Sunday, August 16, 2009

It Just Gets Harder

It has been three weeks since my mom passed away.
And it just keeps getting worse, getting more difficult.
I think of a thousand things a day I wish I could tell her; stupid things, little things. How people are at work. The horrible, horrible heat. An Op-Ed in the New York Times. What I had for dinner.
All the things we would talk about everyday. The things that make up your life.
I want to -- and I can't.
I have never felt more alone in my life. I always had my mom on my side and I knew that even when we weren't together, there was someone in the world who loved me. Now, I just don't feel the same way. I know my siblings love me and I love them, but it's not the same. No one loves you so freely or so deeply as your mother. And mine is gone.

Does this ever get easier?

Sunday, August 09, 2009

Never ask why

Over the past three weeks my life has changed, irrevocably changed and I am not sure how to function.
My mother, my best friend, my biggest champion and the one person who always loved me no matter how much of a pill I am, passed away on July 26.
It was a shock. She hadn't seemed sick or ill when I was home in May and had only been complaining of a pain in her neck. Though we all begged her to see a doctor, she refused and instead saw a quack chiropractor.
After a month of increasing pain and a few days of altered mental status, she finally let my two youngest brothers take her to the emergency room. They took a CT and saw something awful. I was on a plane the very next morning, not knowing what to expect, but hoping that she would be OK.
I had packed for three days and was home for three weeks.
What she thought was just a pulled muscle was actually a fracture in her spinal cord, due to metastasis in her bones...in her bones, in her liver, in her lung, and in her pancreas where we learned it had all started.
It was the longest week of my life in the hospital before my mom passed away. And that was it.

I want to write more. I want to examine this from every angle, every emotion. I want to rail against God and beat my breast and shriek into the wind. I want to turn back the clock and relive my 32 years with her. But I can't. I can't think too much. It hurts. It hurts in a way that is beyond adjectives, beyond words, beyond mere description. It is a raw, red and bloody hurt that I can't dig into just yet. I hope that in the months to come the rawness will fade and I begin to cope, even just a bit. And begin to pick up the pieces of my life without my mother. Someday.

Right now? I just want my mommy.