Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #1235 (SoD #2536) - 2400 Days
Hi Mom,
Hi Mom,
Thanks for still being with me, hovering over my shoulder, infused in all my energy and daily choices.
Welcome back.
It always seems fitting to me to acknowledge milestones in my life and on my blog. It's why I have a milestones category.
Today marks the 2400th day since you passed away, Mom.
Now, many readers may consider my acknowledgement of this day to be "hanging on to the past," "unable to let go," "dwelling on long past events," or even more hurtful condemnations, maybe outright calling me pathetic or disappointing.
Now, many readers may consider my acknowledgement of this day to be "hanging on to the past," "unable to let go," "dwelling on long past events," or even more hurtful condemnations, maybe outright calling me pathetic or disappointing.
Even after just 90 days and 88 blog entries in the HEY MOM series, a close friend told me to give it up. Enough is enough. Too much.
This advice was well meaning. She thought I would be unable to move past your death, Mom, and that dwelling on it would stunt my personal growth. She implied that I should not put my personal grief on display, in public, at least not after almost three months. It seemed to be a "shut up and dribble" kind of remark. The equivalent of "I don't want to hear about it; keep it to yourself."
Well, as you know, Mom, I went on to do the HEY MOM series for more than three months; I did it for THREE YEARS. After the first year, simply because I stopped my t-shirts blog after a year, I talked with friends and family about whether I should stop. Were people tired of seeing my HEY MOM posts, and more importantly, did they judge me for doing them?
Universally, people told me to keep going. First of all, who cares if they judge me? Small-minded people who did that were dismissable. I was told to keep writing the posts as long as I wanted to do so. I wasn't ready to give it up yet. It REALLY didn't feel right to stop at 90 days, and it still did not feel right after 365 days.
After all, I am not forcing people to read this blog. In fact, I doubt any one actually looks at it every day. That's because this blog is more for me than it is for readers (though it is for you, Mom). I like having readers. I like hearing from readers (please leave a comment or message on social media). But I am not doing it FOR readers. I am writing this blog for me, and so I am the only one I have to answer to.
In fact, it was probably the well-meaning but totally judgmental advice after 90 days that spurred me on to THREE YEARS because not long after the 90 day mark, David Bowie died, and I had two people to grieve. Not even close to equivalent, sure. I had never met David Bowie. But he is important to me all the same.
Even before 90 days had passed, my blog was more about ME than it was about grief. It was still a daily letter to you, Mom, but it started becoming more about my life and my moving on than it was about my grief. Every month, there were fewer and fewer posts about grief and about you and your death, Mom, and more and more posts about whatever I wanted to share and/or write about.
I moved on incrementally. I hung on to weird things and routines that made me feel better, like kissing a shirt of yours every day or setting my phone alarm for 10:10 a.m. every day so I could reflect on your passing and consider how I was feeling about it.
The thing about me and routine, though, as you well know, Mom, is that I am kind of OCD about stuff. If I set a thing that I do, I am likely to keep doing it long past the time other people would do it and long past the time I actually NEED to do it.
That wasn't really true of the blog. Maybe I could have kept daily HEY MOM posts going for five years or where I am now, midway through year seven. I quit when it felt right to quit it. At first, I had trouble letting go and continued more frequent HEY MOM posts. I thought I would do those weekly. Soon that faded away as well, and now HEY MOM posts are very infrequent, mostly counted on holidays and special occasions, milestones like this one.
I like data and counting things. So 2400 days seems significant to me as a marker to stop and reflect on all those days. That's a lot of days. I have never before in my life kept a count going for that many days. I tried with some break ups, but eventually, I stopped. And though, I do not write HEY MOM posts every day anymore, I still count the days. At the bottom of EVERY blog post, there's a running count of the days since your death, Mom.
If for no other reason, the count is a good acknowledgement for me of what you meant to my life, Mom, but also it's a representation of why I started back up the daily blog regimen and how many days in a row I have done that work, which is 2398 days straight as I started back on the daily schedule two days after you died.
I am a little impressed with myself for that longevity of consecutive activity. I am proud of that streak. And I am not stopping. Your death spurred me on to go back to daily blogging, Mom, and I discovered that I really like posting a blog every single day.
Sometimes the blog are on low power or just THAT ONE THING or just a share with almost no commentary at all, and other times I find the time to create some original content, which, sometimes, even features writing like what I am doing right now, right here. I like that creativity and practice. I like the variety I have in this blog. I like my features (especially MUSICAL MONDAY). I like how I use the blog in my teaching work. I like how the blog keeps me active in learning and studying things. I especially like having readers and hearing from readers. That makes my day. And you're right there with them, Mom. You're the reason that they get to read things or learn things via share or listen to music or have students and teachers even from other schools or other countries find my stuff in their Google searches.
I love being a daily blog writer. You helped me see that, Mom.
Thank you, Mom. That means a lot to me.
TO THE READERS (other than you, Mom): Following are a selection of reprints because with 1235 posts in just the HEY MOM series let alone 2536 on the blog as a whole, these past entries surely get lost. The one I referenced above, the 90 days and 88 posts one, is reprinted below. The first one after 100 days uses a photo my Dad took that seemed incredibly prophetic.
Let me know what you think, and thanks for reading.
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Monday, October 12, 2015
Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #98 - 100 days and Learning to Die
Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #98 - 100 days and Learning to Die
Hi Mom,
You died 100 days ago.
This feels like a mile stone, a marker of passage, and yet I cannot fully the effect of the rite of passage.
The time seems to have passed quickly.
The time seems to have passed very slowly.
I might not be counting days if not for this blog.
If not for this blog, I might not be aware that you died 100 days ago.
I am not sure how I feel about this mile marker.
And then Dad sent me this photo. Just randomly. He did not know one hundred days had passed.
And yet the photo seems perfect for today's blog.
I labeled the photo as you contemplating death as you are staring at the grave stone for your family in New Lothrop, and yet, I doubt you were actually thinking about death.
I know you thought of death from time to time; you discussed it with Dad.
I contemplated what it would be like when you died from time to time as well. But I could not anticipate how surreal it feels, how NOT NORMAL and yet normal, as I am surrounded by normal, and I am adjusting to change, and yet I am still in denial and in disbelief.
It's very much like quantum physics.
Liesel gave me this article a few weeks ago. This author and I, like another friend of mine, and Sarah Silverman, and my wife and so many others are all part of the "our mothers are dead" club. For this author, her mother died four years ago (2011, which was when this picture featured up top was taken) and yet her mother's death was ongoing as the author learned what deaths means as she comes to grip with her own ill-conceived assumptions. She closes the article with "I thought she would live forever."
LINK TO LEARNING TO DIE ARTICLE
I did not think you would live forever, Mom. I knew we were on borrowed time ever since the meningitis in 2000. And yet, I tricked myself into thinking there would be more time. You would live into your 80s, maybe even your 90s, I said many times. After all, you came back from death's door with the meningitis. You had many close calls after that, and yet, you proved yourself so strong. You kept hanging on. Your will to live seemed insuperable. Even when we learned you had the degenerative palsy, I still tricked myself. You were on a plateau. You might stay on that plateau for a long time. As I watched you decline, I knew the borrowed time was growing shorter, and yet I still bargained. I thought you would live on for a long time, not forever but longer than most doctors believed possible. And you did. It was just not long enough. I want more time.
And now one hundred days have ticked off since you crossed over into the beyond and your body was taken away and we said goodbye with loved ones and I have been writing and writing and hearing your voice and feeling you and talking to you and still, it's not enough, but it is what is. It's all there is. It sustains.
And I miss you, Mom, but no more than I did 100 days ago in that first glimpse of your corpse that was no longer drawing breath. I miss you a great deal Mom. The feeling moves in and out like the tide, sometimes it's stronger, sometimes I am distracted by other things, and so it seems less (though it's not), and yet, unlike the days, the feeling of missing you is not growing.
Have someone give you a kiss, and tell you that I love you.
Talk to you tomorrow, Mom.
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- Days ago = 100 days ago
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1510.12 - 20:43
and finally 1510.13 - 11:34
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Friday, October 2, 2015
Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #88 - 90 days and 88 blog entries
Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #88 - 90 days and 88 blog entries
Hi Mom,
Here we are at what feels like a milestone. Today marks 90 days since you died. Three months. Often, it feels like longer. But in some ways, it feels like it was still last week, yesterday, or a few minutes ago. I still cannot wrap my head around what it means that you're gone. I still struggle to understand it, believe it, accept it. I suspect I will feel this way for a very long time, maybe for the rst of my life.
But today, I do not wish to ruminate further on my grief journey. Today's subject is more specifically this blog itself.
I had a comment on Facebook the other day from a dear friend, who meant well, but who may have been better off sending me a private message as her public one stirred up some reactions. Since she shared her thoughts publicly, I see no reason why I cannot re-share them here.
I have known Elizabeth a long time, so I take her comments in stride. You can see my response in the image from Facebook shared above, Mom. You remember Elizabeth, as you loved her Christmas cards with all the cats. I see that Elizabeth is writing to me from a place of love, and as she still works out her own experiences with the loss of her father, as she mentions. It's funny (to me) that she uses the wings analogy because my friend Walt Curley just wrote me (privately) and shared a story about his mother coming to him as a bird and then flying away. It's a common image, but still, it's ironic (in an Alanis Morissette way, as in coincidental and possibly a sign of synchronicity) that she used those specific words at the same time another friend used them. And yet each friend had a different purpose in communicating about wings and flight.
Elizabeth feels she is giving me good advice, and maybe advice she wished someone had given her during her grief process, shortly after her father died. Maybe she thinks my daily reminder to everyone that you died three months ago, Mom, is excessive.
So let me address why I am doing this blog, and what it means.
There is history here. In 2013, I found out I had prostate cancer. Not very advanced and not very difficult to treat, but still it was a bit of a shock, and learning about it changed my priorities. A blog project idea I had rejected two months prior as narcissistic suddenly seemed a very good idea. A week after learning I had cancer, I no longer worried that people would think I was narcissistic. And so, I started the T-shirts Blog project titled 365 T-shirts, which I wrote for year. The blog project really helped me. The daily writing discipline became very important to me.
(ASIDE - I fully explore this issue of narcissism, here in T-shirt #77, but there is also some cool stuff in T-shirt #180.)
And so, two days after you died, Mom, it struck me that another blog project was just what I needed to deal with my grief. It hit me that day (a Monday) that I would not be able to call you on the phone and talk to you any more, so I decided to make a blog that would continue those conversations. I already had this Sense of Doubt blog in operation, so I just started to feature "Hey, Mom" here.
This blog is more than a way for me to work on grief. This blog serves as a vehicle to allow me to exercise my writing muscles on a daily basis. Some days generate more content than others, like today, but the goal is to talk to you, Mom, and by extension to give me a platform to really write about whatever I want.
Like with the T-shirts blog, the daily writing discipline helps me make sense of my life and to like my life rather than to hate it; and so even when work and anxiety and stress try to suck me down the storm drain of life, I have this blog to look forward to doing and it helps me keep going from one day to the next. I made a promise to you, Mom, and thus by extension to myself that I would devote myself to daily posts for another year, like with T-shirts. So far, so good, though there are a few posts on here (there are on t-shirts, too) that I consider unfinished.
It's sort of a misconception that this blog will be a daily reflection on grief in general or even my grief in particular. Surely, the sense of loss pervades the blog as I have a sign off every day about how I love you, Mom, and I want someone to give you a kiss, which is the exact way I used to end every phone call to you (or a goodbye when I saw you in person and could kiss you myself).
The grief is here and all around me, but the blog is meant to be about my life. Really, it's about me. My subject matter concerns the things with which I am concerned. Along the way, I will write about you, Mom. I will draw on memories. I will reflect on my feelings and share about grieving. But in the final analysis, I am doing this blog for me, about me, about life, and in that sense, it's a celebration. Because, after all, I am still here, living, loving, crying, and dancing for joy. I am not miserable. I am not sad all the time. I eat sushi and drink cocktails. I play music and sing loudly as I dance around the house. I ride my bike, take the puppy for walks, and play Ultimate. Life is happening. It's hard, sometimes, but I grab it by the horns and wrestle. I sound my barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world. I live.
If this blog is about me, or even my private conversations with you, Mom, then why share it? (ASIDE: And, yes, dear readers not my Mom, there are private things that I share with Mom that I do not put in writing here.) If it's just writing exercise, then why would anyone want to read it? I don't know. I do not expect readers. Though I mention readers from time to time, the only reader I really imagine is you, Mom, and you are not so much reading it after its publication, like other readers, as accompanying me as I write it. You are here with me. You are seated right next to me or on my shoulder or on my back. I FEEL YOU very strongly in all these locations at once.
So, again, if this is about me but for you, Mom, and you are here, then why share it with the world via social media? Well, gee, isn't that the whole purpose of social media? Isn't my daily blog post like a status update? Writing is meant to be read by other people. I have never been very big on doing writing that I am not planning to show other people at some point in the future, the exception being notes for a novel or piece of short fiction.
Writing is meant to be read, and so I share. I have had a great deal of positive feedback, which I have written about here on this blog on numerous occasions. In fact, I just wrote about the feedback subject nine days ago in Hey Mom #79, though my favorite post on feedback is Hey Mom #31 "forever and ever." The positive feedback I have received has encouraged me.
So, the blog is meant to be read, and yet I am not invested in whether people read it or not. It's out there for people who want to tune in, but I am not expecting any readers other than you, Mom. (ASIDE: Though occasionally I will tell people close to me like my Dad or Liesel to read a specific entry.)
Yet, since I have written about this issue before, had my friend Elizabeth read those posts, she might not have shared her advice with me or at least not publicly where other people could react to it.
I had had people close to me tell me that they think what I am doing is excessive. And yet, like Elizabeth's remarks, these comments come from a fundamental misunderstanding of what I am doing. The blog is not about grieving only any more than the T-shirts blog was about cancer. After all, I did not call it "Chris' T-shirts Blog about Cancer." In fact, cancer was not really mentioned at all, though the confession of it is hidden deep in T-shirt #77, which was also the first mention of the cancer. Cancer just provided the motivation to do the daily writing. Now, your death, Mom, provides me with the motivation. Your death gives me a theme to work with, which is much more overt than the cancer for the T-shirts blog. But it's just that, a theme. Sometimes I will write about you, sometimes I will write about grief, and some times I will write about ending my candy fast as I did here in #73. And the farther away I get from your death, the more the blog will be about my life and less about my grief.
If you're a reader, and you're reading regularly, sporadically, or if you found this blog by random chance, thank you. Drop me a line. I appreciate you.
Like this good friend, who wrote something encouraging on Google Plus.
Mom, you may remember a poem I wrote called "This Poem is Not About You." It's very approriate to what I am trying to communicate here. I would share it now, but I am afraid this entry is already too long. Besides, the poem would make a good stand alone entry
Have someone give you a kiss, and tell you that I love you.
Talk to you tomorrow, Mom.
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- Days ago = 90 days ago
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1510.02 - 21:11
and again 1510.03 - 9:20 (gee, nearly exactly 12 hours later)
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Sunday, April 1, 2018
Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #1000 - 1000 Days
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.
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.
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).
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.
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. :-)
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- Days ago = 1002 days ago
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1804.01 - 10:10
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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 soon, Mom.
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Let me know what you think, and thanks for reading.
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Monday, October 12, 2015
Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #98 - 100 days and Learning to Die
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| Mom contemplating death Her family's grave marker May 11, 2011 |
Hi Mom,
You died 100 days ago.
This feels like a mile stone, a marker of passage, and yet I cannot fully the effect of the rite of passage.
The time seems to have passed quickly.
The time seems to have passed very slowly.
I might not be counting days if not for this blog.
If not for this blog, I might not be aware that you died 100 days ago.
I am not sure how I feel about this mile marker.
And then Dad sent me this photo. Just randomly. He did not know one hundred days had passed.
And yet the photo seems perfect for today's blog.
I labeled the photo as you contemplating death as you are staring at the grave stone for your family in New Lothrop, and yet, I doubt you were actually thinking about death.
I know you thought of death from time to time; you discussed it with Dad.
I contemplated what it would be like when you died from time to time as well. But I could not anticipate how surreal it feels, how NOT NORMAL and yet normal, as I am surrounded by normal, and I am adjusting to change, and yet I am still in denial and in disbelief.
It's very much like quantum physics.
Liesel gave me this article a few weeks ago. This author and I, like another friend of mine, and Sarah Silverman, and my wife and so many others are all part of the "our mothers are dead" club. For this author, her mother died four years ago (2011, which was when this picture featured up top was taken) and yet her mother's death was ongoing as the author learned what deaths means as she comes to grip with her own ill-conceived assumptions. She closes the article with "I thought she would live forever."
LINK TO LEARNING TO DIE ARTICLE
I did not think you would live forever, Mom. I knew we were on borrowed time ever since the meningitis in 2000. And yet, I tricked myself into thinking there would be more time. You would live into your 80s, maybe even your 90s, I said many times. After all, you came back from death's door with the meningitis. You had many close calls after that, and yet, you proved yourself so strong. You kept hanging on. Your will to live seemed insuperable. Even when we learned you had the degenerative palsy, I still tricked myself. You were on a plateau. You might stay on that plateau for a long time. As I watched you decline, I knew the borrowed time was growing shorter, and yet I still bargained. I thought you would live on for a long time, not forever but longer than most doctors believed possible. And you did. It was just not long enough. I want more time.
And now one hundred days have ticked off since you crossed over into the beyond and your body was taken away and we said goodbye with loved ones and I have been writing and writing and hearing your voice and feeling you and talking to you and still, it's not enough, but it is what is. It's all there is. It sustains.
And I miss you, Mom, but no more than I did 100 days ago in that first glimpse of your corpse that was no longer drawing breath. I miss you a great deal Mom. The feeling moves in and out like the tide, sometimes it's stronger, sometimes I am distracted by other things, and so it seems less (though it's not), and yet, unlike the days, the feeling of missing you is not growing.
Have someone give you a kiss, and tell you that I love you.
Talk to you tomorrow, Mom.
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- Days ago = 100 days ago
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1510.12 - 20:43
and finally 1510.13 - 11:34
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Friday, October 2, 2015
Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #88 - 90 days and 88 blog entries
Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #88 - 90 days and 88 blog entries
Hi Mom,
Here we are at what feels like a milestone. Today marks 90 days since you died. Three months. Often, it feels like longer. But in some ways, it feels like it was still last week, yesterday, or a few minutes ago. I still cannot wrap my head around what it means that you're gone. I still struggle to understand it, believe it, accept it. I suspect I will feel this way for a very long time, maybe for the rst of my life.
But today, I do not wish to ruminate further on my grief journey. Today's subject is more specifically this blog itself.
I had a comment on Facebook the other day from a dear friend, who meant well, but who may have been better off sending me a private message as her public one stirred up some reactions. Since she shared her thoughts publicly, I see no reason why I cannot re-share them here.
I have known Elizabeth a long time, so I take her comments in stride. You can see my response in the image from Facebook shared above, Mom. You remember Elizabeth, as you loved her Christmas cards with all the cats. I see that Elizabeth is writing to me from a place of love, and as she still works out her own experiences with the loss of her father, as she mentions. It's funny (to me) that she uses the wings analogy because my friend Walt Curley just wrote me (privately) and shared a story about his mother coming to him as a bird and then flying away. It's a common image, but still, it's ironic (in an Alanis Morissette way, as in coincidental and possibly a sign of synchronicity) that she used those specific words at the same time another friend used them. And yet each friend had a different purpose in communicating about wings and flight.
Elizabeth feels she is giving me good advice, and maybe advice she wished someone had given her during her grief process, shortly after her father died. Maybe she thinks my daily reminder to everyone that you died three months ago, Mom, is excessive.
So let me address why I am doing this blog, and what it means.
There is history here. In 2013, I found out I had prostate cancer. Not very advanced and not very difficult to treat, but still it was a bit of a shock, and learning about it changed my priorities. A blog project idea I had rejected two months prior as narcissistic suddenly seemed a very good idea. A week after learning I had cancer, I no longer worried that people would think I was narcissistic. And so, I started the T-shirts Blog project titled 365 T-shirts, which I wrote for year. The blog project really helped me. The daily writing discipline became very important to me.(ASIDE - I fully explore this issue of narcissism, here in T-shirt #77, but there is also some cool stuff in T-shirt #180.)
And so, two days after you died, Mom, it struck me that another blog project was just what I needed to deal with my grief. It hit me that day (a Monday) that I would not be able to call you on the phone and talk to you any more, so I decided to make a blog that would continue those conversations. I already had this Sense of Doubt blog in operation, so I just started to feature "Hey, Mom" here.
This blog is more than a way for me to work on grief. This blog serves as a vehicle to allow me to exercise my writing muscles on a daily basis. Some days generate more content than others, like today, but the goal is to talk to you, Mom, and by extension to give me a platform to really write about whatever I want.
Like with the T-shirts blog, the daily writing discipline helps me make sense of my life and to like my life rather than to hate it; and so even when work and anxiety and stress try to suck me down the storm drain of life, I have this blog to look forward to doing and it helps me keep going from one day to the next. I made a promise to you, Mom, and thus by extension to myself that I would devote myself to daily posts for another year, like with T-shirts. So far, so good, though there are a few posts on here (there are on t-shirts, too) that I consider unfinished.
It's sort of a misconception that this blog will be a daily reflection on grief in general or even my grief in particular. Surely, the sense of loss pervades the blog as I have a sign off every day about how I love you, Mom, and I want someone to give you a kiss, which is the exact way I used to end every phone call to you (or a goodbye when I saw you in person and could kiss you myself).The grief is here and all around me, but the blog is meant to be about my life. Really, it's about me. My subject matter concerns the things with which I am concerned. Along the way, I will write about you, Mom. I will draw on memories. I will reflect on my feelings and share about grieving. But in the final analysis, I am doing this blog for me, about me, about life, and in that sense, it's a celebration. Because, after all, I am still here, living, loving, crying, and dancing for joy. I am not miserable. I am not sad all the time. I eat sushi and drink cocktails. I play music and sing loudly as I dance around the house. I ride my bike, take the puppy for walks, and play Ultimate. Life is happening. It's hard, sometimes, but I grab it by the horns and wrestle. I sound my barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world. I live.
If this blog is about me, or even my private conversations with you, Mom, then why share it? (ASIDE: And, yes, dear readers not my Mom, there are private things that I share with Mom that I do not put in writing here.) If it's just writing exercise, then why would anyone want to read it? I don't know. I do not expect readers. Though I mention readers from time to time, the only reader I really imagine is you, Mom, and you are not so much reading it after its publication, like other readers, as accompanying me as I write it. You are here with me. You are seated right next to me or on my shoulder or on my back. I FEEL YOU very strongly in all these locations at once.
So, again, if this is about me but for you, Mom, and you are here, then why share it with the world via social media? Well, gee, isn't that the whole purpose of social media? Isn't my daily blog post like a status update? Writing is meant to be read by other people. I have never been very big on doing writing that I am not planning to show other people at some point in the future, the exception being notes for a novel or piece of short fiction.
Writing is meant to be read, and so I share. I have had a great deal of positive feedback, which I have written about here on this blog on numerous occasions. In fact, I just wrote about the feedback subject nine days ago in Hey Mom #79, though my favorite post on feedback is Hey Mom #31 "forever and ever." The positive feedback I have received has encouraged me.
So, the blog is meant to be read, and yet I am not invested in whether people read it or not. It's out there for people who want to tune in, but I am not expecting any readers other than you, Mom. (ASIDE: Though occasionally I will tell people close to me like my Dad or Liesel to read a specific entry.)
I had had people close to me tell me that they think what I am doing is excessive. And yet, like Elizabeth's remarks, these comments come from a fundamental misunderstanding of what I am doing. The blog is not about grieving only any more than the T-shirts blog was about cancer. After all, I did not call it "Chris' T-shirts Blog about Cancer." In fact, cancer was not really mentioned at all, though the confession of it is hidden deep in T-shirt #77, which was also the first mention of the cancer. Cancer just provided the motivation to do the daily writing. Now, your death, Mom, provides me with the motivation. Your death gives me a theme to work with, which is much more overt than the cancer for the T-shirts blog. But it's just that, a theme. Sometimes I will write about you, sometimes I will write about grief, and some times I will write about ending my candy fast as I did here in #73. And the farther away I get from your death, the more the blog will be about my life and less about my grief.
If you're a reader, and you're reading regularly, sporadically, or if you found this blog by random chance, thank you. Drop me a line. I appreciate you.
Like this good friend, who wrote something encouraging on Google Plus.
Mom, you may remember a poem I wrote called "This Poem is Not About You." It's very approriate to what I am trying to communicate here. I would share it now, but I am afraid this entry is already too long. Besides, the poem would make a good stand alone entry
Have someone give you a kiss, and tell you that I love you.
Talk to you tomorrow, Mom.
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- Days ago = 90 days ago
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1510.02 - 21:11
and again 1510.03 - 9:20 (gee, nearly exactly 12 hours later)
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Sunday, April 1, 2018
Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #1000 - 1000 Days
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| Mom at Laura's wedding October 1985 also - http://sensedoubt.blogspot.com/2015/08/hey-mom-talking-to-my-mother-30-one.html |
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.
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| http://sensedoubt.blogspot.com/2017/07/hey-mom-talking-to-my-mother-728-two.html |
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| http://sensedoubt.blogspot.com/2015/08/hey-mom-talking-to-my-mother-50.html |
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.
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).
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| http://sensedoubt.blogspot.com/2017/07/hey-mom-talking-to-my-mother-728-two.html |
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| http://sensedoubt.blogspot.com/2015/07/hey-mom-talking-to-my-mother-15.html |
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. :-)
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| Mom at Dad's 50th birthday 1985 and - http://sensedoubt.blogspot.com/2015/08/hey-mom-talking-to-my-mother-50.html |
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| http://sensedoubt.blogspot.com/2017/07/hey-mom-talking-to-my-mother-728-two.html |
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| http://sensedoubt.blogspot.com/2015/08/hey-mom-talking-to-my-mother-50.html |
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- Days ago = 1002 days ago
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1804.01 - 10:10
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| Mother's Day - 1984 and - http://sensedoubt.blogspot.com/2017/07/hey-mom-talking-to-my-mother-728-two.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 soon, Mom.
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- Days ago = 2400 days ago
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2201.27 - 10:10
NEW (written 1708.27 and 1907.04) 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. Dropped "Talk to you tomorrow, Mom" in the sign off on 1907.04. Should have done it sooner as this feature is no longer daily.
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2201.27 - 10:10
NEW (written 1708.27 and 1907.04) 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. Dropped "Talk to you tomorrow, Mom" in the sign off on 1907.04. Should have done it sooner as this feature is no longer daily.
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