My Angels

       Now comes the post that is the hardest to write; the reason I went backwards instead of starting at the beginning. It is also the reason that I have been away. I am going to split this into two parts and build up the courage and strength to write it. So first, let me say that this week has been great. There has also been an air of sadness thrown in as well. This past Friday would have been my grandmother’s 70^th birthday. As I told you when I started this series of posts, I began with birth and would end with death. My grandmother was a wonderful woman who was a significant part of my life. For many years, it was just her and I. This is not a dig against either of my parents; it just is the way it is. She was an incredibly strong woman, and if you have read any of my past posts you will know that she passed away a few years ago. She was and will always be in the hearts of her family and we miss her every day. So Friday was an especially sad day. But my aunt likes to say that she is her guardian angel, watching us as we go through life. I just hope she is proud of what she is seeing. And I also hope that her latest company is proud too.

                This past December, we lost somebody close to us. It wasn’t a distant family member, and it wasn’t somebody easily missed. We lost my mother. I have been trying to come up with a way to write about her, and I still don’t know what I am going to say. It has taken so long to come back to writing because this is a post that needs to be written, but it is a very hard one to write. What child is ever ok when they lose their mother? My grandmother has been dead for almost 5 years and most of my family is still not ok with it. It was the first time I have ever seen my father cry and he is the strongest man I know. The same can be said for my mother’s side of the family. It is a very rare thing to see my Grandma cry or even extremely upset. She is another very strong woman, and this devastated her. As is to be expected, because no parent should have to bury their child. But my mother had some problems. After a lifelong battle with her issues, she lost the war. And in that moment, we lost her. I don’t want to say that this was harder on any one person in our family. Everybody mourned her loss for a different reason. Her brother, who she was incredibly close with as a child, mourned the fact that they had grown apart. Her sister and other brother mourned the fact that no matter how much they tried, they couldn’t help her. Her extended mourned the fact that they hadn’t stayed in touch as much as they might have. Her mother mourned many things. She mourned the loss of her troubled child; a child who may have caused her some heartache over the years, but was none the less her child. And her ex husbands mourned for the woman they once loved, but mostly for the sadness each of their daughters would now have to face. And each of her children mourned the loss of their mother. Now please do not think that I know exactly what everybody is feeling. I am not that arrogant and do not believe I know everything. Every person experiences the same loss in their own way. These are just some ways I perceived them to have felt, maybe even just for a moment.

                My mother, like every human being, had her flaws. She may not have made the best choices all the time, but she stuck to her decisions with conviction. I don’t know much about her childhood, but I know it was a happy one. I know that she met my father at a young age and they were married right after she graduated from high school. They were happy for a time, and then they weren’t. I have seen home movies of my childhood where my parents are together and there was joy and laughter and more. As an older child, I didn’t see much of my parents, at least that I remember. But I always knew they loved me and they were always in contact with me. When I grew up a bit more, I went to live with my mom. By this time, my sister had been born and she was happy again with her second husband and child. (That is not to say she wasn’t happy with me at any point) I remember many great things. I remember her love for decorating on the holidays, her favorite season was summer, and she was a sucker for a rescued animal. Every Halloween we went all out and decorated our yard with spider webs, tomb stones, blood, lights, spiders, and more. Christmas was no different. We had big trees with lots of lights and different ornaments. There were Santas all over the house since she collected them. And her pride and joy was a ceramic village my grandmother had made herself. She loved that village and every year would lovingly put it up and place the little lights on the trees. And no matter how strapped for case we may have been, there were always presents under those trees. She also collected elephants and when the decorations came down, the elephants went back up. They were everywhere, and to this day nobody knows why she loved them so much.

                My mother had a habit of rescuing strays, and not just animals. If anybody ever needed a couch to crash on, hers was available. And she was constantly finding homes for battered and homeless dogs. We always had pets at my mom’s house. There were birds (which you can imagine I was not too fond of), rabbits, fish, cats and dogs. Though some of them may have been temporary, there were a few animals that never left her side. Zebo and Bear were our dogs and Bongo was our cat. Even though the animals belonged to us all, they were completely in love with my mother the most. And who could blame them? Her joy was infectious. She was always able to make the most of a bad situation. And her laugh was infectious. I remember so many times just sitting in the car and listening to her sing a song out of nowhere. She loved to dance around the house to loud music, or drive around with the top down in her little Geo Tracker. And she loved driving to Rhode Island and going to the beach. She was a fair skinned, blonde haired woman who loved the sun. As a little kid we were always hanging around at Grama’s pool. She was a fish, just like me. But her true love was the ocean. There was nothing better to her than sitting in the sand with the hot sun, cool ocean breeze, and a good book. As a child, those were the best memories of my life. But as is true with everything, things change.

                As I got older, my mother’s issues got worse. I am not writing this to bash my mother. And contrary to what people think, I have no real bad feelings towards her. I may not have agreed with her decisions, and we may have also grown apart over the years, but she was still my mother. I knew her better than anybody, and while we may not have been as close as we once were, I was the one person on this earth that she was closest to. So while I will not bash her, I will also not lie or pretend everything was perfect. We had our differences, and as I said, I disagreed with some of her choices. Towards the end of her life, she was not close with my sister at all. They did not speak for a few years, and I know this is something that upsets my sister now. I hope that she knows that no matter what happened my mother always loved her. And even though both were hurting by the separation, she understood why it happened. She was working, in her own way, to make herself better so that someday her youngest daughter could forgive her. And I am very please to say that in the last few months of her life, my mother mended many fences; one of which was the one with my sister. So my sister can grieve for her loss but know that in the end, they weren’t at odds and were, in fact, ok.

                I am not personally ready to write out my feelings of my mother’s death. I don’t know when I’ll be ready, or even if I ever will. I can say that I am angry, and hurt, and saddened by the whole situation. But I am comforted in the fact that I am not alone in my grief. I am also comforted knowing that through thick and thin, ups and downs, and everything we had ever been through, my mother was always there for me if I needed her. She loved my sister more than life itself and she loved me more than words could ever say. She was happy at the end, and she was pulling her life together. She left this world having made up with the people that she loved, and she was at peace with things. This has made it possible for those mourning to be at peace with her death as well. It is something that nobody will ever get over completely. But we will live our lives feeling lucky to have had a chance to have been a part of hers.

                

   

           

                                   

<3 RIP MOM <3