the susie solution

Well, folks, I’m back. 2014 – “the year that wasn’t”, as it shall always be to me – is over.
The 5+ months since I wrote my last post have been stressful and traumatic and blessed. Although I haven’t written on this blog, I was, in fact, writing. From sometime in August until the end of October, I was writing occasional updates to my mom’s CaringBridge site, and near-daily emails to a circle of family and closest friends detailing my mom’s deterioration physically and mentally as she lost the ability to care for herself, lost her ability to think clearly, and fell prey to delirium and paranoia brought on by the tumor in her brain. I simply couldn’t also deal with trying to do this blog.
I lived at Mama’s from early August until the Sunday after her death, except for two weeks she spent in a nursing home in September, and five days she spent later in the hospital. My sister, Sandy, shared in the duty two nights/days a week. For the last seven weeks, my sister-in-love, Patti, was here for 3 weeks on, 1 week home, with other my sister-in-love, Beth, here for Patti’s week off. Mama was finally released from the sufferings of Earth to the glories of Heaven in the earliest hour of Wednesday, October 29th. The two months after Mama’s death were as intense as the months that preceded it. I spent virtually all of November sick with a nasty respiratory bug that was difficult to defeat, on top of which there was: clearing out Mama’s condo; cleaning my own house from the disaster it had become in my absence; rearranging my stuff to fit in all the stuff I brought home from Mama’s; planning her memorial service, putting together a slide show of her life, figuring out arrangements for the 20 or so out-of-town relatives here for the weekend of the memorial service; and, oh, yeah, celebrating Thanksgiving and Christmas. I’ve hardly had time to think. When we pulled out the calendar last night to do our usual New Year’s Eve review of the year past, it seemed so odd to look at it because frankly the entire year was just one big blur to me!
“So,” everyone asks me, “how are you doing?” Good question. Mostly I’d say I’m doing fine. For Mama herself, I can feel nothing but gladness that now she is HOME – no more suffering, no more pain, even the memory of them wiped away. For me… having been through this with my dad, I know what an odd beast grief is, hitting you at the unlikeliest of times, and being a no-show entirely at times when you’d expect it to attend – so this time I’m prepared. I haven’t actually had any big moments of grief yet; they may come, they may not. There is healing still to take place to deal with the trauma of Mama’s last months and days and actual death itself; to survive emotionally, it was necessary to essentially dissociate from it all at the time, but now that it’s all over it has to be faced and processed. Thankful I am that just as with physical healing from injuries, most of the work of this healing isn’t something that I have to “do”, but something that is happening as a natural process. It is hard to break out of feeling always on edge “waiting for the other shoe to drop”, a constant pressure to hurry, hurry, hurry to get things done because who knows what’s going to happen how soon to pull me away. I guess I have something like “phantom limb pain” – I’m still trying to juggle “phantom balls”, having trouble getting used to the fact that they just aren’t there anymore. I struggle with requests to do things for other people, no matter how near and dear; however selfish it may sound to those who haven’t been through something like this, I’m flat-out tired of dealing with other people’s needs. My emotional energy battery is dead, dead, dead. I’d give much to be able to just go away somewhere, all by myself, to a place where I had nothing that I had to be responsible for and no one whose feelings I had to worry about or whose emotional needs I was expected to meet, where I could just take a break from all of life. But life doesn’t generally give you bereavement leave, or days off. (You may have noticed.) Somehow it just keeps coming at you, day after day. Unless you’re in the grip of a mental condition such as depression or bipolar, you either get “stuck” or you choose to somehow put one foot in front of the other and keep moving, however slowly.
There is so much that has happened this last year that has given me food for thought. I have written dozens and dozens of blog posts in my head; I hope that much of the gist of them will make it to publication here as I work through things. In one of my CaringBridge posts, I made a comment that God has promised to get us through – but He never promised that it would be pretty. He certainly was faithful to get us through this past year – but it wasn’t pretty. Like a chemist’s solution, my heart and mind are a confusing and sometimes conflicting mixture of many different feelings and thoughts. I don’t know that I’ll get them sorted into any kind of neat order, but it’s ok if I don’t. Having “answers” is highly overrated.
Now that I’m back to my own life, it’s time to sally forth and see what lies ahead in this next phase. As the Lord did for the Israelites, I know that He has passed ahead of me over the Jordan and has prepared the way ahead.

Tally ho!