It’s been about a year and a half since my last post and things have definitely changed, for the good and for the bad.
We’ll start with the bad. Sorry, but this might be a long one.
My Mom, who I mentioned in the last post as having dementia, passed away in January after being on hospice since December, due to a rapid decline in her health (not dementia related). Thankfully, she never experienced significant pain and up until about 24 hours prior to her passing, she was still smiling and joking with us. She left us quietly the evening and we were all able to be with her to say our goodbye’s. It was what we had hoped for, if she couldn’t stay with us, then for her to be taken from us with loving care.
Since her passing, life has been quiet. It is an adjustment going from being a full time caregiver for the past eight years to having nothing to do during the day, adjusting to making one cup of coffee instead of two, making a meal for one, instead of two, you get the picture. Since the hubs travels for his job nearly five days a week, I always thought the silence would be a change. I could play my music loud and it wouldn’t interfere with her TV shows or I could just sit in the quiet and work on my junk journaling without hearing the 1,420th replay of Blood Bloods (Mom loved her some Tom Selleck!). But it’s been too quiet, too silent.
Yes, I play music, yes I junk journal, yes, I do my graphics work, but it’s…empty. There are days that I just want my Mom back….no, I want my healthy Mom back. I want to be able to sit and talk about mundane crap, just like we used to do during breakfast. I want to be able to run in there and tell her some good news about one of my boys, I want to tell her about my day or listen to her fuss at the dogs when the leap on her lap after being outside in the rain. I want to hear her praise my husband’s cooking (he is BBQ master). I want to see her smile as I pass by her chair on the way to the kitchen. That smile, even when she could no longer say but a word or two, the said a thousand I love you’s.
The house is different. Her bedroom is now my husband’s office, the living room is arranged the way I want it. It’s my house on paper, my name on the deed. I lived in it from the time I was six until I married, then from 2015 to now. Yet, it’s not mine. It’s my parents’ home, built the way they wanted it, renovated to their specifications over the years. What should feel like home to me, sometimes just feels as if I’m just a caretaker for THEIR home. It’s a painful reality. The house across the street – one my husband and I lived in from 1993 to 2015, was more of my home than this is and I haven’t lived in it for 10 years. Yet, for all that, I still don’t think I could live anywhere else.
*Deep breath* Life, I guess.
Now, on to the good:
I’ve almost completed another book! I’m hitting the hard block though, the ending. I had about four possible outcomes, yet can’t seem to make them make sense. All of them seem a bit anti-climatic. I’m trying to reach the goal of over 100,000 words and I’m close. Once I finish, it will go through the usual polishes, rewrites, editing, rewrites, so on and so on. But, I’m very optimistic as this story has been sitting on the proverbial shelf for years now. The good part of this is that I have more time to devote to completing more books, the bad is that Mom, who was my biggest cheerleader, won’t be here to be my preliminary proofer anymore (she read for flow, plot holes, etc.). No matter what though, I plan to move forward and I’d really like to expand out my writing onto here more, including more short stories or maybe a continuing story that I add onto. I’d also like to put Derick Upton to work and have him contribute to the blog or create his own for the Worldwide Coalition of Elders.
Until then, let’s just see where this next part of my journey will take me. Thank you for joining me on the ride!
That's great Mom...but I have pie. 