August 08, 2004
I thought I would add a category for things related to my moms death, more so that I will have a single place to find all the entries I end up writing in one place - some time later on.
It's a week since she died. Actually she died at approximately 7pm last sunday and today the hour passed and I didn't even notice.
I thought that was weird, but than I thought , probably I haven't even begun to understand what it means to be dead.
I was reading eris's latest about her binary roots and it got me to think about the fact that certain of my own roots have definitely undergone either a shift in the soil or perhaps a transplanting.
Continued from main page..
To be honest, at first I couldn't even read her entry, it was so optimistic and driven, and I was sitting around noodling on my lap-top driven more by a desire to avoid doing or thinking.
I guess I never realised that grieving isn't just demoralizing with respect to my immediate relationship with my mother (which is not over now that she is dead, I just have my first relationship with the memory of a person, with their embodiment in my head). It's demoralizing from the perpsective of causing me to question what I have up to now, considered of the utmost importance, primarily work, success, and the admiration of my peers.
Some small voice says, you are just sad and the fact that you are blogging means that part of you is as invested in the you that you were before this sea change. Another voice says you spent seven years imagining yourself as a grown woman away from your mother and now that she's gone you have no idea what you want from your own life, what does that mean?
One thing I know is that some things are much more important than they were before, and some things seem less consequential.
For example; I am no longer going to try to work my feeling away, it didn't help my mom and it probably won't help me in the long run, so if I am feeling really awful I am not going to develop some long-term project and invest in it rather than learn to feel sorrow without panic-ing.
Another thing is that maybe I have to lighten up on myself a bit. I slam myself for not having all the training or all the skills or being as techy as I wanna be, but maybe I want to stop and re-think what I want to spend the next 20 years doing, making really nice web sites, or talking to people and trying to organize for social change. I mean it's possible to do both but I think if I focus on organizing, my web stuff will suffer, and I am not sure which I care about more, or which I wiill be better at, and I think if I choose one I will wind up having more success and feeling less like a jack of all trades.
In a total non-sequiter, the dog Lola is grieving as well, and it's really something to spend time with her, a dog in mourning is not something to take lightly. She looks like she's both sick and also being punished. The only time she's happy is on walks, and she hates to be alone. Her eyes are about as sad as eyes can be without actually just turning into little puddles on the floor.
That's it for today, I am going to watch another stupid movie and fall asleep.
Posted by Miriam at August 8, 2004 10:44 PM
Posted to death and dying