This. Life. Now.

Posted under GrownUpVille, Life, The Guts Of Me by Sarah

Since winter returned to our town, an outdoor rink has been set up in the park across from my mother’s house. This afternoon, two weeks after my mother died, I’m watching the skaters glide effortlessly and gleefully over the ice and realizing that I’m used to my life feeling more like that than this.

Not even sure I want to dig around the murky depths of my brain to imagine a word picture for “this”, I can at least say it’s not effortless or gleeful. Picture the opposite of effortless and gleeful and you might have a bit of an idea what these days and weeks have been like and what the near future promises to hold.

“This” involves a lot of tension and stress, worry and hard work, sickness and grieving, loneliness and depression, deadlines and expectations. “This” is something you only expect to see in the movies, never in your own life. And things don’t turn out in real life as well as they do in the movies, in case you were still living in that unrealistic bubble. Sorry for breaking it.

“This” means feeling as if you may never land gently, as if you will never again be whole, and sometimes as if everyone depended on you and everyone will let you down. “This” is knowing that you desperately need the strength and peace of your faith and at the same time seeing that your life and emotions are so much like a tenuous high-wire that one wrong circumstance could send you grasping in another direction, any direction.

“This” is so unlike skating.

A Day to Remember: Sunday, January 13, 2008, 9:45 AM

Posted under Family, Life, Love, Memories, The Guts Of Me by Sarah

Some days should be forever etched in your memory. Other days you remember and you wish you didn’t. Today is a day I hope to remember, clearly, forever, even though it already feels like a blur.

My body feels drained and my face feels dry and scratchy, the outer curves of my nostrils red and irritated. I’ve cried so much today, and laughed so much, for that matter, and I know that there is much more emotion to come.

Somehow, I think I’ve always felt it. Known that she’d go young, leave us while we were young. Still, I never woke up wondering if today would be the day. Today was the day.

She’s gone, my mom, gone to a place where cancer can’t get past the gate. It was a stretch to look at her thin, jaundiced body, as it slowly turned blue and cold, and think of her true self finally unleashed in paradise, but that’s what I believe happened to her this morning as we all hurried to get to the hospital in time, vainly.

I’ve imagined a motherless life, with me having to be uber-responsible (surprise, surprise) and my siblings and I banding together to take care of each other in our quasi-orphanhood (orphandom? orphanimity?). I’ve thought about the technicalities and legalities I’d have to follow up on once she was no longer on earth. I’ve anticipated the release of tension and stress that would come when we no longer had to worry about her, make her food, take her to the bathroom, be with her 24/7.

But I wasn’t ready. Today wasn’t supposed to be the day. I thought I had the weekend. I wanted to hold her smoothly soft hand one more time, see her eyes light up when one of us walked into the room. Why didn’t I ask her more about herself, about who she was, about what her life was like before she naively married my father and went on to become the mother of six children?

It baffles me how you can know someone all your life, how you can actually belong to someone’s soul and body, be grown from their DNA, and feel as if you don’t know them at all. I feel like I miss my mother more for the woman I hadn’t gotten to know yet and less for the one I had already.

I wasn’t ready, but she was.

Perhaps it’s morbid, but I took pictures of her dead body as it lie there in the hospital bed. I want to remember the way her skin looked, how thin her face was, what she was wearing, the tinge of blue under her fingernails, the pattern of the freckles on her cheek.

Mommy, someday, someday, I’ll find out about the rest of you, the other half of your life before we met. I’m gonna be sad for a while, Mom; have regrets about your last days, weeks, and month; do my best to honour you as I do my part to wrap up what you’ve left behind; and learn from your legacy. I’m gonna be sad for a while, but then I’ll start looking forward to forever with you, someday.

Puttin’ on the Ritz

Posted under Family by Sarah

As if my life could get any crazier, my second brother and his girlfriend of about a year and a half decided early in December that they wanted to get married. Before the month was out. Uh-huh.

So, of course, we had to pool our resources, call our people, and get real creative, real fast.

Somehow we did, without spending overly much money, and without driving each other crazy, and on December 29th, the second sister-in-law was added to the clan.

The garden-party-esque reception was likely the best-decorated reception ever held in that church gymnasium, thanks to the time and efforts and creativity of my siblings and a good friend, L.

Not without a few sibling squabbles, some exhaustion (and me seeing stars), and MAJOR lack of sleep, the two younguns are hitched, took a brief few days away, and are back to the difficult life at mom’s house. Felicidades!