Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #1000 - 1000 Days

Mom at Laura's wedding October 1985
also - http://sensedoubt.blogspot.com/2015/08/hey-mom-talking-to-my-mother-30-one.html

Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #1000 - 1000 Days

Hi Mom,

No April Fool's prank. This is entry 1000 in the Hey Mom series and day 1002 since you passed away on July Fourth, 2015. It is also post #1135 on this blog.

http://sensedoubt.blogspot.com/2017/07/hey-mom-talking-to-my-mother-728-two.html

A few months ago, when I was very busy and challenged to create original content even once a week let alone more frequently, when I felt this blog feature had run its course, when I felt that the perception that I am still actively grieving and making a public spectacle or my grief rather than writing about my life, when I felt and thought all these things, I considered ceasing daily transmission of this blog feature today with entry #1000.

http://sensedoubt.blogspot.com/2015/08/hey-mom-talking-to-my-mother-50.html

It felt like 1000 entries would be a good stopping point. Since moving out west, I have been juggling many things, and so, in part, I was not sure I still had time to devote to this blog the way I would like. One thing I have not been able to figure out is why time is different here. I seem to get less done here than I did in Michigan. I have shared this issue with you before, Mom. In part, I know that some of my time is cut back by walking the dogs more often and having them at day care less often. Also, the dogs spend less time outside than they did in Michigan because our backyard is smaller. Then again, despite the time issue, I am able to get blog time in around work, learning to code, looking for work, and household chores, which include dog walking. There's never enough time for everything, and there are loads of things that don't get done each day, each week. But once I felt I started being able to organize time for the blog, then I felt like continuing.

I didn't do a count down either. In the T-Shorts blog, I started a countdown at some point. I am not sure when, but I see I counted down at least the last 100 entries. But the T-shirts blog had a definite end goal. I knew from the start that I was going to do 365 consecutive daily posts. With Hey Mom, I was just rolling along. Like T-shirts, I thought I would stop at one year.

One friend of mine suggested I stop around 88 entries:
Hey Mom #88 - 90 Days and 88 Blog Entries.

I was still actively grieving then, so the blog was still frequently about grief, though not exclusively. Number 86 was about apples and you, Mom. But #90 was about the end of Baseball season and number #91 was about Monday Night Football. #92 was about gender performance, and is one of the posts I am most proud of.

As I approached the one year mark, I realized that I liked the blog feature too much to stop, not because I needed it to grieve, but more because I was using it as a tool to live. More so, I like producing daily posts, so even if I did stop at 1000 posts in Hey Mom, I would continue to make daily posts just as part of the Sense of Doubt blog.

When I reached entry #365, I didn't make a big deal of hitting the year mark. I had already discussed my thoughts on the blog future in many entries, like this one about Memorial Day (#330).

http://sensedoubt.blogspot.com/2017/07/hey-mom-talking-to-my-mother-728-two.html

After I decided that I would not stop at 365 entries, I didn't give myself a deadline. I didn't know when I would stop. I decided to go with my feelings. I would feel it when it was time to stop. I would know. This process mirrored my experience with grief thus far. You are the most significant loss I have yet experienced, Mom. I had no experience with the process of this kind of grief, and I have been feeling my way through it. In the almost three years since you died, I have given up some of the things I had been doing to cope, such as setting an alarm for the time of your death (10:10 a.m.), kissing your t-shirt each day, calling Dad nearly every day, and a few others. Also, I stopped writing about grief on this blog because I want it to be about life and living and not grief. There are days in which I don't actually address you directly outside of the initial greeting and the boilerplate closing that I simply copy and paste with each entry. This blog feature is supposed to be a conversation with you, Mom, but it isn't always. Often it's more like show and tell. And many times, it features things that you would have no interest in and would have had a difficult time even feigning interest for my sake.

http://sensedoubt.blogspot.com/2015/07/hey-mom-talking-to-my-mother-15.html

As for the grief, I thought it would be harder. And for a while, it was. The first few months were the worst. The whole first year was pretty bad. But each year has been easier. In part, I had already been grieving you for the fifteen years prior to your death, Mom. When the Bacterial Meningitis struck you, I was devastated. You were in coma. You died and were resuscitated. You had major surgery and were in the hospital's ICU and in another rehab hospital for seven months. Then we had fifteen years with you as you experienced many health issues and hurdles until you were diagnosed with the degenerative palsy that finally ended your life. So I had all that time to grieve and mourn the loss of the woman in these photos. I am purposefully not sharing photos in this entry from after you recovered from the meningitis. Not that I don't love those years, but most often when I think of you, I think of how you were in these photos.

I do not want to minimize what I have gone through to learn to cope, to move on, to get to this place emotionally, Mom. I feel I have made a great deal of progress, and surely, of all the things I have done as part of the grieving process, this blog has been the best of those things. But the blog is more for me than for grief. It's an exercise in keeping writing muscles limber. It's a tool to at least publish something every day (or pretend I do when I get behind and produce four or more posts in one day). Still, it's been a healthy outlet for me.

Grief still hits me from time to time just as friends of mine warned me because they are coping with a similar loss. But for the most part, I think, I am happy and healthy.

Still, given how much I love you and how attached to you that I was, I thought I would be more devastated and more destroyed by your death. My wife actually remarked on this thing, too. Perhaps I am more resilient than I believed or maybe I was just better prepared. Because surely if you had died when you had the meningitis, and even that was less unexpected than what others have experienced in which, without warning, the life of a loved one is snuffed out leaving the emotional wreckage of survivors to try to make sense of it and move on. Really, for most tragedies of that kind, there is no making sense of it.

So, as I have confessed before, I feel some shame that I write about my loss at all compared to the much more devastating and tragic losses others experience.

But then, loss is loss.

It's difficult to quantify pain.

And yet, I don't want this blog to be about pain. I want it to be about life, my life now, our life, some focus on memories, but mainly a place for me to do whatever I want with writing, creation, and brain dump.

My tendency is to do too much, which is part of the problem.

This entry is probably already too long, and I am finishing it on Wednesday 1804.04 having started it Tuesday 1804.03. I seem to always be running behind rather than building up a cache of content and running ahead. I have a lot of material. Of 1494 total posts, 1135 are published, this is #1000 in Hey Mom, and there are 359 drafts. So I have plenty of material, and most of it is not about loss or grief or even you at all, Mom.

This is not the first time I have shared thoughts on this blog and its process. However, this is the first time I tried to share photos exclusively using the addresses to where the photos are already stored in my Google account. Google photos is a great utility, but it only seems to store photos I took with my camera on my phone and not photos that I uploaded to my blog. I know the photos are stored in My Drive but finding a way to search them quickly to find the photo I want is very time consuming, and then getting the storage URL for the jpg is not possible through Drive. At least, I can't figure it out... wait, what's this? I think I found the way to move between years. But the Drive's archive shows me when I uploaded a photo and not when I published it to the blog. It's sort of hit and miss. I found a photo that I uploaded on July 19th, 2015, but I cannot find the photo in the blog entry for the 19th. It was on the entry for the 20th, but this proximity will not always be the case.

I tracked many photos and added the links for where I found them for future reference, but I am a little disappointed that Google does not show me where I published the photo when it's in the cloud because I uploaded it via my blog.

Anyway, I sorted out some of the photo issues.
And this is the first time I am really writing about the grief process in a while.

To end this blog entry, before the rest of the favorite pictures, I want to include a few links to posts I have done that speak to loss or grief or this blog in particular that I think are good ones in case you, reader, have ventured here and read this far and want a sampler of entries to explore.

BLOG THOUGHTS AT 950

http://sensedoubt.blogspot.com/2018/02/hey-mom-talking-to-my-mother-950-at-950.html

800 DAYS

http://sensedoubt.blogspot.com/2017/09/hey-mom-talking-to-my-mother-798-800.html

A MASSIVE BLOG RECAP WITH MANY REPRINTS

http://sensedoubt.blogspot.com/2017/02/hey-mom-talking-to-my-mother-600-focus.html

THE SERENDIPITY LETTER

http://sensedoubt.blogspot.com/2016/05/hey-mom-talking-to-my-mother-301_3.html

THE BIKE RIDE - THE ROAD - ONE YEAR

http://sensedoubt.blogspot.com/2016/07/hey-mom-talking-to-my-mother-363.html

SCHEDULING TIME TO OBSESS

http://sensedoubt.blogspot.com/2016/01/hey-mom-talking-to-my-mother-198.html

http://sensedoubt.blogspot.com/2016/06/hey-mom-talking-to-my-mother-350-year.html

http://sensedoubt.blogspot.com/2016/11/hey-mom-talking-to-my-mother-500-number.html

NOT JUST GRIEF BOY

http://sensedoubt.blogspot.com/2015/12/hey-mom-talking-to-my-mother-148-150.html

http://sensedoubt.blogspot.com/2015/09/hey-mom-talking-to-my-mother-85-your.html

DAYS ALONE

http://sensedoubt.blogspot.com/2015/11/hey-mom-talking-to-my-mother-144-days.html

LOL is not Laughing Out Loud

http://sensedoubt.blogspot.com/2015/09/hey-mom-talking-to-my-mother-83-lol-not.html

DISBELIEF

http://sensedoubt.blogspot.com/2015/08/hey-mom-talking-to-my-mother-50.html

There's probably more that I could find, but this is a good collection. Not all of the entries are stunners, but I think it's a good list, and it probably pushes the boundaries of what defines "a few" links. :-)

Thanks for reading my blog! Leave a comment and prove you're a human. :-)

Mom at Dad's 50th birthday 1985
and - http://sensedoubt.blogspot.com/2015/08/hey-mom-talking-to-my-mother-50.html

http://sensedoubt.blogspot.com/2017/07/hey-mom-talking-to-my-mother-728-two.html

http://sensedoubt.blogspot.com/2015/08/hey-mom-talking-to-my-mother-50.html

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Reflect and connect.

Have someone give you a kiss, and tell you that I love you, Mom.

I miss you so very much, Mom.

Talk to you tomorrow, Mom.

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- Days ago = 1002 days ago

- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1804.01 - 10:10

NEW (written 1708.27) NOTE on time: I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of your death, Mom, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of your death, Mom. I know this only matters to me, and to you, Mom.

Mother's Day - 1984
and - http://sensedoubt.blogspot.com/2017/07/hey-mom-talking-to-my-mother-728-two.html