Like A Butterfly...She Flies Away...

I don't eat much, and then I drink too much vodka. I throw up.

I am alone in my dead mother's house, in her bed, in her room and this sadness is too extreme. 

I am not  in my own body.   This is NOT my life.

I am disappearing.  Just a blob of raw open wounds.

Eleven months. My own insignificance in the face of all things holy.

I think...
how her body grew smaller, until it ceased to exist.
How I was not ready.
I sob.

No, I weep like I haven't allowed myself in these past few months.


I let go, no one to see, no one to hear...my grief takes over.  And I fall asleep.

~~~~~~~~~

My heart has turned a corner.  It took me eleven months to allow myself to hit bottom.

The Holidays were not terrible, I smiled for Mother's Day and cried a bit on her birthday.  But now there is only one more milestone.  Her death day.

The month of June is full of weddings, anniversaries, christenings, communions, graduations...all these milestones.  

Tomorrow my niece(Beepboop, Bebe, Bee, Beeper, Beatrix) is getting baptized.

We mark time through events.  

I am tired.  Tired of being tired, of not having any answers in life.  Tired of living in a dead woman's house, of pretending that I am fine.  Pretending that I am strong and vital, that I don't need people, that I don't need the sacred marking of time.

Dying people are like butterflies.  In Auschwitz they found drawings of butterflies all over, but aren't we all just butterflies really?  We start as one thing and life, love, grief, what happens next in our cocoon?

And dying people are here to teach us something.  They are here to teach us to live.

To live as though we are the dying, because we are. 

I am raw.  I am vulnerable.  I'm accepting this.

My thoughts are on the sacredness of all things, my niece tomorrow will have a Priest baptize her into the Roman Catholic Church.   I am her sponsor/godmother, and I take that role to my heart.  I pray that I can share with her the beauty that was her Grandmother.  I hope that she will know Kate through me.  I pray that she will love the sacred things in life.  Birth, and death--are the same just reversed.    

And Beatrix, I cannot wait to see what a beautiful Butterfly you will be.

Tomorrow, in a holy place, I know my Mom will be there with us.

Songbird was played at my Mom's memorial...it's brought me healing over the past few months.

Again

"Tell Pam she's got a good screamer there."
I hear this voice in my head, my Mother's voice and I tell Pam, laughing because I don't know if it's me or some ghost of my Mom talking to me.  Or maybe it has finally happened.
I've lost all sense of sanity.
We were trying to get my niece to sleep, she has this habit of waking up at 11:30PM and not going back to sleep until oh you know 3:45AM!!!

So maybe I hear her voice due to my lack of sleep...who knows.  It's no the first time it has happened, nor will it be the last...I hope.

As I write this I am watching Beatrix crawl around on the living room rug, playing with her new teapot toy.  In moments when I speak to Bebe or buy her things, I think about what Kate would've done.  The dresses and cute toys she would have gotten for this little lady.  I try to see if there is anything I recognize of Kate in Beatrix and there are flashes of her stubborn nature, but mostly I see a baby Erik.

I am trying to go easy on myself these days.  To not be saddened by the past events of this year, some who read this know the extra sadness...some don't.

Palm Sunday
Pam, Beatrix and I found ourselves in church Sunday night.  I could not remember Easter from 2013, I believe that I was at Morristown Hospital with my Mom, but I cannot recall huge chunks of time.

We sat in the beautiful church, listening to the singing(Bebe sings along now).  There is something peaceful in religious services, a calm, a certain sense of what will come next.  And this is strange for me because for someone who was once so connected to a God, a Christ I no longer feel that connection in the same way.

This is the week of celebration of death. We celebrate a death on Friday. We are supposed to embrace the suffering of the Christ, hope in His risen self.

I've read that they believe Jesus began his ministry at age thirty and died at thirty-three.  I am thirty-three, this past year has been one of my own death, I am only beginning to understand this now.
How or what it means to be resurrected.
I watch as Bebe has been pulling herself up to my coffee table, she can almost stand, but is not steady on her feet yet.
She takes a tumble, maybe bumps her head but within minutes she is up again.  Anastasis is the Greek word meaning resurrection Ana means again, or anew and Stasis means to stand.  To stand again.

I am learning to stand again.  My niece and I are learning the same things.

In 2013, I witnessed a death and a birth.  Perhaps I could say two births, because I too am climbing out of my own egg shell, learning Anastasis--to stand again.

My own life, or I should say, my hopes of what my life would be, have been put to death within.  I have been trying to learn how to accept this new life.  I am a baby, or a wee chick emerging from that egg.
At thirty-three, I do understand a bit of the suffering of Christ or how the mystery of holy things pervades my thoughts.

Once A Long Time Ago

One year ago today, I was running around trying to get everything together for a drive out to West Lafayette, Indiana.
How can I explain what has happened in a year?  I thought that maybe I would write about the trip to Indiana, but I am choosing not to dwell on that sadness.

This past weekend, I drove my sister and my nephew Crosby up to Albany to visit my Dad, Erik, Pam and my niece Beatrix.  Both babies are almost seven months old now, I watched them meet each other, now aware of life.  They'd met before but were too little to know it.
My Dad held them, realizing he had two grand-children, and we laughed and watched them sitting next to each other.  Their chubby baby knuckles, big heads and almost toothless grins...I laughed at the simplicity of being a baby.

I tried not to think.  Tried not to think about the person who was not there, could not be there.

I've been told that every great work of literature is about loss or love or both.   I know now that's because everything in life is about loss and or love.  They work in tandem at times, one following the other.  If you put your heart out there, it will eventually experience loss.

The love I feel for my niece and nephew is so great, I never knew I could love two people who are so new, so unknown to me.  Two little souls, who entered my world just as another left.
There is something so tragic in this, I don't quite know how to write or express it at all.  I see people posting things about their Mom's on Facebook, or their grandchildren and it's wonderful.  That love is wonderful, but at times it just reminds me of my own loss...

I think about Crosby and Beatrix, how they will never know this person who brought me  and their parents into this world.  How she will never tell them funny stories about their Mom and Dad as small children.  And I wonder, will they miss someone they've never met?

Maybe I love them more because she is gone. And I wish that I could just wrap them up and keep them in my pocket forever.

I don't want this to be sad, that's not where I am at right now.  There are just little fragments of sadness illuminating my days, because I'm starting to feel better.  Starting to accept things.

Friends, most of you who are my age, you've yet to experience so great a loss.  Some of you have, but someday you will.  Remember that there is no "right" way to grieve, we each have our own way to learn to live without someone.

Maybe that's not right, I am not learning to live without her, maybe I'm just still learning to live.


It's almost Spring again, I'm longing for the warmth and the flowers.  Maybe a soft rainfall, that first smell of Spring...because it's all about rebirth, a respite from this cold.

Hope.  Hope that each day the sun will come up again, that sorrow lessens over time, that there is love to be had in this world again.