Sometimes hope peaks through.

Hiding from the Night

It's now 11:42 and I am still up . . . wide awake as a child on Christmas Eve or the night before the first day of school.  Lately, I have not been able to sleep.  I have always been nocturnal, so this comes as no surprise, but while I love the solitude of night, I think I am hiding from it.  It is that time . . . that middle-of-the-night silence that scares me the most because I am alone with my thoughts, which ultimately drift to the loss of my mother, my adult girls' future, my grandson's life, and my husband and his retirement at 56.  Too much thinking for a time when you should be shutting down.  The coolness of the pillow should provide respite and sanctuary from the intrusion and chaos of life. But sleep has been elusive, like that winning lottery ticket that I never seem to be able to find or the numbers I want to see on the scale when I step on.  But I digress  . . . which follows suit with my train of thought at night . . . wandering wherever it pleases.  Sometimes it visits pleasant places and I feel comforted, but mostly it has been seeking out dark and scary places that I try to repress.

This blog, however, has become a safe haven of sorts.  It helps me make sense of my random thoughts. . . I wonder if I'm even normal sometimes.  Will I ever feel like myself again now that my mom is gone?  She was my very best friend, and when I think of a world without her . . . oh no . . . push it down.  I still have to go to her house and sift through her belongings.  It all seems so senseless that we collect all this stuff and then we leave this world, and it stays right here for someone else to make sense of.  Obviously I will never have the same appreciation for some of her things and some things I will downright laugh at, but I know there are some things that will make her life tangible for me . . . her books, her jewelry, her teapots, her Beanie Babies.

I will do this with a heavy heart, but I am hoping to find smile and laugh a little when I do.  Maybe it will be therapeutic and the nights will no longer plague me.

A Long Summer . . .

Today is the first official day of my summer vacation, and normally I would be ecstatic, but oddly enough, I am dreading it . . . I haven't posted in a long time because quite honestly, I feel so lost. I am having a difficult time coming to terms with my mother's death.  This isn't how I thought my life would turn out.  In the back of my mind, I always knew she would probably go before me, but I always thought it was light years from whenever I thought about it.  If I had only known that it was going to be so soon, I would have done thing so differently.  But then again, wouldn't we all?

There is no way to prepare for death.  It just happens.  I don't mean to minimize life, but it just seems so cut and dry sometimes.  Then you start thinking about why are you on this earth and what is your role.  You wish you can have the kind of life that you are supposed to have, but sadly this only happens rarely.

If life is just a series of lessons (and I feel it is), and we evolve into the person we are supposed to be with each lesson, then my mother's death is supposed to teach me something.  Right now, unfortunately, I'm feeling pretty sorry for myself.  I loved her so much (wish I had showed her more) and I know she loved me unconditionally (even when I wasn't the perfect daughter) and now I feel a huge void in my life.  It is selfish to wish that she was still here . . . she was so broken by the time of her death . . . not the woman who moved us to SC in 1975 with everything we owned packed into an Oldsmobile, driving down I-95 searching for a better life.

She changed her life dramatically, so that we could have a better one, so I need to find myself.  The "me" she would want me to be.  The "me" who will continue to make her proud.  The "me" my girls and my grandson can look up to,and one day look back after I'm gone and say she used everything God gave her.  Maybe I need to drive on the I-95 of my life . . .