Hard To Say

I've only had the opportunity to blog on Leap Day twice before today in my blog's history, and I was surprised to find out that I actually did blog on both those days...mostly because I used to blog a lot more regularly. So doing it today probably makes it the most consistent thing I've ever done here. There's an exception to every rule, isn't there?

I had planned to finally do my post on how I condition my hair following my baking soda cleansing revelation and the subsequent questions in the comments, but it's once again not to be. (If I'm not careful it's going to become the One Ping Only equivalent of Kimmel's No-Time-For-Matt-Damon gag...) Unfortunately, it's not for a particularly happy reason.

This past weekend, my cousin, Michael, died while on vacation in Hawaii. He had been scuba diving and something happened (I don't know what, so I'm not going to speculate or elaborate), and his body was deprived of oxygen too long for him to survive. It was sudden and stunning and so, so saddening. Coming just a year and a half after losing my mom (almost to the day), it is just so hard to comprehend and digest.

Michael was the last person left who had known me all my life. He stepped up and was so there for me and my brother when Mom died; he was never more than a phone call away and he made sure we knew we mattered to him. He wasn't one to talk about that kind of thing, but there was no doubt in my mind that if I needed him in any way, he would be there.

He had a special place in our lives because, when I was 7 or 8, and he was 18 or 19, he moved from New Jersey to California and came to live with my family while he got settled. I remember feeling like I knew what it was to have an older brother for a while. Though we moved back east within a couple years, he had an influence on me during that time. It was from him that I got my love of classic rock, because that's what he listened to and I just absorbed it, and I can never think of Dan Fogelberg without thinking of Michael because he had a t-shirt from one of his concerts that he used to wear all the time. I remember talking to him about how sad it was that Fogelberg had died so young just a few years ago. This is especially hard to remember right now because Michael was a year younger at the time of his death than Fogelberg was.

My mother was especially close to him, as he was her first nephew, and she was really involved in the early years of his life. I think it always meant a lot to him that she provided a place for him to go when he needed a fresh start and she was always in his corner. There was the typical amount of family drama to contend with over the years, but there was an unbreakable bond there that mattered. When we moved back to California, it was a comfort to have him nearby and more a part of our lives again.

He wasn't a perfect guy, by any means -- his smoking drove me bonkers but I was so proud of him when he quit a few years ago and stuck to it -- and he had a weird fondness for gnomes that left me scratching my head, but he was honest, caring, and a good guy, and I thought the world of him.

I'm going to miss you terribly, Michael. You left your mark and you won't be forgotten.

I Am Become The Bay Bridge

At some point late this month, I realized that neither my brother nor I had changed our calendars to August. We hadn't talked about it and I just happened to notice that he hadn't done it, either, when I was at his house last week. By unspoken agreement, apparently, August is now our least-favorite month and I think that neither of us wanted to acknowledge that it was upon us.

As of last Friday, our mom has been gone for a whole year. My brother wrote this soul-crushingly good piece on Facebook that he posted that day, but I wasn't able to order my thoughts enough to put something here. I'm still not entirely sure I've got them together, but I felt I needed to get something down as we usher out this unfortunate month and move on to the next year of our lives without her.

I had to smile wryly as a friend on Facebook put in her status update that August 26th was her favorite day of the year because it was the birthday of three of her favorite people. It was one of those reminders of the Circle of Life and all that, a theme that has been popping up for me quite often, recently. As hard as it is to acknowledge sometimes, life does indeed go on, even when we lose someone so vitally important to us. That same day, babies are born, couples get married, people find the help they desperately seek, doctors heal the grievously injured and, as much as we feel like our lives have spun to a stop, the same things will happen the very next day. Though we move forward feeling as though a piece of us was ripped away, we do still move forward.

Last November, I wrote about how hard it was to go to places where Mom and I had gone, because in every corner were reminders of her and I was sometimes overwhelmed with how gaping the hole was in my life. I said that "I need to find a way or simply get to a point where these reminders bring me moments of happiness instead of pings of sadness." Much to my surprise, I have gotten to that point. I can smile when I am hit with those little reminders of her and think of them more fondly than sadly.

I'm building my bridge. Every once in a while a bracket or cable snaps (to further abuse that metaphor) and I'm right back in that ICU room listening to the machines go nuts that one, final time before she was gone. But I keep making repairs and shoring up my pillars (I'm done, I promise) and I'm inching toward the other side.

I couldn't be who I am and where I am without my mom's gifts to me and, even though looking back at them and weighing her loss in my life still brings me to tears, I'm infinitely grateful for her -- who she was, what she did and all she provided to me and my brother, tangible and intangible, while she was here.

An Order of Birthday, Happy on the Side

I thought about calling this "An Order of Birthday, Hold the Happy," but I decided that wasn't really accurate or honest. I don't want to hold the happy, I'm trying to embrace the happy. It's just that it's not front and center for the the first time on my birthday.

Birthdays have always been a big thing in my family, something I've probably written a few times here on this day in the past. But celebrating one without my mom here just seems...incomprehensible. There's not much more I can say about it than that.

I'll be spending the day, and Thanksgiving, with my now-smaller family and I'm grateful for that, just as I'm grateful for all the kind wishes that I'll receive from my friends. I just don't know if I'll be able to get through the day without bursting into tears and thinking, "She should be here. She should be here. She should be here."

The fact that I'm fighting to keep my dinner down right now tells me that I'm going to have to leave it at that. For those of you who are all about honesty and being real and revealing yourself on your blog, there's nothing more honest or real or personal I've ever written than that.

One Ping Leads to Another

I need to write. I know I need to write. But deciding what to say and how to say it ties me up in mental knots. Because this blog has always been a balance between the impersonal and the vaguely personal; it has never been something like a diary. That's not me, that's not what I do. Others do and it works for them, and I say good on them if it's what they want, but my blog is just that: mine, however I define it. And laying bare all my thoughts and feelings here is as alien to me as saying no to chocolate. It just doesn't happen.

But I'm not sure I know how to "just blog" while there's all this distracting emotional stuff in my head following my mother's death. It feels like there's simply nothing else for me to write about at the moment, and while I've happily taken a blog break before, that's not what I really want to do.

So, how do I bridge that gap? How do I go from talking about the universal to the personal, and still feel comfortable and true to myself? The only thought that comes to mind is: Baby steps.

I'll start with something that occurred to me today, and what really prompted me to finally sit down in front of the keyboard and at least try to start moving forward.

The biggest problem I'm having is that there are so many things -- so many, many things -- that remind me of Mom, and they pop up constantly, pinging on my consciousness. Our lives had become so intertwined, and I was so used to caring for her and thinking about getting and doing things to help her, that thinking about her when I'm out and about is second nature. I've always been a person who has a very visual memory. I see a stuffed lion and I think of my dad, because he was a Leo. I see a "Back to the Future" poster and I think of the summer we spent in Maine, the year it came out. I see an owl and I think of my mom, even though she stopped collecting them almost two decades ago.

Going to the grocery store is a mini-nightmare. Get a cart, go in, see strawberries, think of Mom. *ping* Keep going, see the apples she liked, think of Mom. *ping* Push on, see the oranges, think of Mom and resist the impulse to buy her one because it was a thing we liked to have on hand for when her blood sugar was low. *ping* Get out of produce, go down an aisle. See the biscotti she liked to have with her coffee each morning. *ping* Look to the other side of the aisle, see the braunschweiger (don't ask) Mom loved to have on crackers. *ping* Continue on, another aisle, remember a conversation we had right there about Eggo waffles. *ping* The hits keep on coming and finally I get to the checkout. Oh, and there are the pumpkin seeds that she loved and that we were buying constantly the last year to help her fiber intake. *ping*

Each of these reminders has a different feeling; some are somber, some are melancholy, some are funny, some are regret-inducing, a few are a little painful, some are surprising, while others are just "Oh, Mom would have liked that" kind of moments. (Not all of them are related to food, I swear. The grocery store was just where I was tonight -- the first time I'd gone back to that one since Mom died, as it happened -- thinking about it.) All in all not really bad things, but I just feel bombarded by them in a typical day. When I'm overwhelmed by them, I tend to think about and recall the more painful aspects of losing Mom, like the last 48 hours in the hospital and the last few minutes of her life. When I flash on those, and they tend to get gloomier the more I think about them, that's when I start to feel down and teary and like I will never stop feeling like this, like the bottom has dropped out of my life.

Then, as I was driving along tonight, it hit me that I need to find a way or simply get to a point where these reminders bring me moments of happiness instead of pings of sadness. For some reason, just realizing that and feeling like it can happen seemed really significant to me. It doesn't give me the slightest bit of insight on how to get there, but it feels like a starting point, at the very least.

So, there's the first pylon. Or whatever it is you use to start a bridge. The real question is, will it be the Bixby Bridge (short, scenic, stylish and leading to sunshine), the Bay Bridge (long, winding, keeps breaking, closes down every once in a while and its repairs won't be finished for years), or the infamous and least-desirable Bridge to Nowhere? (If I need to explain that last one, all hope is lost and you should move along to LOLCats or some such.)

I have no idea. I'll just be pleasantly surprised if I can successfully build it.