the last day of normal

By calendar date, the one-year anniversary of mom's death is March 3rd - this Saturday.  But it feels like it's tomorrow - Thursday.  Because we live in a world that runs by days of the week, not dates.  We often take this week for vacation because it's not as busy as Presidents Weekend, but the kids have Friday off school due to conferences.  So it feels to me like today, one year ago, was the last day of normal.

And you know, we were really having a great time.  These are some of the photos my mom saw on Facebook that Wednesday.  We had landed in Salt Lake the previous evening and spent the day skiing at Brighton.

I thought about calling her after she sent me a text about the photos.  But I was on a chairlift and didn't want to drop my brand-new iPhone.  Then time just got away from me, in that way that time always gets away from everyone.

I'm trying to track down the firefighters and EMTs who were on the scene.  I want to send lunch to their stations.  I'm not sure how many responders were there - it looked like a ton from the photos.  A woman at HFD is trying to get me names of two guys in particular who I could see were really instrumental and who looked, I don't know, so somber, so careful, so thoroughly present in what they were doing.  I just want to say thank you to them.  What a difficult, wrenching job - I would think a job that would be easy to compartmentalize and to turn off the human factor when you're dealing with a fatality.  But I looked at their faces and saw guys who cared.   Now I find that when I see more than two emergency vehicles in one place, I get pretty anxious.

I'll probably call Officer Cooper tomorrow - Thursday.  For months I couldn't think "Thursday" and not jump to, "my mom died on a thursday.."  That's going away.  Some things are going away.  Other things, other words still jump up and bite out of the blue... Fog.  Blunt.  Jaguar.  Pipes.  Loop.  Rhythms.  And all the initials/acronyms -  MVA. HPD.  DWLS.  TXDPS.

My aunt will be with us this weekend.  I had wanted to go to Des Moines, but Lydia has basketball and is on FIRE this season, having scored ONE basket!  Go Girl!  I think we'll go to tea on Saturday; mom loved tea.  The closest good place is Lady Elegant's, in St. Paul.  Isn't that a terrible name?  I told Auntie Syd that it sounds like a second-rate gentlemen's club.  Mom and I went there a few years ago for a Christmas tea and laughed the entire time because it was a Charles Dickens theme.  Great idea, right?  EXCEPT they had actors there.  Still - great idea, right?  Actors who did A Christmas Carol.  In its entirety.  For almost three hours.  Walking around the tables, while you're trying to pour your tea and have a scone, so you couldn't even talk to each other.  That was a really long afternoon, but fun, because mom and I thought alike and were just rolling, watching these overwrought performances, in a TEA ROOM for God's sake.  I miss her so much.

I like to think she saw this photo and thought, "Shannon looks pretty happy."

She worried about me.  A lot.  With reason.  I could tell stories... I probably will tell stories in the future.  I caused her a lot of grief.  It is a huge blessing that at the time of her death, she and I were in good territory together and she was proud of me and not worrying about me.  We'd seen her at Christmas, were supposed to see her the very next day.  Just 28 hours more and she would have been in Utah.  I'd booked tickets just 10 days earlier to spend the kids' Spring Break at her house in Boca Raton and she was planning to come up for Owen's 5th grade graduation.

My heart breaks for those plans and all the endless events in the future that she doesn't get and that we have to do without her, but I'm happy she knew how much we all loved her and I know she was really excited about the next day, and about the future.  Really, it's all most of us can ask for from each day.

The Last "First" Holiday

It's only 25 days until the one-year anniversary of my mom's death in Houston and I am dreading it in so many different ways.


Valentine's Day is coming up and it will be the last "first" for us.  All the family birthdays have passed for the first time without gifts, cards, or phone calls from mom.  Christmas, Thanksgiving, the first summer at the Lake without her, 5th grade graduation, the New Year, my sister's engagement... the world has marched forward and mom stayed 64 forever.  My mother loved holidays and always sent my sister and me boxes with decorations, goodies for the kids, and cards.  Have you wondered who buys all the holiday knickknacks at Cracker Barrel - the embroidered shirts, the stuffed animals, the wooden hearts, pumpkins, etc.?  Leslie did.  I imagine Cracker Barrel's sales suffered in 2011.


Last Valentine's Day, I got my last holiday box from mom.  Before they moved their operations to Texas, the boxes always came from her company, Tarrah.  I wonder sometimes, when was the last time I called her at work rather than on her cell?  It would have been in December sometime.  If I'd known when I punched in "101" for Leslie Campbell that it would be the last time, how would that have felt?  It didn't feel significant then, that the business was moving, but now all those everyday things pull at me.  561-374-5995, ext. 101.  That's gone now.  Her cell phone number too.  I called it several times after the accident to hear her speak.  Now I'm starting to forget the exact wording of her outgoing message.  Is it crazy that I want to write down all her numbers?  All her addresses?  That I can't stand the thought of forgetting anything?


Last year's Valentine box contained giant chocolate bars for the kids, cards for all, and three $10 gift cards to Starbucks.  I told my Aunt that now I couldn't spend them and she responded, "well couldn't you spend two of them and save one?"  It made me laugh - mom would tell me to go get my coffee and stop mooning over a piece of plastic.


Here is the card we got, David and I, from mom:

I'm glad I'm a pack rat and have a mountain of cards from her.  I bought a cedar chest just to hold a fraction of all my "mom" things. I just opened it looking for those Starbucks cards and am feeling kind of panicky that I can't locate them.  I also have two "mom shelves" that have some of her favorite things, a plaster cast of her hand, and her ashes.  I've been buying seasonal plants or flowers to brighten the area and these are her Valentine tulips, which can be replanted.  Once it warms up, I have some Thanksgiving mums and a Christmas pine to plant too.

So why such dread of the one year mark?  For one thing, it just feels too soon.  This just happened, didn't it?  It hasn't really been a YEAR!  I don't want to mark time without her in years.  First it stopped being "days since mom died" and then weeks, months... "years" is just too much.  It was hard enough to know her life was over.  But the way the world just keeps marching forward feels so brutal sometimes.  This must be some kind of non-acceptance.  I don't WANT to accept this because it's simply UNACCEPTABLE.  I am reading a book called How to Survive Losing a Parent and one of the patients being profiled lost her mother to a car accident too and the therapist tells her an accident is the most difficult of all deaths to accept and move past.  HA!  I knew it!  What do I win?  Oh right, nothing.  Nothing at all.  I admit that sometimes to fall asleep I imagine what I could have done to change things and to save her.  Could I have called at 8:18 and then she wouldn't have pulled over?  What if I'd called when I woke up that morning for the first time, at 7:10 Mountain Time, nine minutes before the accident and just called to chitty chat? It still humbles and frightens me that the thousand tiny choices we make in any given day can end like that.  It's random, it's cruel, and I just want to change it.  Knowing that I can't change it doesn't seem to help.   Since I can't change it, it only seems fair that I get a do-over on our last phone call, which lasted 9 seconds and consisted of us each saying, "hello? hello? are you there?".. and so on).  


I'd like the chance to call back and say, "by the way, I love you more than I've ever said and more than you can imagine, Mom."  I'd like to go back to Christmas and run back over for one more hug goodbye.  I'd like another first, not another last.


One of the things that's talked about in the book is this fear of going on.  When mom died, it felt like the end of the world.  I couldn't imagine this point, almost one year later.  Yet here we are - life did go on.  I didn't drink or end up in a hospital.  I laugh, I am exercising, I like to cook, I see friends... and it sometimes feels disloyal.  If I have a good time, then it means it's okay, and then she is really and truly gone.  I wasn't ready; none of us were ready.  How do you decide when it's time to let go?  Is it 6 months, or a year, or two?  How do you snap out of it when it feels like yesterday?  


I just go back to the same answer - putting one foot in front of the other, breathing in and out, and trying to do the next right thing.  I tell myself there is good, great good, and beauty in this world, even if it's missing something dear.  My optimist mother would like that.