May 4:   While I was at Jack’s for the wildflower weekend, Sylvia and I stayed in the guest bedroom.  It felt nice but kind of heavy to be sleeping in one of the rooms that Mom had so meticulously decorated.  She spent many years helping Jack decorate his home, and almost every detail was shaped by her sense of style.  Between seeing her imprint on the walls around me, thinking back on all the wonderful family vacations we took together at Jacks, and being close to the beautiful Wisconsin River, my mind filtered through thoughts of Mom all weekend.  I think that if after she died, her spirit dissipated into a million million pieces that many of them might have found their way to the Lower Wisconsin River.  I can imagine her energy flitting over the water like the swallows or living on in the powerful down strokes of a bald eagle as it launches into the sky.
Bergum Bottoms was always one of Mom’s favorite places, and walking down the beautiful road – eating lunch next to the River with the little girl she never met on my lap – made me want to appreciate it for her.

I wouldn’t necessarily say that I now appreciate life more since losing Mom, but I would say that I’ve become innately aware of the impermanence of life.  That feeling you get on New Year’s Eve singing Auld Lang Syne has stuck with me.  I often find myself looking around at the place I am occupying, the people I am with, the feeling I have in my heart because of their company, and I hold onto it a little more because I know it’s a moment in time and that we really can’t count on having things repeat again and again just as we would wish.  I don’t think go around thinking that bad things will or might happen, I just try to make things count a bit more, pay a little more attention, and love a little harder.

Back in September, Joe wrote a post on his blog that has really stuck with me:

Given any moment, I have a set of conditions under which my brain operates. I assume that there is something beneath my feet, holding me up. I assume that there will continue to be oxygen in the air for me to
breathe after this breath. I assume the Earth isn’t going to spontaneously combust. I assume that I have a father, a mother, two sisters, and a brother. When I take time to stop and think about these conditions under which I am continually operating, I realize that they aren’t all true. I rediscover the flaw in the code of my brain and it feels like an entirely new wound.

For me, the conditions under which I operate feel a little less certain than they did years ago.

I assume that the next time I see you, dear reader, we will have as nice a time together as we did last time.  But you never know.  So I’ve been responding to the unknowable-ness of our future by hanging on to the relationships that I treasure just a bit more tightly.

Sometimes I think it’s nice to get out of my normal routine for even a couple days.  It seems to allow my brain to do some meandering along less traveled paths.

April 25: In the last couple weeks, I’ve gone down to the basement and sorted through all Andrew’s old clothes to see what Sylvia can use and which things can get passed along to friends.  I had mixed feels about the whole experience.  I loved Andrew’s baby clothes, and it was wonderful to look through them all again.  But so many of them were either from my mom or I had purchased while with my mom.  And it made me really heart-sick to remember how much fun we had baby clothes shopping.
Now that it’s spring, I also just pulled out some clothes I had bought at the end of the season last year.  In the box were the last of the items that Mom and I had bought for Andrew together.  I still can’t believe she’s not here.

It is really hard to hold some cute outfit that we had discovered and loved over together and know that there won’t be any future clothes shopping trips with her.  I can remember the store, the rack, the other things that we bought that day.  Shopping was something we always had fun doing together.  And that’s really an understatement.

I feel so sad that my mom wasn’t able to have fun looking for clothes for her beautiful granddaughter.  And I feel really guilty for being the only one of my siblings to get to share a grandchild with her and to benefit from her parenting advice and expertise.
It really all just sucks.
Especially when I see the spring line of cute little boy shortalls that Mom admired last year and to be re-reminded with that hollow feeling in my gut that she’s not here to see them this spring.  So I guess I’ll just admire them for her.

April 7: Mom’s 56th birthday is today.  It’s the first birthday she’s ever skipped in her whole life.  And it feels weird.  A real reminder that she’s not here with us anymore.  Instead of feeling sad (which is pretty easy to do), I’ve been trying to think of using her birthday as an opportunity to celebrate Mom.  So family members who are here in Madison are going out to dinner tonight at the Mariner’s Inn.  I think I’ll order lobster.  It’s Mom’s favorite.  And mine:)
I also thought that Mom would probably really enjoy it if I got her grandkids some cute clothes to celebrate her birthday.  Unfortunately, shopping with the two little ones is a little beyond my abilities today, so maybe a belated birthday present, Mom.
I did make a birthday present for Mom.  And since she’s not here to give it to, I thought I’d share it with you.  Mom really enjoyed poetry.  She had lots of poems memorized, and when I went through her papers, I was surprised at the number of poems and beautiful prose that I found copied out in her lovely handwriting.
I pulled together a set of poems that either I know Mom enjoyed or I think she would enjoy.  You can find them here.  I hope they make you smile and perhaps breathe more deeply for a moment and think for a moment about what a wonderful world we all live in.

March 30: Tomorrow, March 31, is the six-month anniversary of Mom’s departure.  A week from Monday is Mom’s 56th birthday.  It’s just weird.  I sometimes find myself thinking of calling Mom when I’m bored or when something neat happens or when I need her advice.  It’s like my brain just can’t remember that she’s not here.  On the other hand, I have found myself becoming more accustomed to not counting her when doing a head-count for family events, and that feels sort of bad too.  I really don’t think that I want to get too accustomed to her not being here, because then it’s like I’m OK with her being gone.  And I’m really not OK with it one little bit.

The following responsive readings are from Hospice and suggested for for reciting during gatherings to honor those you have lost.

We Remember Her

Nov. 7: Today is the two-month anniversary of my mom’s funeral.  It’s been an odd journey these past couple months.  There’s a lot of sadness, a lot of normalness, a lot of happiness, and a lot of trepidation about how we all move forward.  The second half of Mom’s funeral gave people a chance to come up and say something about my mom.  The speakers have generously shared their comments with me so I could post them more broadly.  Here they are:
Dad, Mary Read (mom’s friend from childhood), Nancy McElmurry (mom’s friend from when I was little), Paula Kopp (mom’s cousin), Heather Lerner (my friend and one of mom’s adopted children), and Terry.

Oct. 18: Lots of people have lovingly been asking me how I’ve been doing as we adjust to life without Mom.  In general, it’s really not fun.  I still worry most about the rest of my family and how they are all coping.  And I feel so deflated in the regular moments when I think to myself, “I should call Mom to…”  Then I kind of frown and often feel a lump in my throat and then move on.
There’s things I see or hear that so clearly remind me of times we’ve had togehter.  I can see her and hear her and remember her so clearly, that it’s painfully startling to re-realize that she’s gone.  Now it’s just me holding the memories of the times we have had together.  The other side of the “remember when” conversations is gone.
I’ve had so much fun picking out clothes and baby books and little things for this new baby.  And Mom would have loved to be part of it.  I feel so lucky to have a wonderful mother-in-law and sister to share these fun times with.  And since they both knew and loved Mom, it helps me feel more like she’s part of all this too.
All that said, on a daily basis, I don’t spend much time feeling sad. I sometimes worry that I may be avoiding the grieving process altogether, but then I think that a lot of that took place for me over the summer and in some ways over the last couple years.  And I know that Mom was really worried about me being too sad or stressed during this pregnancy.  Maybe she gave me a mommy spoonful of heart-healing medicine when she left.  Because for better or worse, while I miss her so much, I’m not holding a lot of sadness in my heart.

One thing that has been regularly coming to mind is the last weeks of Mom’s life.  At the time, we were all in a mode where we were doing what needed to get done.  We were providing a lot of care and nursing for Mom, and I was trying really hard to be accepting of the place we were and of the place where we were heading.  I’m so glad we had that time to help Mom let go and to say goodbye.  But I am currently thinking back on those times and mixing that purposeful sense of gratitude with memories about how wrong, how horrible really, it is to watch your mother die.

I think back, and my heart constricts as I remember seeing sign after sign that her body was failing and that she was irrevocably slipping away from her vibrant living self.

I remember times in July that I just knew that things were really not right, and I so desperately wanted to find a way to fix them.  Why didn’t Mom want me to buy her a new, lighter purse.  I couldn’t know at the time it was because she was never going to leave the house again on her own.

I think of Mom lying on her hospital bed and seeing the bag that held her urine turn darker and darker as her kidneys shut down.  At the time, I tried to just enjoy having her near me and being in her presence.  But now I think back on that image, and my soul shouts, “NO!”  My mom’s kidneys are NOT supposed to shut down.  That means that all the toxins are staying in her body and destroying her brain and meaning that she can never, never come back to us and be herself again.

…

Those last weeks had a whole lot of goodness to them.  But this month, as I continue to get used to the idea that Mom the person is gone, I’m also thinking back and working to come to terms with the hard parts of letting her go.

The up-side is that I still feel her all around me all the time.

Those are my thoughts for now.
~Althea

Sept. 28: I just woke up from having the most amazing dream. Since Mom died…exactly four weeks ago…I haven’t had any dreams about her. But last night I had this long and elaborate dream, and it was lovely.

In this dream, we were burying her with the casket open.  And as we shoveled dirt onto her, I broke down and couldn’t watch.  So I was sitting in a nearby room (I think we were burying her indoors, hmm), Mom walked in, freshly showered and looking completely healthy.

Her hair was curling around her face, and her expression was calm and happy.  She said that somehow the shoveling of dirt onto her had woken her up.  I thought about telling her that her body had been prepared for an open casket funeral, and there was no way in the world that she could still be alive, but I decided to let that matter rest.  Who cared, she was right there in front of me.

We held each other, and I cried and told her how much I had missed her.

Then, in one of those dream-like transitions, Mom and Andrew and I were out shopping together.  She pointed out a couple things she thought I would like.  In one case, I was holding the same item in a different color on the other side of the same display.  I said, “I’m going to buy this, Mom.  It’s not every day you come back from the dead!”

Andrew was being a pickle, and Mom seemed to be having so much fun, was expressing so much relief at getting to watch him run around and do his marvelous exploration of the world.

For a long time, Mom and I wandered and shopped and talked…mostly about every day nothing.  It was lovely.

Toward the end of the dream, she and I were curled up in her bed.  She was wearing the night gown she wore some of her last coherent days at home, but now it looked good on her healthy, not-so-skinny body.

I cuddled close to her and smelled her skin.  She smelled just like she is supposed to.  I’ve missed that, without even knowing it.  We laughed together at how white her legs are.
I was just so stunned to have here next to me, in my presence, and so fully alive.

She asked me if I felt like this was worth it.  If the goodness I felt at seeing her again overshadowed the pain I would feel if she died again.  And I told her I would take two more weeks of the torture of watching her die to have this one beautiful day.  She seemed glad about that.

A couple moments later I woke up.  My little sister is sleeping in the bunk above me; I’m staying with her in St. Paul this weekend.  I spent a few moments thinking about how lovely it was to not have that sadness anymore.  Then I realized that it had been a dream.  Oh well.  At least I got to see her.

I so hope I have more of those dreams.  It really made me feel good.  It made me realize that what I miss most is spending time to Mom and being close to her.  I really makes me sad to think that we won’t be able to have anymore lazy days spent in happy company together.  So if we can do that now and again in my dreams, that would make this new reality a little easier to bear.

And maybe when this new little baby is born, I can introduce her to Mom in my dreams too.  Of course, I think she’ll already know her well.  I have a feeling that in some form, Mom is going to be spending the next four months holding and singing to my little one.  I wouldn’t be surprised if it came out already knowing all our lullabies.

Sept. 15: I’ve had quite a few people ask what Maretta and Joe are doing at this point, so here’s a quick update.
Maretta and Kyle drove back up to St. Paul on Sunday, September 9.  Maretta had gone up for a couple days last week to get settled, buy books, and attend the first day of classes.  After returning to her apartment at St. Kate’s on Sunday, Maretta spent a couple days lying low, and she started going to classes on Wednesday.  Although she didn’t try out for the fall plays, one of the directors approached her earlier this week and offered her a part in a three-person show this fall.  So even though she had been thinking about taking a bit of a slower semester, it looks like she’ll be working full throttle for the next month.  I’m glad because she’ll be doing things that she loves.  Maretta is a senior majoring in theater.
Joe flew back to Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine on Thursday, September 13.  He’s planning on starting classes on Monday.  He’s going to take a couple classes this fall, work, and play his English horn in a quartet.  I imagine he’s going to have his work cut out for him the first few weeks since classes at Bowdoin started on August 30.  Joe’s a sophomore this year and is planning on majoring in philosophy.
While Joe was home over the last couple weeks, he’s been staying with Michael, and Michael took off work Monday-Wednesday this week to recuperate and to spend time with Joe.  I believe that Michael went back to work on Thursday at Excel Inns where he works as a computer guru.
I stopped in work at Gathering Waters Conservancy briefly on Tuesday and Wednesday, but other than that, I took off the whole week to recover and to spend time with Bryan since he was having his week off between jobs.  After nearly four weeks of time off work, I’ll be back at work on my normal schedule starting on Monday.

I think for all of us, it was good to take off some time after the trials and events of the last few weeks.

In talking with Maretta the other day, we noted that we’re all learning to incorporate a deep sadness into our lives now.  It’s a lot different than what we’ve been dealing with the last couple years.  A sense of loss and a gaping hole has replaced a previous constant sense of anxiety or alertness.  I am glad to not have to continue to worry about the results of the next test.  When would bad news come?  How would it come?
The last month was much more serious…how much pain was Mom in? Was she acting normally, or not? If she wasn’t acting normal, what did that mean?
So, bizarrely, I find myself experiencing a sense of relief on some level.  I can still carry with me a constant, very low-grade worry that some accident will befall someone I love, but I don’t have that same sense of potential impending doom.  Now that the worst has happened and we no longer have our Mom here with us in our lives, we instead need to work through our grief and learn how to make our lives OK with this new, undesired reality.

If anyone wants to drop Maretta or Joe a note, here are their addresses:

Maretta Babler
College of St. Catherine
#145
2004 Randolph Ave.
St. Paul, MN 55105

Joe Babler
Bowdoin College
33 Smith Union Hall
Brunswick, ME 04011-8400