March 2004 Archives
I was debating even posting because as I explained to Jeff last night on the ride home, I think I've beat this dead horse to death (ba-dum-bump) but of course, time goes by and today ends up being the one-year anniversary of my Mom's death.
I miss her every day but honestly, while today was starting off OK, I figured I needed to give her a little more attention so I threw myself into all the writings from last year and now I'm all weepy looking at her picture. There is nothing more to be said then that...it's a weepy thing, even still.
But she would have been the last one to get all squishy about it, believe me, so I'm trying to get on with my day and plan for a little stone unveiling at the end of April for friends and family to honor her memory. Of course to really celebrate her memory, we'd all have to stand around drinking that piss-water she called wine from its box and getting high on home-grown weed, but I think we're going to go a bit more casual than all that this go around...at least for the sake of the more delicately-inclined of the family.
Yay!!! Jeff and I can finally spill the beans we've been holding on to for a week or so: my next youngest brother, Mitch, and his lovely wife, Sarah, are with child for the first time. We're going to be uncles again! Now that my youngest brother, Matt, and his wife, Nicole, are set up with three boys under three years old, the torch has passed to Mitch and Sarah.
We're doing the rain dance for twin baby girls because they deserve them just that much.
It seems almost impossible, I know, that pretty much all of a year has passed since my Mom died. I managed to save all the entries I'd written during her illness from last year and everyday I check in to see what I wrote, what new horrible thing was happening to her and to see if I had any hint at how short the days were really becoming. Tomorrow will be what I consider the beginning of the very fast slide out of this world for her. She'd already been diagnosed with tumor metastasis to her brain and we'd been doing a week of radiation to her hip for possible bone mets when she seized up in her chair that afternoon during an episode of "M*A*S*H" in front me and my brother Matt and his family. This is what I wrote last year:
"I don't think I can imagine witnessing one single worse acute event other than a grand mal seizure. A full out body-rattling, electrical storm that winds the muscles of the body so tight in constrictures you'd think you could just about hear bones getting ready to crack, not to mention the complete look of utter horror in their face with the eyes rolled back and the mouth drawn up into some wicked, maniacal grimace of what looks to be mind-blowing pain. I've had years of experiences with seizure patients and at first, it's one of those episodes which causes you to lose complete control of yourself and start yelling for someone to do something, anything, just to make it stop. That's the very problem with seizures: they are completely, utterly unstoppable once they start up and there is nothing you can do about it. They run their course and you're left standing by the wayside, watching. In the ER, we'd roll the patient to the side in case they started to vomit so they didn't aspirate and choke and we'd give them some meds, put them on some oxygen which is all secondary symptomatic treatment and not doing anything to limit the seizure time. You just learn to not panic and realize you have to ride out the storm, hard as it may be.
I mention this because, inevitably, my mother experienced the first seizure of her metastatic brain tumors while sitting in her chair watching "M*A*S*H" yesterday afternoon. Her leg started kicking uncontrollably which she had just started to mention to me and to which I immediately knew what it was before it washed over her totally, causing her first to clutch her chest and scream the most harrowing shriek you hope never to hear anyone ever let loose and then went complete rigid with that horrific grimace of shear fright. She did the whole deal, turning blue by the end of the thing from her inability to breath and literally, all I could do was sit there and hold her hand and wait for it to be done. I hadn't done that kind of seizure care in a long time, but it was the calmness of just holding her hand, calling, "Mom, we're here" just sort of popped out of nowhere. Of course I had that voice screaming in my head to do something, ANYTHING, but I also had this really strange, calm voice put its hand on my shoulder and say, "if this is it, then it's ok" and that felt alright too. Unfortunately, my youngest brother and his wife and two little boys had just stopped over right before this whole thing launched into orbit and there isn't anything like trying to be available to a room full of people all at once. My brother, God's most gentle, soft-hearted, soulful dad ever, thought that Hell itself had just erupted in the middle of the living room and was dragging Mom away in front of him. I know he and his beautiful wife will never forget that image for the rest of their days and that's a sorrowful thing added to the bank of misfortune that clouds their lives anyway.
I say all this for this reason; I know anyone and everyone who's following this whole thing has been thinking and praying and hoping for whatever is appropriate to hope for in this situation. I'm telling this to show the story moves on. This is where we are now and we move forward, quicker than I thought. It's hard to explain but my new mantra for each day, to make each day count is "time grows short" and I can manage with that.
As it turns out, we had less than two weeks left which even then and now looking back was a blessing. She was literally well and walking one week, wheel-chair bound the next and dead two weeks later. That's a slicked down slide if I've ever heard one. By this time last year, I'd already painted her bedroom a strangely comforting but saddenly infuriating shade of lilac and lavender. I'd scrubbed her floors by hand with a brush almost every day and I'd baked what was probably my 15th or 16th loaf of bread because I was so powerless to do anything else.
It's a cliché to say how the time has flown over the last year but I can say, more truthfully than ever before, that's exactly the whole of it. The days simply melted away without her and now we're circling her death's year-anniversary. It's been a year that has been gearing up for me to get back up and start doing again so that's what I'm into. Her estate is coming to a close, finally, and her grave stone is ordered and should be ready in May and those were the last things I'd been holding onto not really wanting to let them go but knowing sometimes, you just have to call it a day and make do. And there is some REALLY good family news coming down the pike which makes the timing seem on the sweeter end but still bittersweet, none-the-less along with the day to day fizz of all of us waking up and shaking off the long, cold winter. Spring is coming, things get green, the world turns like always.
Our move out from the Center of the Universe at the critical juncture of Becoming in the Blog wasn't exactly lost on me. I'd started to make social connections with like-minded, comic-fueled, socially-awkward, INFP's and actually meet the people whose blogs I'd been reading and admiring and getting jealous over. Witter, funnier, more alive and interesting then I could ever be. It was, like everything else in my days, blissful torture; the good of who they were and how much I liked them running neck in neck with the seething jealously of how not them I was. But who can get too caught up in all that mess? So we moved and my Blog life went back to pure bits and bytes, which is the way, I suppose, it was suppose to be.
In the meantime, I was meeting more people online and developing some pretty significant friendships with a few never expecting to ever get to meet them because while they might get to NYC, they certainly weren't getting there via Barryville.
Then somehow I got lucky enough to meet up with Jeff last week for a quicker coffee-hour than we'd planned but it was like old times; instantly drawn into his world of MFA applications and writer's shop talk and realizing I was a still just a schmuck fumbling after class. Anyone having the chance should totally make time and effort to stand next to him and look for that wry, shit-eating grin.
It's official. Within the next few weeks I start graduate school, studying for a dual masters degree in Nursing and an MBA with a focus on health care management. Good GOD. As I'm in a car five hours a day traveling to and from work, I'm going to be taking up with a distance-learning program and do my graduate work via the Web. Exciting and scary and a whole lot of sleepless nights lately. I had to laugh the other day because I was so used to those monstrous green forms for financial aid filing and didn't even think that since higher education has evolved to online learning that maybe the whole filing process for student loans did too. I'm happy to say it has and my filing was all done electronic, including the signatures. I feel so fucking grown up.
So the next two and a half years ought to be interesting. Busy...but interesting.
