June 5, 2015

• That time of year

  The other night I was reading an article about the king and queen of the Netherlands visiting Grand Rapids, Michigan. I was scrolling through the pictures that were posted with the online article and realized I was crying. I told myself it must have been the photos of the children in the oncology wing of the children's hospital the royal couple visited that made me feel so sad. I closed the article, pulled myself together and, feeling bored, clicked a link on my Facebook feed to a YouTube video. As I watched the video, I realized I was crying again. There were no sick children in the video; there was nothing sad in the video at all. And that's when it hit me - it's that time of year.

  June and July are hard months to get through. Even when I'm not actively thinking about what month it is and why it makes me sad, the sorrow is lurking inside like a locust, ready to claw its way to daylight for no other reason than that nature has ordained that this is the day, the month, the time of year. Nature is a bitch.

  Aging... disease... death... all are part of nature. There is joy during this time of year, too, but the sorrow gets me whenever I'm not actively engaged in the happy moments. I spend the majority of my days alone, which usually doesn't bother me. I'm comfortable with solitude - I even like it most of the time. But on a quiet day in June when I'm not keeping myself busy, BAM! I think of my mom and how her birthday is... today, actually... and how it's no longer a day for sending flowers and making happy phone calls. Now it's a huge mixed bag of emotions and gifts carefully chosen for their usefulness. Scrub shirts with big pockets, elastic waist pants, socks because she's always losing them even though her name is on each one. (Shoot! I forgot to buy her socks for her birthday!) I sent her two cards. She'll forget about them both within minutes, but that will be two happy little moments in her day. She'll recognize my name when the cards are read to her, but she probably won't be able to remember  my face, or the fact that I'm her daughter. I stole a photo off my sister's Facebook page. She took a cake to the nursing home that was so big it fed all of the residents AND all of the staff. My sister is awesome like that. I just hope Mom didn't notice the number that wasn't a 3. It's an 8, and even though she  told me on one of my visits that she was going to live to be two or three thousand years old, I don't think she would be very accepting of the number 83.

  

  Tied up with the mingled joy and sadness of Mom's birthday are feelings of anger and guilt I have toward my dad. The guilt is because of the anger. Because I know when I called eight years ago to wish Mom a happy birthday, Dad didn't realize it was her birthday. I know he didn't purposely choose her birthday to announce to the family that he was no longer going to eat anything and hopefully he'd be dead in two or three days. That was how he greeted me on the phone. I know he was in pain, he knew he was dying, we all knew he was dying and we understood that life had become a burden in his diseased body. For eight years, I've lived with the guilt of being angry with my dying father for choosing that day to decide to hasten death. He lived another 20 days...

  ... which leads me to the anniversary I always try to forget and the grief of losing my beloved dad. I wrote a letter to a friend a few years ago after she lost a family member. I typed that letter and saved it as a private post before mailing it because I thought it might be a good thing for me to look back on when the grief blindsides me late at night, so I pulled it up the other night when the realization hit that it was June 1st and that's why I was crying. As I reread the letter, I nodded my head. "Yep... mmhm... oh yeah... I hit that nail on the head... " Everything I wrote about what to expect in the days, weeks, months and years to come was still relevant and, while I could probably add a few paragraphs to what I wrote then, there's really no need to expound further. Grief is part of nature, and nature is a bitch.

  In the next month, there will be Father's Day, when Krysten and I will happily celebrate Brett for the awesome father he is and I will quietly miss my dad at odd moments during the day and probably cry a few more tears late at night. And there will be Dad's birthday when I will keep my mind occupied with Other Things all day so I won't be thinking about Dad and how he loved chocolate cake with no icing, stuffed into a tall glass and covered with milk. Yes, my dad drank his birthday cake; he was awesome that way.

  Also in June - my birthday. That will be a happy day and I plan to celebrate every one of my many years. Unfortunately, I usually feel every one of them, too these days. But that's okay. Aging and pain are part of nature. Say it with me...

   

   

  • 10:05 pm
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