On the way home from my healer Su’s little house in the woods, “The Peace House” is its name, I heard it so clearly that I suddenly said it outloud to myself:
“Nope. I’m not feeling alright.”
My mom was found four years ago today, and I guess I need to heavily mourn a good while more.
From what we have pieced together, it is likely she died yesterday on the night of the Spring Equinox. When the most dark begins to shift towards the most light.
Today would have been the day that I had a very full schedule at my Little House Acupuncture Clinic. I remember that I would meet two new patients that day, one of whom was in the middle of a miscarriage. My uncle, many states away from my mom in Arizona and me in Chicago, would begin calling in the late afternoon. I would realize this by early evening, after I left the room holding the dear woman losing her pregnancy, now calmer and resting with needles in. I would be just beginning to understand that something had gone very wrong.
I told my healer Su this morning that I felt I had done a really good job of taking care of myself leading up to this year’s remembering.
Last year felt so shockingly bad that I consciously choose to heed that anniversary’s clear advice. Even more so than last, I slowed everything down, trying to listen to what I could hear from my heart. I talked with my Uncle last night, reached out to my brother, then walked slowly in the woods. Last weekend I went to my healer’s monthly drumming circle, surrounding myself with some of the best human souls I can imagine. I danced gently at my dear friend’s Ecstatic Dance class on Sunday and then we went to a lovely afternoon concert in a beautifully lit barn with a bubbling stream running by it and farm dogs looking for love from anyone and everyone.
I didn’t sit quietly enough though.
It’s not that I am afraid of the feelings.
Been there, done that, got the sturdy left-over neon-colored entrance wristbands with VIP stamped on them running up and down my arms.
Feelings are my way of life, even my way of making a living.
It is just that there is always so much to do – and it was my mom who taught me this best.
It already feels like I am honoring the hell out of her by doing nourishing things. Doing nothing feels like speaking about my mother in a completely foreign language to a room full of strangers.
What do I want to say here…I think that it’s how I remember visiting my mom and grandmother at their house years ago and sitting at their round back porch table that had outdoor swivel chairs which rocked slightly in any direction. I remember one year sitting down in the one my mother always sat in and noticing that it was fully broken in a forward tilting direction.
It actually couldn’t sit back.
She had so often used it while eating or “relaxing” in that ready to go position – or gotten up so often and so quickly – that it was broken FORWARD.
I remember saying something like: “What in THE hell mom? How do you sit in this thing, it feels like I’m being flung out of it…”
I can still see her face, completely bewildered for a moment and then slightly amused and lastly resigned. She knew. She felt broken forward too.
When I talked with my uncle last night it was both relieving and strange. He was the last person to speak with her that night. He didn’t understand that she was anything more than her often deeply sad self. He told her, “I’ll call you tomorrow Sis.” He is a very loving human and I know she knew how much he loved her.
Luckily I know she knows how much I loved her too.
My uncle and I agree on so many obscure and profound things but we have such vastly different perspectives about who she was. Of course that isn’t really strange. We are different humans and we had very different experiences – he with his sister, and me with my one time aunt, who adopted me and became my mom…but I felt distinctly that as a man, he cannot understand how she always felt so responsible for everyone’s wellbeing. She took care of so many people. She tried so hard all the time.
She thought that her care was her only value.
Unlike him, she didn’t know that she could take the time to take care of herself – until she was so angry that she couldn’t see how to.
Now, today, in her honor, I got quiet and listened to myself the way she never felt was possible. I heard it when my dear healer Su listened to me patiently and then gently asked: “Are you receiving as much as you are giving?”
I drove home and canceled my day, getting into a bathtub with no other noise except the running water. I put on my pajamas at 2pm, my skin still bright red from the hot soak.
Here is what I know: The grief you may feel after loss is often inconsistent – sometimes suddenly barging into your home yelling in some foreign language. Or even worse, it sneaks in and begins creepily whispering in one.
It can be a slippery, wriggly thing too.
You think you have it subdued. Then comes the thrash. Or worse, the heavy limpness.
My mom didn’t want to be here anymore. And I don’t regret that she is gone, for that exact reason. I can genuinely say that I don’t wish for her to still be here most of the time.
But still, the grief.
Good heavens the grief. She and I need to talk about my grief.
I wish I could sit with her in a non-broken-assed lawn chair, in her backyard and have one of our margaritas today, telling her how hard it is to live without her.
It’s been four years. And I am still here it seems.
I am so sorry to report that this far on the other side of losing your loved one can continue to be a bit of everything you can imagine and a whole lot of what you cannot.
I hear her now, suddenly as I type this. She’s saying: “You don’t need your grief about me to flare for an excuse to do nothing, honey.” (She could be a deeply kind soul to most anyone other than herself)
I often imagine her enlightened-self speaking to me like a benevolent spirit that can now see through all the bullshittery.
She was the one who used to help me process the grief of all the others being gone.
She is the one who kindly taught me both how I want to be, and distinctly how I do not want to be. The second being even more generous teaching than the first.
I do not say all of this about deep loss to worry you. I hope instead to give you the space and grace you didn’t know you get to have.
I hope to give you the sense of loving permission I didn’t know that I needed. Still need now.
My mom would be deeply proud of you for taking your time, I just know it.