Monthly Archives: August 2011

thank you

Posted in grief, happiness, life, marriage, mother by

i’m bound to thank you for it.

i have been remiss to write my thank you notes.  for our wedding.  for my mother’s funeral.

i think it is the duplicity of the task that has kept me from starting.  not that they are redundant, but that they are linked.  i cannot do one without the other.  so instead of dealing with one or the other, i dealt with none.

until today.

i finally got out the funeral book to find the information that would lead to the creation of the thank you notes for things related to my mother’s passing.  yes, it is odd that i started with a sad event that took place [by a margin] after the happy event, but maybe it is not completely.  it’s the harder task to accomplish, so i couldn’t put it off.  if i completed those notes, i had the good notes to look forward to writing.  plus, there were fewer notes to write.  the “task” seemed as though i could accomplish it.

but then i opened the guest book.  it was not what i expected.  it was more.  i expected a book, maybe with a title page, and some pages with guest info.  instead it was a chronology, or a final summation, of my mother’s life.  alongside the cold hard facts of her passing were words of comfort.  quotes, sayings, poems and psalms.  the two intertwined to provide the reasoning [?], solace [?], story [?] of my mother’s passing.  halfway through i had to stop reading and get right to the data.  it was all too much.  i scrolled through the names, the witnesses of her last service, and stopped again.  i picked up the thank you notes and started writing to the people i knew and were “easy” for me to communicate to first. i got through the bunch.

[numb]

i started on the wedding thank you notes.  writing them was rather uneventful, but their juxtaposition to those for my mother’s funeral was unsettling. i am more than grateful to the people in my life, but having to detail both sides back-to-back is not how i expected.

so thank you.  for the happy and the sad.

things i got from my mother

Posted in fitness, grief, mother, things i got from my mother by

my mother was an avid holistic nutritionist.  she got that from her mother.  now that did not mean she only followed alternative medicine and did not believe in traditional medicine; rather, it mean that she knew diet played a role in one’s overall well-being.  while she may not have always acted in the proper way, with that knowledge, but she always took her vitamins.  she had a whole kitchen cabinet full of them.

recently, i started taking vitamins again.  regularly.  more regularly than i ever have before.  [i have some that i am prescribed to take, but in a totally volunteer nature, this is the first time i have managed to take them this long.]  i realized that as i take my vitamins every morning and every night, i think of my mother.  this was her routine, though she also took them throughout the day.   this was her habit/practice that i am now adopting.  one small ways she is living on in me.  helping me through this.  staying close.  and in this small way, this small ritual, she is here with me.

becoming conscious of this, has made me start to think of the other things i got from my mother.  i need to start documenting them so i don’t forget.

my father

Posted in father, grief, life, mother, unfinished business by

this is a subject i never, or very rarely, discuss.

i do not know my father.  i know of him, but i don’t know him.  i have never officially met him, though i know that he has seen me when i was 2.  so maybe i did “officially” meet him, but not in a way that i would ever remember.

i’m sure you won’t believe this, but that has never really been an issue to me.  really.  sure, there were times i wish i had one around but those were infrequent.  i only wanted a father around in the conceptual sense, not really in the practical/actionable sense anyway.

–

actually, the only memories i have of wanting a father around involved father/daughter dances.  even then, it wasn’t so much that i wanted a father, but that i wanted a male figure to take me to such a dance.

oh, there was one other time.  when i was in elementary school i went to spend some time with my uncle, his wife [my other aunt], and their daughter [my cousin].  in this occasion we were on vacation in cape cod.  my cousin would fall asleep downstairs while we were watching tv at night and he would carry her up to bed and put her to sleep.  i never had this experience, so one night my cousin fell asleep and i faked the same.  i wanted to know/feel what it was like to be carried up the stairs to bed, be tucked in, and sleep.  it was a mixture of curiosity for the concept and curiosity for the feeling.  i can’t say i gained much from the experience, but perhaps a glimpse into fatherly love.  not sure.  i don’t have a strong memory of the feeling, just the experience.

other than that, i have never had feelings one way or the other towards my father.

–

i have not longed to find him.  i have not hated him.  i have not loved him.  i have really just had a void of feelings there.  thoughts of him rarely crossed my mind.  it was just a non-issue.  he was a non-issue.

that was okay.  i mean i tried to put myself into a mind-set that put me at some point down the road where i wanted to talk to him and i just couldn’t imagine it.  it just was not there.  i had no desire to talk to him.  not out of malice or anything, maybe just out of disinterest.  and all of that was okay.  no big deal.  really.

little did i know,  that my mother’s death would open a pandora’s box regarding my father.

as i cleaned out her house, it started with a valentine i came across from him.  it would have been from right around the time i was conceived.  bizarre.

it extended to random letters and cards.  mostly from not long after my birth.  one was general “cockiness”.  one was full of updates and sexual in nature [bizarre and disgusting].  one was this letter [above], not dated, but the context clearly showing a communication path that went beyond the first few years beyond my birth [something of which i was unaware].  and later it trailed to several other letters from my late teens.  what the f*ck?

of my father i only knew a few things:

1) his name
2) his general location [a bordering town to my hometown]
3) he spent time in jail
4) i had not met him, but he came by when i was 2, much to everyone’s dismay
5) he had two other daughters [this is not completely a fact... just what i heard from the family]

but i had no idea that my mother and he still communicated after my birth.  come to think of it, i knew nothing of their relationship.  this never bothered me, but now i had evidence of some other dimension i could not piece together from what limited verbal communication was provided about my father and it didn’t make sense.

what to do.

i’ve thought on this a great deal and i still have no answers, but here are what thoughts run through my head.

should i contact him to find out?  i almost immediately go to a resounding, “no” on this one because whatever he says about what happens, there is no way for me to visit the other side of it in my mother’s view.  given that she raised me, that she was there, the story deserves that much.  so if i can’t get it and i could only hear “his” side, then i am not sure i want it.  i would always want to know her side and i just couldn’t get it.

should i contact him/them to know my family/siblings?  many people who fall into our category of family would not be in our life if it were not for that moniker.  falling into the category of ‘you can choose your friends but not your family.’  well, here i *can* choose my family.  what if these people are not people i want to associate with?  what if i open the door and i can’t go back?  see, if he were the kind of man i would choose to have in my life, he would be the kind of guy who no matter what would contact his daughter.  no matter what happened during the years with the mother, there would be at least one attempt of contact [letter, call, something] that would allow the child to know that you at least at some point tried.  effort is everything.  and there never was any.  not to me anyway.  none.  a man who would be in my life would have done something.

so that really puts me back in the position i have been in all along.  only now, there is this pandora’s box of information that my mother kept, that i now have to go through, that provides me a window into a life i don’t know.  that i will never know.  and now leaves me torn as to what to do.

i wish i could go back to my apathy.

My Mother’s Role

Posted in grief, life, mother by

As I drove to NJ for work today, I called a friend [HAG] who I was remiss at contacting. [Heck, that is really probably everyone, but I am trying to get to people here and there]. We have exchanged emails, but I have not spoken to her since my wedding. So I decided to start catching up today.

It was a great call. We started with all sorts of depressing things. A HS friend who’s father passed because he was hit by a car on a bicycle. A 9 year old girl who passed away in some sort of accident or something, but who’s generosity was so contagious that a cause she supported raised over a million dollars in a few weeks. And a man [Matt] who’s wife delivered their first child and passed away the next day when she headed out on to hold her baby for the first time.

On the last one, I mentioned how I found out about his story shortly after my mother passed because of a blog my friend wrote. I told HAG how I started to read back through his old entries and ended up reading his book and how helpful that was for me [in some possibly macabre] way. I felt like I understood how he felt. How he wrote in a real, honest way that I could relate to, and he was through it in some way. While I recognize there is no other side of this per se, there is a point where the grief is not so overwhelming, where it is not the central portion of one’s life.

Following my depressing discussion, HAG mentioned something that has really been sitting with me. She said how my mother saw me through my wedding and that her role in my life and was complete. She fulfilled her purpose [not necessarily just me being wed, but in general] and that it was okay for her to go. While this is not a new thought process, and has been said by others and in some way internalized by myself, it is still something that I fight against in some way.

My mother lived a very tough life. She had very little and suffered a great deal. But the thing is, she finally got to a place where there was some relief to her. She finally got the resources to be comfortable. To do the things she wanted to do. To experience the life she spent so many years missing out on. And before she got to even have a little taste, it was all taken away. It all ended just like that. Never got the benefit for all the suffering she endured.

That’s what kills me. She didn’t have to live forever, but I wish she could have lived a little longer to enjoy life just a little.

I know that there is never enough time with our loved ones. No matter what, the ones left behind always wish they had more. I just wish…

It’s the little things

Posted in day to day, grief, life, mother by

It is funny what triggers emotional tidal waves. I can be out and get hit by a memory from the most seemingly innocuous thing. Suddenly I am transported to another time when my mother was still here. A time when she was a real living, breathing person and not just a memory swirling through my head.

Today we went to Costco. The whole trip was particularly uneventful, a standard shopping trip to stock up on supplies we have neglected since before the wedding. As we finished our trip, B got in line to check out and I headed to the restroom. For a minute I was considering getting a treat on our way out, so I scoped the menu options and saw the berry sundae.

Yes, I lost my composure over a berry sundae.

The berry sundae that was most of my mother’s diet in the last few weeks of her life. She so enjoyed them. She loved ice cream in general but the berry sundae was the vice she enjoyed the last days of her life.

–

I was headed to Costco to pick up pictures I printed for the wedding so I called my mother to see if she wanted a berry sundae. Now I knew that if I was picking up a berry sundae that meant I had to pick up two. One to eat now (or eat part of now) and one to freeze to eat at a later date. Still, I only asked my mother if she wanted me to pick up a sundae, so she corrected me. “Pick up two sundaes,” she requested.

“I know, I was planning on getting two. Don’t worry.” I assured her.

–

My mother was an infamous ice cream fanatic. She took her ice cream very seriously. So seriously in fact, that she got quite the reputation from one incident that will go down in history.

I was about 5 or 6 years old heading to the local corner ice cream shop with my mother and my aunt. I was so excited to be a big girl, so I wanted to order and carry the banana split my mother wanted over to her. As I was carrying my mom’s banana split over to her, I tripped and fell. My mother’s banana split went flying everywhere. Her ice cream treat was destroyed.

Now you might expect that she would recognize that I am a small child and that it was an accident, but she didn’t [at least not immediately]. Instead she yelled at me for dropping her banana split. [No, she was not a monster]. It was quite the spectacle, though it did provide years of good ribbing. We all learned a valuable lesson too. Ice cream is the most important thing. :smile:

–

So at Costco, looking at the berry sundaes, The grief washes over me before I even have time to prepare myself. I would buy her a hundred more. I just wish I could. For now, I have lost my appetite for ice cream.

taking back my life, one small step at a time

Posted in day to day, fitness, life by

i finally made it back to bikram yoga tonight.  it is the first time since things really started to hit the fan with my mother.  it’s really the first time i have worked out in quite a while.  i have slowly let my life spiral out of control.  i have just worked on existing day to day and nothing more.  i have stopped working out.  i have not eaten well.  i have let myself decay in a way i have never seen for me before.  i’ve gained 30 pounds.  30.  i don’t fit well into my clothes [the ones i still fit in] and i refuse to buy any more new clothes.

i deserve more.  i deserve better than this.  it is not that hard [even if it feels monumentous] to make some changes.  i need to start holding myself accountable.  this is the most important thing.  i’m hoping i can tap into my inner perfectionist, not completely but enough to keep me motivated.  i really need the help.  or i really need the commitment.

i really need a way to find some peace, to bring some calmness to my mind and body.  and i think that bikram [or yoga in general] is the best way for me.  somehow i need to deal with all that has happened in the past year [and continues to happen].

so, tonight i made it back.  and i just need to keep going back.

two months ago

Posted in grief, life by

it was just about a half hour ago two months ago that my mother passed.  and just about 10 minutes from now, that day, that i was frantically headed home.  mind racing.  thoughts and feelings swirling.  everything raw but numb at the same time.

i find myself in my mother’s house again, as i was that night.  though tonight, i am here because i am working through cleaning out the house.

it’s a strange place to be in.  here physically.  here emotionally.

when i walked in, i almost immediately started bawling.  i didn’t expect that.  i have it together most of the time [or a lot of the time anyway] and i knew this was coming, that i had to clean out the house.  still the emotions rushed over me and i couldn’t believe i was here, cleaning out my mother’s house, because she is no longer here.

how could she no longer be here?  how could she do this to me?

it is a reality that is difficult to fathom.

it is more difficult than i imagined cleaning out the house, and difficult in ways i never imagined.

a neighbor, an old friend’s grandmother, said tonight that when i left my mother’s life was lonely.  and i have to say, sitting here the past few days [and really before that] i realized that.   how very alone she was day-to-day.  how very little she had.  how very hard that was for her. it had never really dawned on me how alone, how isolated she was.  it breaks my heart that i didn’t see it.  that i didn’t do more.   i know that everyone thinks that, but in this particular situation it was so true, so amplified.

–

i wanted to visit her grave today.  or more her burial site, there is no headstone yet.  but with trying to accomplish so much with respect to her house, there was no way i could make it.

god, i am too busy to visit my mother’s grave.  does it ever end?

–

the house held many secrets.  many words that i cannot express yet, but suffice it to say, there were plenty documents of my history that i have never spoken of [nor never known all the details of] that revealed things i never had the chance to ask.

i guess as much as i was unknown to my mother, she was unknown to me.

and on the anniversary of her death, i find that hard to swallow.  but i am trying to digest it.

permanence

Posted in grief, life, mother by

this week a co-worker passed away.  she had three children and a husband she left behind.  i tried to imagine the reality they were now faced with.  or the last moments they spent with her. [this is probably odd, so be it if it is].  and i had a hard time internalizing the permanence of the situation.  how she was gone and would not be able to return.  how she would miss out on so much.  how everyone’s life was forever changed.

and i thought of my own mother.

as i have mentioned, there have been so many times that i want to call her up.  just tell her about something so simple.  i think about the things i want to do with her.  i think about the things i want to share with her.  sometimes it doesn’t hit at once, sometimes it takes a few minutes before i realize that i cannot do any of those things.  she is gone.  i think about her in the casket and try to wrap my head around how she is just gone from this world.

she will never have another moment.  shared with me.  shared with her dog.  shared with anyone.  not shared with anyone.  no other moments.  she will have nothing to say.  nothing to do.  nothing more will come from her life.  because there is none.

it’s hard to fathom.  all those years left ahead in my life.  all those years gone from hers.  all those years i thought we would spend together.  all those years we won’t.  all those things she won’t see.  won’t do.  won’t have.

i know we have a fixed amount of time here,, but it would have been nice to actually get to a place where i could enjoy and be with my mother.

add that to my list of regrets, i guess.

 

taking your life back from work – a white paper

Posted in day to day, happiness, life, work by

has work has taken over your life?  do you spend almost all of your waking moments at work?  or at home doing work?  or thinking about work, even when you are not at work?  or, the worst, dreaming about work?  read on.

the first thing you must do is admit that your life has succumbed to work.  do you do things you used to enjoy?  do you have free time to do anything other than attempt to recover from work and brace yourself for the next day?

no.?

the thing is, no matter how important or how interesting the job is [and that's being optimistic about the situation because few fall into that category, regardless of any self-importance imposed on the position], at the end of the day it is in fact a job.  a job is not and should not be your life. the job pays the bills, but that is about it.

so, you need to just stop giving work your life.

work life balance does not mean that the balance of your life should be work.

they are not your friends.  they do not have your back.  and at the end of the day, the job and the people who employ you will only do the thing that serves them best.  it’s just a fact of business.  now you’re thinking, but they are my friends.  it is possible that they are your friends [or some of them anyway].  but really, at the end of the day, the job is the job and work is work and friendships matter very little in that equation.  they will do very little for you, your person, your life.

let’s be frank.  at the end of the day, they’re all @$$holes only concerned with themselves.  so be your own @$$hole.  get concerned about yourself.

it is your life.  take it back.

stop spending all of your waking hours there.  stop spending most of your waking hours there.  stop spending more than the actual number of required hours there.  it is your life.  your life that you will never get back.  your moments of happiness that you’re trading and you need to stop. [yes, there is happiness and job satisfaction, but you already have to spend a minimum of 40 hours a week there so soak up those benefits during your mandatory time there and find other things that make you happy during the time you are not required to sell your soul for a paycheck].  diversity of experience is important for a full and enriched life, so go out there and expand your horizons.  do things that make you happy.    instead of spending all your time at work, go outside.  spend time with your family.  spend time alone. read. write. swim. hike. bike.  drink [though, if you're spending almost all of your waking hours at work, you're probably already doing this... and probably too much of this...].  hang out with your friends.  see movies. just live life.  that’s why people say that.  they don’t say live work.  work is not going to bring you real happiness.

do things you want to do.

this includes taking leave.  there is no reason you should have significant leave on the books unless you are planning a major trip or have some other leave requirement.  other than that, you should take time off.  it is your time after all.  it is part of the compensation package.  if you weren’t meant to have it and/or take it, then they wouldn’t give it to you.  you can’t continue to efficiently produce if you don’t take time to re-charge your batteries.

speaking of re-charging your batteries, when you are not at work, don’t think about it.  don’t read email.  don’t take phone calls.  however important you think it might be, there really is very little that is actually that important.  your time is your time, so keep it that way.  you’re not supposed to do personal things at work, so why should you do work things on your personal time?

it all sounds simple, but sometimes implementation is difficult.  so start small.  take back your time in small increments [20 minutes, 60 minutes, 2 hours - all depends on how far you've fallen off the work deep end]. work your way back to the required hours.  do things for yourself, for your life, that you enjoy.  whatever you do, just start taking your life back.  work is certainly not going to give it to you.

[also, recognize the problem might go deeper than all of that.  your job may suck.  you may work in a toxic environment.  or other factors my play in.  i'll cover that later.  for now, this is something you can control.  even if your job/work-place is awful, you can at least control this.  you can take your life back, at least in some small way.]