, had contact with the man who is her father. My friend has been going through a myriad of emotions in these recent days, mostly good ones. It’s just amazing that she now has a connection to this person after all of these years. She is learning so much about herself, her heritage, and family she never even knew she had. Pretty wild! While some questions might never have complete answers and some situations don’t always make sense, I believe that we are always exactly where we are supposed to be. Had her dad found her 10 years earlier, who knows how this all might have played out? Right now, it’s just amazing to bear witness to my friend metaphorically being born all over again.

Illuminating Celebrity: It was a bit of a somber week with the passing of comedian George Carlin. His caustic but dead-on observations about the world we live in were literally painfully funny at times. In honor of his brilliant way of communicating ideas, words and in general, making us laugh for years–some memorable things said by Mr. Carlin himself:

I would never want to be a member of a group whose symbol was a guy nailed to two pieces of wood.

If God had intended us not to masturbate he would’ve made our arms shorter.

Some people see things that are and ask, Why? Some people dream of things that never were and ask, Why not? Some people have to go to work and don’t have time for all that.

Standing ovations have become far too commonplace. What we need are ovations where the audience members all punch and kick one another.

The main reason Santa is so jolly is because he knows where all the bad girls live.

The very existence of flame-throwers proves that some time, somewhere, someone said to themselves, You know, I want to set those people over there on fire, but I’m just not close enough to get the job done.

When you’re born you get a ticket to the freak show. When you’re born in America, you get a front row seat.

*********

Illuminating, Amusing Feline

Illuminating Link: Zits-be-gone! An amusing, time-suck of a game to test your popping techniques…

Illuminating Ani: Ani DiFranco chopped her hair off recently, but she still as adorable as ever. A new-ish clip from a  concert featuring the tune I’m most digging at the moment,  “Names, Dates and Times”…

Illuminating Trend: Apparently women just don’t have enough body-image issues. Umm…yeah, this kind of saddens me–Vagina Anxiety

Illuminating Quote: For my friend, J.

Every day is a new beginning. Treat it that way. Stay away from what might have been, and look at what can be. ~ Marsha Petrie Sue