Days now are beginning to let happiness leak into my life, but that happiness is frequently followed by sudden sickness in my soul: she isn't coming home. She was hospitalized a few times over the years when I was small and more often, lately. I knew the joy of preparing for her to return: cleaning and planning and getting all her favorite things ready for a period of recuperation. When she came home that final time in December, she was in extremis, dying, not HER -- she didn't know that things were ready for her, she wasn't aware of much except pain and fear. So I guess in my heart, she didn't really ever come back. And when I relax and feel "normal"  that joy of expectation returns and explodes into sudden grief. She isn't coming home. No matter how nice I make things, how many times I clean, what I do to make the house (and me!) what she would expect, she won't be coming back and it's searing. Like sticking a finger in boiling water. Only it's my heart. Anyway, that's the exception. The sweet joys and that dreadful grief aren't the standard days now. Mostly I'm still on the edge of feeling hopeful and happy. I know that I'll get past this. Each step has been tough and this one is going to take me to another one...but over all, it's getting better.

Here's Mom -- and me -- a million years ago:

Nice.

I started this site primarily to unload the emotional garbage that was piling up around me last year, and then it turned into a journal, and then it became the place I wandered back to occasionally, to chronicle my grief process.

It's been less than seven months, so I'm not done with grieving, I know. But there are patterns in it. I can see them now. The breathtaking stomach jabs from missing Mom still hit me but are no longer surprises. The firsts are fewer. And I'm anticipating them better, now. I can see that the time will come this Fall, when the pain of remembering will be excruciating, because that's when things got so very bad last year. And it'll be my birthday and Thanksgiving and Mom's birthday (she would have been 90) and Christmas, all around, no escape. Gah.

I'm not sure that I'll be sufficiently communicative then, to come here. It's possible that I'll just withdraw for a while. Maybe not.

In any case, right now I think that it's time to let byrondarius move on.

I'll keep the site -- maybe I'll keep the posts. If I decide to delete them I'll archive them here on my computer, and include your supportive and loving comments, so that I can read them later, when times are bad again.

What will the site be? I'm not sure yet. I already have a fictional character Vox site -- Hazru the Deedmaker -- and several digital imaging learn/play sites. And a couple of ranting sites. Maybe this one will be another fictional one.

Or maybe I'll need byrondarius tomorrow and this is stupidly premature.

Two days ago I moved Mom's clothes out of her bedroom closet. I'm not rushing into anything. I just wanted you to know what's on my mind. 

I just made an appointment with a "tree preservation specialist" -- recommended by an old friend of my Mom -- a guy who used to work for them. He knows our trees and knows that money isn't plentiful and knows how good they are at that company. Most important, he knows how much Mom loved trees. When we moved here there were none. It was pasture land. She planted trees and cared for them and loved them and did everything she could to help them thrive. The two trees closest to the house are very close. They're 50 years old -- big maples. They've been pruned and thinned, and up until about 10 years ago, they were well-shaped. But they've grown too tall. They threaten the house. Mom, when her world began to collapse on itself, feared for her life in storms since the trees were right over her head. But we didn't do anything about them. Money, time, indecision ...all the usual reasons.

I know that storm damage can wipe out a house and ruin people financially, even with good insurance. So I knew I had to do something about the trees. I wrote to her old friend, who's living in Michigan now, retired. He told me NOT to cut them down -- but to have these specialists come in and estimate the cost of re-shaping and shortening.

I got his letter two weeks ago and I just now FINALLY worked up the courage to make the call. It was "Mom's job." They were her trees. I knew it would be hard to do, stupidly hard, but hard, and I was right. I shook the entire time I was on the phone.

Anyway, the appointment is made. The tree guy is due here on Monday. It'll cost a lot  -- more than I can afford.  But to lose the roof? Way worse. 

To lose Mom's trees? Unthinkable.

Today, sometime in the late morning/early afternoon, six months ago, Mom died.

I don't know the exact time, or even within an hour of the time, because I was downstairs eating my lunch and watching TV when it happened. She was alive when I left her room to get my lunch and she was dead when I came back an hour later.

Every day for a week the visiting nurse told me that she was very very close to death. That morning she wasn't even making the sad sounds she'd been making for days. But I couldn't eat in the room with her. I had to get away to do that. To be honest, I wasn't sitting with her all that much by then, because I was trying to get things ready...for what was to come next. Trying to field phone calls and do the things people do, just to survive.

I'm coming to peace with this; it's taking time, but I'm getting there. People have to do the things that need to be done. She was heavily drugged - if she knew was was alone, I had no clue of it. She appeared to be totally removed from the world around her...except when I would take her hand. Then she sometimes squeezed back and held mine. I left her even then, several times.

This morning I ate my breakfast in her room, in the re-decorated loveliness it now is, watched the TV that I got her last year, enjoyed some cool morning air. And I didn't cry until just now.

The six months without her feels like six years.

The fifty-six years I had with her feels like six minutes.

Tuesday I go to the cemetery to order her grave marker.

Things just have to keep happening.

Another end of something happened a couple of days ago, and although it has little to do with Mom directly, it hurts much more than it would have, without the guilt I feel about it.

Not long after I left law school in 1997 I decided to work on writing, since I could do that at home (I thought). I knew I needed to learn a LOT, but there was no $$$ so I joined a local Writers' Workshop. It met every other Wednesday in the morning. The group was full of vibrant, energetic, knowledgeable, published writers and I quickly made a place for myself there. I learned from them and I think they got a little from me, too.

I began to believe that I could write and that the group was important to that effort. I never went anywhere else, but often the meeting times bumped into doctors' visits for Mom, things like that. She knew how important it was to me, and did everything she could to make the times available so I could go.

But gradually the membership of the group changed. People moved away, died, lost interest. The leadership changed. I wrote less.  I didn't attend meetings as often.  I complained to Mom about how it was changing. But I never slacked off in claiming that time for myself, even when I didn't go. Mom's needs increased and I still managed to make her feel bad about my missing meetings -- even when I was missing them because I was too lazy to attend. And far WORSE: I wanted to go someplace else and lied to her, telling her I was going to the writers' meeting, because I knew that she'd understand about that.  I behaved badly about it all, felt bad at the time, and STILL feel it. Truly selfish...

When things here got VERY bad, I forgot about the group and never left the house except to get food, etc. I didn't miss it; I wasn't writing anyway. When Mom died, what was left of the group sent flowers.

Because I felt guilty about drifting away, I went back to a couple of the meetings. By then only four people were attending (from a high of 20!!) and two of them were non-writing yappers who just wanted an audience for their performances in critiquing. Not long after that, I started the job I'm coming to the end of now.

I didn't call the leader, I didn't try to attend. I just walked away.

Yesterday I got a letter from the leader: the group has disbanded. After 23 years of meeting at the local library, and producing a couple of moderately successful novelists, the Writers' Workshop is no more.

I know I didn't kill it and there was little I could do to save it. But I feel crushing guilt for the times that I gave Mom a hard time about missing a meeting, when she needed me. The group wasn't important to me -- really. If it had been, I'd have done more to keep it going. So I feel like I let them both down.

These tiny deaths  do happen. Too bad that the accompanying guilt isn't tiny.  

Things have been going OK, process-of-grief-wise. I've been making progress, mostly, and finding my way alone. But this sudden heat and the arrival of real summertime has shot it all to hell.

Mom LOVED hot weather, when I was little. I took after my Dad, who detested it. I can count on one hand the things that I like about summer and four of them are food. The fifth I don't do anymore (swimming). Mom was always cold, though. And I know that she was extra cold, trying to make sure that Dad and I were cool enough. Later in her life she got warmer, somehow, and then the heat started to bother her. We actually enjoyed bitching about it together, the past few years.

Last year when she was dying, it was winter. We shared that last winter. And this Spring ran on forever, with its cool wet days. I was lulled into a sense of ease and complacency I think -- she wasn't here but the cool damp of that last shared season still remained.

And now it's hot and horrible and there have been tornado watches and nearly everything makes me miss her. So here I am, starting all over again, in some ways. Not as bad, of course. And I'll be OK. But what a setback. And such a surprise.

And gosh I wish she'd had a pushbroom - she'd've loved it. 

How are you spending this Memorial Day? How will it differ from Memorial Days past?

This year I put out the flags the way I did after Dad died, and every year since. It was always his job. I took it over, after. And every year, Mom and I would say that it was good, to keep that tradition going. This year, I'm alone in remembering. Memories do fade and people do turn to dust and the world moves on. It's the way of things.

I wish wars WEREN'T....the way of things. You know?

And it's not about Mom, or grief; but me and my odd life. I stopped drinking alcohol in the summer of 1997. We had a long relationship, but didn't get along well at all. So I stopped. That was it. A few days were tough in the beginning, mainly because of the habits involved, the times, the places, when I would have had something to drink. But I got past those and each day has been alcohol-free, since. I've told myself, on the days when I have a tiny twinge, that I'll have drink the day I die. I can wait.

But I wasn't working in 1997. I lost my job that January, and my life changed completely. I thought that I wanted to climb into a bottle because of the other things that were going on, relationships, shyness, all that, plus my BP-brushed genes.
Suddenly, in the past week, I've realized how very very much I want to again. I won't. But I want to. And the only thing that's different is that I'm working again. I HATE going out to work. I like to work, but I don't like having to go somewhere to do it. It's the commitment to being somewhere, to doing something, the trapped feeling of containerized living, even for $$$$, that makes me want to get fuzzy and forget.

Took me 11 years and this temporary job, to realize that. Each Friday night, I've wanted more and more, to do what I used to do. Each day when I get home, I want to drink again. Carp.

Anyway, it's an important lesson to learn; something I needed to know.

This site will eventually turn into something else (I've got some fun plans....). And I'll answer the sweet comments that people have left the past few months.

When? As soon as this job is over (about a month) and I get my odd-but-good little life back.

EDITED TO ADD: I should have put this part in, because it's very important! I DON'T want to drink, more than I want to. WAAAAAAAY more. I never ever ever want to feel that horrible way again. EVER. It's just that I haven't missed it at all, until lately. It's tapping me on the shoulder and whispering in my ear, but I truly and completely don't want anything to do with it. And now I know why it's back, I know that I have no use for it. I'm not concerned. Just vigilant.

I have comments to reply to here - you sweet people left some and I didn't come back to answer them. Each time I did, I started to cry. Such is grief: just when you think it's wandered off, it sneaks up behind you and says, "Booga-Booga!!"

I've had eleven of these cysts removed from my eyelids since I was in my 20's. We had a kind of ritual, Mom and I -- she would tell me not to drive myself home and I always would. And she always looked like I was never coming back, when I left the house to go to the hospital. Today I'm leaving the house without that and it hurts so bad.

More than the eye will.

So thank you all for wishing me well - it means more than I can express.    

Sorry for not answering your comments yet -- I'm behind again, everywhere. Will catch up, I promise.

Today I did some work outside. I hate doing it  -- not a yard work person AT ALL  - Mom used to watch me through the windows and was always happy that I did things, even if I screwed them up. That's what moms do, right? I miss being the person whom she looked at that way -- I miss knowing that I'm the center of someone's world. I don't know if it's possible to have that with anyone but a parent.

No one else has ever loved me at all, except my Dad, and I didn't realize that until it was too late, with him.