What I'm feeling today (second edition)

I miss her. God, I miss her. I so wish she were still here.

I don’t cry every day anymore, but when I do cry it’s for hours at a time and it’s draining. I never know when it will hit or what will bring it on – yesterday it was because I thought about the fact that the tomatoes at my dad’s will be turning red soon, and fresh tomatoes were one of the things she loved about summer. She won’t be here to enjoy them with dad.

Their 59th wedding anniversary would have been last week (and let me tell you that my father was breaking my heart, as he misses her tremendously), and her birthday is coming up next week. The “year of firsts” is supposed to be the hardest, and we’ve been hit with some pretty big “firsts” in the time she’s been gone. Mother’s Day. Father’s Day. The girls' dance recital. Their anniversary. Husband and my 10th anniversary. Now her birthday is right around the corner. (Memorial Day and the 4th were in there too… but those aren’t something I usually associate with my parents. I think I stopped spending those holidays with them in college.)

Somehow I don’t imagine that it just sucks the first year. Her presence in this world was a strong one – sometimes too strong for me!! I fear I will always feel her missing.

She has been gone 10 weeks today.

It hurts like it was yesterday, but it feels like she’s been gone for so much longer. While some days now I start out strong, most days I still have a hard time managing even the smallest tasks to completion. My house is a disaster area, and my husband is a saint! He’s been holding our family together, really, since I was feeling so sick in February. He says that he is totally OK with this, and that he knows he’ll be holding things together for a while. I’m starting to feel pressure (from myself) that it’s time to pull myself together, but then I get anxiety from the pressure and it’s harder still to keep going. I try to push these feelings to the side and let myself deal with this slowly but I’m still overwhelmed a lot of the time. I try to remind myself that the housework will wait, the dust bunnies will breed, the weeds will flourish, and I will heal. Someday.

Because someday? It won’t be such a shock that she isn’t here anymore. (Yep, still "Stage I" of grieving.) It’s still a shock when I think about it. It isn’t something I’m “coming to terms with”, or “quietly accepting” yet. I’m sure I will miss her forever, but I’m looking forward to the day when it’s not as painful. When it’s not such a fresh wound on my soul. At the same time I hate the fact that someday it will be normal that my mother has died. I’m not interested in that being my new “normal”. That is the part I hate perhaps most of all.