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.