I’ve learned a lot the past several weeks. Most perhaps I’d rather I hadn’t:
I never knew it was possible to miss someone this much. I honestly had no idea.
One that doesn’t bother me to have discovered is that I always assumed that both of my parents were equally messy, but it turns out it was mostly her after all. Who knew?
Dad and I are doing okay. We’re going to buy a bigger house, kind of like Gigi and her dad. People tell me that I’ll feel better when I move and there aren’t reminders of her everywhere, which I half agree with –but the other half of me worries that I’ll feel worse when markers of her are stripped more from my life. Dad apologizes for going to bed so early that I’m alone at night and I don’t know how to tell him that it wouldn’t make me feel better if he didn’t go to bed early – I am sad at night, but not because I’m lonely in general, but because I specifically miss her.
Other than having to go back to the E.R. again a couple of weeks ago, Dad is doing better than I expected. Last Monday would have been his and Mom’s 41st and he was mostly okay. Sometimes I wonder if she’d be doing so well at this point if we’d lost him instead.
I’m learning to cook more now, but it’s hard when odds are at least 25% that cooking will make me cry. I cooked a pot roast and felt guilty that it turned out really well – guilt is irrational, and I don’t even know why it’d make me feel guilty other than the kitchen being her domain, but there it is. Somehow it feels like a betrayal (of her) to take over what she’d always done, and how does that make any sense?
As shouldn’t be surprising, but somehow is, is that I’ve learned that my brother and I are really not at all on the same page about mourning. He keeps talking about embracing the new normal, and is totally convinced we’ll all be fine in a few months, and that the holidays will be fine. I’m still crying at least a couple of times a day, and terrified of the holidays. They’re going to be so wrong without her. I don’t think he understands at all how different it is when the person who dies is someone you saw every day. I’m trying not to lash out and tell him that he’s being dumb, because he doesn’t get that cluelessly insisting it’s all going to be okay feels like he’s trying to invalidate my feelings.
Perhaps the thing that has surprised me the most is how utterly devoid comfort my beliefs in an afterlife have turned out to be. Even though I’ve lost grandparents and great-aunts, I never had given much thought to what I’d feel after a closer loss. I do believe that there’s something after life, but I don’t believe in ghosts (or not ones with any awareness, anyway; I’m on the fence about residual hauntings), and I don’t believe that the dead immediately go to heaven (or hell), but instead I believe in the biblical theory that the dead rest until judgment day.
So, even though I’m hopeful that one day the dead will be reunited with their loved ones, that does little to offer any solace now. I don’t think she’s “always with” me like people keep telling me, or that she’s looking down on me now. I truly wish I was able to feel that she’s still around in some form, or even that she’s up in heaven now reunited with my grandfather and the three babies my parents expected but didn’t survive to term, but I don’t. I’m trying to pretend that when I cry out loud for her she hears me, or when I watch our favorite shows in the same room as her urn she gets something out of it, but I really don’t believe it. I wish I sensed her presence like others who have lost loved ones say they do, but I feel nothing like that. One day the light over the fireplace, just above where her urn is was inexplicably on after Dad went to bed, and I so badly wanted to believe that it was a sign from her…but I know that cats like to climb on the couch near the switch and are far, far more likely to have been the agents of turning on the light on even though they’ve never done it before. Maybe I’d feel better if I could believe she was responsible for that.
Despite logic keeping me from comfort, I’m not entirely logical, I’ve discovered. I can’t count the times I’ve wished that she’d come back, begged God and/or the universe at large to give her back, and have very badly wanted to encounter something that could reverse this, perhaps through time travel or a genie. I know that she can’t come back, but I’m having trouble believing in my heart that death is completely irreversible. It seems impossible that there isn’t some science or magic in the world that could fix it all. Science is such a powerful force – why can’t I go back to the fall and have another chance to convince her to let me buy her flu shot? I should’ve fought her harder on that, not just admitted defeat after offering twice and being politely declined. I could try harder if given another chance. I won’t mind the tedium of reliving the past few months if given the gift of a second chance.
The foreverness of this loss is taking so much longer to sink in than I ever anticipated it would. At the back of my mind I’m still waiting for her to come back, I think, because it just doesn’t seem possible that she won’t ever come back. Intellectually, I know she won’t, but still… My brother and I are both considerably healthier than our parents were at our ages, and despite the terrifying fact that neither my mother or her own mother reached the ripe old age of sixty, there’s little reason to believe we’ll suffer an abbreviated lifespan ourselves. This means that there’s a very real possibility that we’ll live longer without a mom than we did with one. That’s still hard to accept – how can we possibly live longer without a mother to ask advice and approval of than we lived with one?
The last thing that surprises me is that sadness comes in waves. It’s not a well of grief like someone on Huffington Post claimed. There’s an undercurrent of sadness to be sure, but most of the time I’m okay. Not great, but okay. I’m getting my work done. I’m not curled up crying in a dark room (not even the day she died), or crying myself to sleep. But all of the sudden something will remind me of something I hadn’t thought of before, and grief drags me under all over again. This has gotten a little better already, maybe because I’ve already thought of so many of the “she never got to…” “we didn’t…” and "she’ll never again…"s already that there aren’t so many left to think of and be stung by a new hurt. But there are still some – one of the doctors I worked with is retiring, and she asked me on Tuesday if I have plans for a summer vacation yet, and it occurred to me for the first time that I won’t spend time with Mom on my vacation this year like I always have. I had all I could do not to burst into tears. I have no idea why these things aren’t immediately obvious, but I keep stumbling over them and they hurt individually. It reminds me of when I was working with kids who have autism and some of our trainings said that many kids who were more severely affected weren’t able to generalize. I apparently can’t either.
Hugs.