A Different Sort of Dawn

The new year came quietly for me. Open sky and sun, a light breeze chasing the summer heat away as my father and I walked among the flowers of the park and admired the art show displays. Later in the evening, there was a pleasant dinner at a nice little spot out in the neighborhoods away from the hustle of the city. It’s different with just the two of us, but we laugh when we remember her and it’s nice to share the memories without the pall of grief hanging over us.

At one point I tipped my glass to no one in particular and smiled when others looked at me oddly. A small gesture just to show I remembered, even if there was no fanfare to follow it...

Disconcerting Dreams of Her

I’m not certain I like it here. The clouds get snagged on the mountains and the rains and rolling thunder are just out of reach, visible but too far to hear or smell or feel. I suppose it wouldn’t make much difference anyway. I mostly sit inside with the shades drawn pretending I’m not here. I had forgotten the roughness of the place where my brother lives. I don’t like to go out alone in this part of town and the neighbors are loud and unstable. But we go out in the evenings to better parts of town when my brother is in the mood for it and the company is worth putting up with the broken shower and the small space. All in all, it isn’t so bad.

But then there are the dreams and the small anxious thing inside me that paces about because I don’t know what to do about them. It is the third dream now, when she has come and said she was coming back. Coming back? What does that mean? I look between the slats of the big window that can see the clouds being torn on the mountain tops. High above the desert, moisture gathers and threatens to fall. An empty threat. My mind turns back to the dreams. What do you mean you’re coming back? You’ve gone west, mother…there is no coming back from that journey.

In the last dream there was a strange resurrection and I think she wants to see my brother. I would work towards that, but he can’t see her because he doesn’t believe so there is no point to it. Then I think that must not be it at all because she has used the guise of others to say the same things—specifically the guise of a person I respect and trust and love— and if this is just about my brother, that doesn’t fit. What are you trying to say? What do you want me to do? Are you trying to say you are leaving the west? Are you trying to say you intend to try again at life? I won’t know you if you come back. I say. You’ll be different.  

Wind picks up and dust swirls… then all is calm and bright. The storm stays on the mountain. My mother stays in the west.

I don’t understand. 

Fishing for Pride

 “Hey, long time no hear,” he says with mild enthusiasm. Then he launches into an inventory of every minute thing which has happened to him since the last time I called…which was a long time ago because these life inventories of his are tedious to listen to. I can’t stand that kind of banal substitute for actual emotional connection anymore.  Oh, I understand doing it every now and then—we all have those moments when we just need someone to act like they care what paperwork we got dumped with this week—but time after time our conversations start this way.

In Memory of April 30th to July 14th in the World After Mom

There’s the final medical procedure on the last Monday of April and the looming appointment for my GRE in early May. There’s also the end of the school year fast approaching and the plane tickets for far off Albuquerque pinned to the fridge door to remind me that June means freedom. Everything moves quickly but in slow motion and my writing is almost as fractured as my thoughts. I find myself with lots of snippets but nothing with enough substance for a proper blog post. It is a state of incoherence that I experience every year at this time.

 Every year except last year.

It’s been almost a year to the day since the phone call that changed everything. Almost a year to the day since I abandoned the last weeks of school like they meant nothing and drove home to be with her. Almost a year to the day since my world collapsed inward and became about her and only her. Almost a year to the day since the Summer of Mom.

I have a goal this summer: to spend as little time alone as possible. A month with my brother, then a month with my father. They work, obviously, so I will have the days to myself, but the evenings will be filled with the presence of family. I am not giving myself so much as a single sunset to just stare at the ceiling in an empty apartment and pine for the voice I will never hear again.

I’ve always somewhat loved the happy chaos at the end of the school year. Last year I had to give it up to do the most important and difficult thing I had ever done. This year I am beyond grateful that it has returned to me. I am overbooked, foolishly optimistic, and blissfully frantic. So though I know my silence may look disconcerting it is not altogether unhappy. As the one year anniversaries pass—that of her diagnosis and, later this summer, of her passing—I am not opposed to being too preoccupied to think on it much. 

A Brief Meditation on Tears

I skipped the Akhu dua because I needed to speak to my mother at length, so I did my own ceremony and spent a long time by the ancestor shrine. By the time that was over, it was already 5pm and the chat was probably winding down as well, so I didn’t log on. I was also crying something fierce, which would have made internet-ing hard...

The World Where She And I Can Both Live

The wheel turns and the seasons change again. The trees are bare and the moon clatters through the branches to pour cool light into the living room. I watch the frozen mist roll in from the valleys beyond the town. Something in me shifts slightly.

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I know when she is going to appear in my dreams because I feel her, see her, remember her just before I go to sleep. I fear that because she is always dying in my dreams. But this time she is not dying. 

My Mother's Magician

So the big news around town is that the roof partially blew off of our high school during the windstorms this week. 60mph sustained and 77mph gusts. For several days. (Not entirely true…there were a few times when the wind dropped down to 54mph.) That kind of wind takes the siding and shingles off of homes as easily as normal wind whisks autumn leaves off of foliage. Every tree and bush in town is stripped bare and the mess of dry still semi-green debris got powdered into a fine dust that chokes anyone trying to breath in its vicinity.

 All of the commercial signs came down except one which was already down: that one was blown back up and installed on a post three parking lots away. Conga lines of Semi-trucks dancing sideways into the ditches along I-90 prompted the government to close the interstate for a few hours during the worst of it and the weather radios blared all day long trying to get local residents to take the wind warnings seriously. The day after was an eerie kind of silence that had even us long timers flinching nervously whenever a slight breeze started up.

That’s not why I haven’t been online lately—though it was interesting enough that I thought I ought to start with it—if anything, it’s why I should have been online: hours trapped in my little apartment without much else to do. But I’ll be honest: I’ve spent the last week sleeping and feeling bad for myself. In the latter stages of grief, anxiety has given way to depression…or maybe that’s just me looking up after the storm of her death and realizing how deathly quiet it is in my life without that. I try to think back to how things were before the diagnosis, but the memories I find are not pleasant. I have always been close to my mother in that compulsive sort of way that led me to confess everything to her, but I was only really emotionally close to her during those last five years.

My therapist keeps pestering me about whether or not there was something I wish I had said to her before she died. No. There isn’t. I’m glad I never said any of this to her. I’m glad I didn’t know about it soon enough to disclose…

Do you know the difference between an illusionist and a charlatan? Do you know why one of them inspires us and the other feels like a betrayal personified? Consent. That is the core of the thing. We give our consent for the illusionist to lie and deceive us so he can bend our realities slightly and give us the magic we hunger for. The stage is an agreement between performer and audience. But the charlatan has no concern for our consent. There is no contract.

Our reality as the close-knit mother and daughter was largely an illusion. There was a time when it may have been real…but near the end, it was a careful charade suspended between us. It was a gossamer web of lies holding out on its last threads as it waited—like so many other things waited—for her death…I will forever ask myself if my mother suspected that much of our relationship had been created out of dreams and fantasies that we had endeavored to make real, that we were quietly playing the part of illusionists, putting on a show that hid the pain underlying it all.

Maybe she really did believe. Maybe she truly forgot the things she said to me once, the things she did to me once…or maybe she never saw any fault in what she had done. That last week, she had cried and apologized to my brother for an argument that had never sat quite right with her. 

Where was my apology? 

Oh, she offered me a chance to air my grievances some weeks before that, but it was in such a confrontational and critical way…it was nothing more than an offer to argue with her—an offer which I refused, because that wasn’t what I wanted. She never offered me what I wanted, and what I wanted wasn’t the sort of thing I could ask for.

So I kept my mouth shut and continued the show. It was my greatest, and final, performance for her. After she died, I told her I was a magician, and that I would see her again…perhaps sooner than she thought. I was speaking of a different kind of magic: the kind that makes the world of the dead accessible even to our modern minds. However, in retrospect, there were layers of meaning in that statement. I meant what I meant, but I was simultaneously being far more literal than I realized at the time.

It’s only 50 degrees outside right now, but all the fans in my apartment are on because it is too quiet in the absence of the wind. The fans don’t really cover up that silence, because it isn’t a real silence. It’s the same silence that is in the white noise of my conversations with my brother and father. It’s the same silence between me and my friends as we banter on the phone or around a dinner table. It’s the same silence underlying every meeting with my coworkers and every session with my therapist. The silence between the notes of my favorite songs, between stitches when I bead, between the clatter of dishes as I do my chores….

Her magician does not speak anymore.

I do not know what to make of that. 

Nightmares and Illusions

It is always the same dream. The circumstances change and set up changes, but the events never do. Over and over. It used to be traumatic, but now I just roll over with a sigh and go back to sleep.

In the dream, she is alive again, but still ill. Deathly ill. I desperately try to get a hold of my brother—to tell him that she’s back and that she’s still dying and that he needs to come and be there.  She never speaks, and she always does the kinds of things she did before she died…

She is confined to a wheel chair or bed. If she has her mobility, she uses it to stumble endlessly around a kitchen island claiming that she just needs to walk (as if she could walk off the cancer—I hated watching her do that, watching her struggle). She does not understand that she is dying. She can’t breathe. Sometimes, my brain likes to mix it up and make it her heart which is failing instead of her lungs, but the end result is always the same: the wide eyes…the fear…that haunting look of surprise and terror…

 She was not ready to go. I don’t care what she said or what anyone else said about what happened that night. I was the one who was there when it started. Death surprised her. She was terrified and all I did was tell her it was going to be okay when I knew damn well that it wasn’t. Her death was not peaceful and no matter how many people tell me it was “for the best”, in my dreams the horrible truth is ever present and gruesomely clear.

This time, I called 911.

That was new. Usually, I just stand there and watch like I did when it happened. Or at most, try to get my brother to come. This time, he was already there in the dream, using a defibrillator to try and restart the heart that was failing in her chest. Her eyes were wide like my last memory of her and I couldn’t take it anymore. I called 911.

The operator answered and with a small pause said, “My records show that the last time you called this number it was because your mother had died, is that correct?”

“Yes,” I said, “She’s alive again, but she’s having a heart attack.”

“That’s to be expected, ma’am. It’s probably for the best. This is much better than respiratory failure.”

I look over where she is arching off the bed, her eyes bulging. It doesn’t look better to me. But I can’t think of anything to say and the operator hangs up. My brother kept trying to save her.

I wake once again left with the image of her eyes showing pain and fear….

I don’t dwell on it for more than a few seconds. I have a life to live—I can’t spend it remembering her eyes.

It isn’t on my mind as I drift through my day. But later I am driving to Wal-mart and suddenly realize I am thinking casually about how different the world is without her, and yet, how nothing seems to have changed.  I don’t push the thought away, and a moment later my mind has continued the train of thought and arrived at musing about how I now know exactly which songs on my mp3 player will make me cry with the memory of her because they are the ones I never play. I am surprised at the next revelation: I could use those songs to make myself cry. I now have the strange ability to feel deep, genuine pain whenever I want to. It’s a strange thought to have, I realize, and I let it pass, returning to the normal order of my day.

I spend the evening practicing card illusions and wondering at my choice of activity. Shouldn’t I be beading? Writing? Meditating? Anything other than practicing silly card tricks… I am suddenly seized by guilt. I haven’t made any offerings to Netjer or Akhu in a while. I haven’t been in the shrine room formally in days due to purity, but I don’t have that limitation anymore. I should go. Surely I am shirking my duties to the Names and to the faith. I even missed the Dua on Wednesday because I was practicing illusions and lost track of time.

It was not required of you to go, says a small still voice from beyond my conscious mind.

 But I should have gone. Failing that, I should have gone to the fellowship chat the next night. There is no answer from the quiet part of me which is watching the cards tumble deftly through my hands. But I cannot leave it alone. I am ignoring terrifying dreams about my mother, I think, and I am the only one still honoring her so late in the wake of her death. Shouldn’t I make an offering at the Akhu altar tonight? Shouldn’t I be focusing on her?

You will attend the Dua on Sunday and honor her there.

 There is no arguing with that: I fully intend to make sure I am at that gathering. As well as the other gatherings scheduled for the weekend. I start for the second time on a flourish I am having trouble with. I am engaged in the task, but I still feel guilty. I still feel like I’m just goofing off. Shouldn’t I be doing something productive?

This is productive, the voice reminds me, it is part of our work. The answers we seek lie within. Now focus. 

I do.

Not Everything Happens for a Reason

Disappointment really doesn’t even begin to describe the feeling of having the package you have been eagerly awaiting stolen from the foyer of your apartment building. And yes, while I am out $57 it actually isn’t the money which bothers me the most (though it does bother me…that’s a lot of money for me right now). I was excited to get my package, damn it! And now I’m not going to. :(

The worst part of this, however, isn’t the theft—it’s how I reacted to it. Namely, how I compulsively checked the mail box seven times that evening even though I knew that it wouldn’t be there and how I immediately blamed myself for the theft. As if there was anything I could do about it. Our apartment complex doesn’t offer a secure place for us to receive our packages and I can hardly afford a PO Box simply to receive stuff like this on the occasions that I order things through the mail. In my head I know that it is just a random crappy thing that happened to me…but...that doesn’t stop me from blaming myself.

My mind spun and I was a bit numb and shocked when I first realized what had happened, and then a small anxious part of me freaked out: clearly, the universe is trying to tell me that I’m making too many online purchases and this is to teach me a lesson about watching my finances and not ordering so many things through the mail. Yeah. That’s where my anxiety ridden brain immediately went. And that’s the bigger issue here.

I didn’t do anything to cause this. It just happened, and it sucked, but it didn’t have anything to do with my decisions or actions. It’s not some cosmic punishment for being an imperfect human being who occasionally spends too much dough on mail-order items. Just like my mother getting cancer: it doesn’t have anything to do with me. It isn't a divine judgement of me. It just happened. It doesn’t have to make sense.

Because not everything has to fit.

Because not everything has to be a direct consequence of things I have or haven’t done.

The world is not a 1:1 place; you don’t always get out what you put in. By the same token you sometimes get lucky and get a bonus. Not every bad thing is a failure just like not every good thing is a success. Just because there is a cultural predisposition in my community toward the old stand-by “everything happens for a reason”, doesn’t mean I have to buy into it. No, damn it—not everything has a reason.

That said, recognizing that I'm not culpable doesn’t mean I can’t still make something valuable out of the “random bad thing” that happened to me. I don’t have to go as far as to think that the package being stolen was somehow a direct result of my recently erratic spending habits, but the sudden anxiety I feel at the thought of losing such a large sum of money in one fell swoop does draw attention to just how shaky my finances are and how I continue to spend money despite not having any. That warrants paying some attention to the underlying reason for the freak out—there is something wrong here. There was a reason for my spending beyond “needing” the items, because I don’t need them but I still bought them and obviously I feel bad about it which means that on some level I’m already aware that it was a compulsive purchase and not a rational one and that concerns me on a level deeper than I am willing to acknowledge.

 But the fact that the package went missing isn’t a reflection on my worth as a person. If I choose to learn a lesson about my psyche from this, then that is my choice—but that doesn’t mean that the universe did this to me to teach me that lesson, it means I made meaning out of something which was otherwise inherently meaningless. Just like I found meaning in my mother’s illness.

Making meaning in the face of chaos and disorder is a triumph of human spirit, but we must not confuse it with a justification for those things happening in the first place.

…..and there’s a chance that the package just got delivered to the wrong box and that the other person will eventually notice the mistake and return it. Or that the delivery person accidentally marked it as delivered and didn’t actually take it off the truck. Or that it wasn’t delivered because a signature was required when I wasn’t expecting that and the delivery man either forgot to put a notification slip on my box or it blew away in the high winds we had. There have been other package thefts recently, but not all is lost just yet.

In case you're wondering, the package contained cards. No, not tarot cards, just regular (albeit collectible and therefore expensive) playing cards. But for reasons I will post about later, those cards are important to me for divinatory and other reasons.

 I sat before my Akhu shrine and offered a deal: intervene if you can to get the cards back for me, and you can have one of the decks dedicated solely to communicating with you--I'll even keep it in the Akhu shrine. So…we’ll see. I don’t know if there is anything they can do, but it is worth a shot.

Day 70

There was a veritable feast laid out for the dead, with three liquid offerings and four food offerings—all of my mother’s favorites, because this evening we welcomed my mother home. Her picture now rests beside those of her family and her locket and ring are on the little shelf next to the others. I sigh, basking in the sense of rightness and peace before I close the little shrine’s doors and blow out the candle as I sing her song one more time.

Day 70 is an eternity away from day 1.

In some ways, it doesn’t hurt any less than it did that night, but it hurts different. It’s gentle pain now that brings reassuring tears. She has changed…but not so much that I don’t still know her. The pain is gone from her now…that’s the biggest thing. She finally sees how much my father really does love her. She finally sees how much my brother and I do to be good people and leave a positive legacy in the world. All the criticism and all the pettiness is gone. Her spirit seems somehow bigger than it was, brighter than it was, and far more knowing. She finally has that wisdom she always wanted, that universal knowledge that she always searched for…and true to the woman she was in life, she’s already started using her new found powers as an Ahku to benefit the family.

So…yeah. Closure. It feels nice, it does. :)

I am now officially a Remetj! :D

Remetj.

That was really the only word I needed to see in my e-mail this week to suddenly be having the best week. And now, of course, I have been suffering from a severe compulsion to “READ ALL THE THINGS” on the parts of the forum that I couldn’t see before. But it’s more than that: it’s a step forward in a new world. As the high school I work at winds down from an early homecoming and gears up to start the first “real” weeks of the semester, I face the beginning of another year—one in which nothing is the same for me.

I realize that is an almost redundant statement: if we aren’t trapped in a cycle of stagnation, then things are almost never “the same” as they were in the years, days, or moments before we stopped to think on them. Yet… the timing of things this summer…

My world has changed in a fundamental way on many levels.  The world of Beginner was very different than the world of Solitary Kemetic in ways I wasn’t expecting—and I know that the world of Remetj will be different still from that of Beginner. I eagerly look forward to that change, but even as I overflow with excitement for that new, shiny future which dawns in the east, I mourn the slow fading of a different light as it sinks in the west.

For a long time, I have lived in the world of Mom as Everything—in fact this summer was christened by me as the “Summer of Mom” as soon as I heard the diagnosis in April…but I only called it that until I realized that it's really more correct to say “Lifetime of Mom”. I was so close to her. I can’t say that in words that would do her justice. My world was her. My mother filled a role for me that was as dangerous as it was beautiful: Mom as All, Mom as Other Half. Which makes learning to live in the world of Mom as Ancestor especially hard…

Next Saturday is already day 70.

It doesn’t feel like it’s been that long, and yet, it feels infinitely longer. There is still a hard, sharp edge to the grief, but the wound her death caused has ceased bleeding now and it begins to pull back together as new skin grows to cover it.  That doesn’t mean it hurts any less, or that there won’t be a proverbial scar left behind, just that it isn’t a danger to me anymore. The pain is now a healing one, not a rending one.

I slowly return to myself. My hands go back to beading, my mind goes back to telling stories, and my deeper self goes back to dreaming up new destinies. My gods put tasks before me and the voice whispering within me prods me along the path. I call my brother and my father often; I speak to friends daily—and my heart is beating again. I plan and scheme and go about life in general. I am whole once more. I am hale.

The ancestor shrine is ready. The words of the prayer are already starting to echo in my heart and mind, reverberating in the unseen space I’ve made for her to inhabit when she returns from her journey. I am not certain what to expect. I am not certain what she will be now. I am not certain because, for all I knew of her, I still only knew her as one of the living. She will be different. She will be changed by death. It is my firm belief that all souls are. I welcome that change even as I fear it. I will accept her in any form she takes, but there is no way to prepare for the moment when I first catch a glimpse of her transformed and transfigured self.

So much of life is about not knowing how you will react to things, but finding the courage to keep your eyes open anyway.

A few months ago, I didn’t know how I would react to the Beginner’s class. I didn’t know if I would be impressed or disappointed, satisfied or left wanting, finally connected or more alone then ever… I didn’t know if I could come to terms with the idea of the RPD or if I would be able to accept the Nisut (AUS). Would I feel anything during Senut? Could I really learn to connect with my ancestors? Would I really hear the voices of the other Netjeru if I put Set’s statue away? Could I bear to put his statue away long enough to find out? It was those uncertainties which had kept from applying for the class years before when I first heard of the temple. I only applied this summer because after six years, I had eventually realized that there was no way to know the answers but to discover them by experience.

I wrote here once, a long time ago it feels like, about trust. I have something to add to that:

I trust now.

 I trust the Nisut (AUS). I trust the process and rite of RPD. I trust this community. I trust Senut. I trust my ancestors. I trust all of the Netjeru, when they speak, and I trust Set, even when he is silent. And in all of that trust, I have found what I had not dared to hope for. I am impressed, not disappointed. I am satisfied, not left wanting. I am connected, not alone. I have gained something which was not in the lessons proper but somewhere between the lines:

I am prepared even when I am unprepared. I am ready even when I am not ready. I have learned to put some trust in existence. I didn’t realize that I needed to learn that, and at first, I didn’t realize that I had learned it. Until I thought about it this week when I was buying flowers for the ancestor shrine…

Everything is in balance now. That doesn’t mean it’s perfect or even that it’s comfortable, but it does mean that it is inherently bearable. It doesn’t have to be fair that my mother was taken from me so young. It doesn’t have to make sense that the cancer came back when she had been doing so well. It simply is what it is. The important part is that this terrible thing did not go unbalanced on the scales: there have been blessings along the way to soften the blow (I cannot even fully express how much the beginner’s class, and the HoN community in general, helped in all of this—simply by existing and taking me in and giving me something to hold on to), and there were Names who stepped in to steady me when I started to fall.

 Balance. Fairness. These things are not about individual events and single grains of rice, they are about sums and the weight of the crops against the need for them. The scales dip and soar as they even out, and as long as all eventually returns to the calm, steady equilibrium that makes things functional…that’s really all I can ask for.

Wow. That got overly philosophical toward the end there. I really did start this just to announce that I’m now a Remetj. I suppose that means the title of the post is now a bit misleading.

Sorry about that.  XD

No Shortcuts

Attempts to find professional psychological care in this town yielded little in the way of encouraging results. But since that is what my doctor and I have determined I need, I am not willing to give up my search after a single afternoon.

I spoke with the doctor who prescribed the Celexa to me and it was clear that he felt responsible for what happened and was shaken by how badly I had reacted to what he had considered to be a “safe” drug. In his words, I’ve given him “a lot to think about”. Gee, he has a lot to think about? In any case, he agreed with me that treating what was almost certainly episodic anxiety with long term anxiety medication had been a mistake and that seeking counseling from a certified psychologist was a far more rational approach, and that if they became necessary, it would be best for me to consult a psychiatrist about using psychiatric drugs. Thanks Doc…kind of had that figured out already given the events of the prior night. :P

But at least it seems that he learned a valuable lesson about willy-nilly prescribing SSRI’s to his patients without really thinking it through first. So perhaps remembering my case will improve his general practice and there is some good to be gained from this after all. (Especially since, regardless of whether he feels bad or not, I’m still the one that has to pay for that ER visit…*grumble*)

For my part, I have learned something too: there are no shortcuts. There is no pill for grief. There is no pill for the natural stress of living and dealing with death. It is still valuable to seek professional help and to rule out physical causes of symptoms before addressing them as psychologically based manifestations of personal fears. But getting help is not the same thing as getting “cured”. This is not an illness—it’s a natural process. Uncomfortable and difficult, but natural.

I am not an advocate of faith based medicine or “self-help” style counseling for serious chemically or hormonally rooted psychiatric disorders, nor am I saying there is anything wrong with medicines like Celexa—I have several friends on the drug who do very well with it—but my current issue is not a long term mental health disorder. It’s coping with a single event: my mother’s death. Even my five years of stress ultimately all root back to that underlying fear of her imminent passing—I could have handled any of what happened to me over the last half decade much better than I did had I not also been dealing with the ramifications of her diagnosis and ongoing treatments and the aftereffects of them.

I think prayer is appropriate here. I think generalized grief counseling or perhaps a support group is appropriate here. I think talking to people and letting myself be a bit “crazy” for a while and allowing myself to take a “sick day” from work now and then when I need to spend some dealing with things is appropriate here.

I don’t have to fight this so hard.

I used before the analogy of trying to swim to shore against a current and being too tired to swim anymore—I said that I needed help to make it or I’d drown. But it didn’t occur to me that maybe I was missing the point. Maybe swimming is the wrong approach to take—with or without help. Maybe it’s better to just float and let the current wash me down stream.

The struggle to be normal again may, in fact, be futile. Normal has changed. My mother is dead and life is different because of that. I may not be able to return to what was “normal” because things will never be quite the same. The trick now is to define a new normal and to redefine myself in light of what I have experienced.

 I was close to my mother, and for better or worse, she was a big part of my personal identity and a major figure in the life I was living. But now I have to relate to her in a new way, through honoring her as an ancestor, and she can’t fill the role that she used to fill for me. That is going to change how I do things and think about things and react to things. It is going to change me—as it should. If losing a person I love doesn’t change me, than how good was that relationship in the first place? The pain is just a sign that there was genuine love between us.

That’s not wrong.

That’s not an illness to be fixed.

That’s just the human experience.

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“Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in its spiritual being, his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not he is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance.”
― Viktor E. Frankl

Beauty Born of Sorrow

In Memory of J.A.S.--May She Ascend

Today was a first: today I made the first pendant I have made since my mother passed; the first creation of mine that she cannot see with the eyes of the living, peering through her bifocals and holding it two feet from her face. It was born of sorrow and joy, longing and hope. At first I was only making it to replace a piece that sold from my online shop earlier today, but about halfway through, I suddenly realized what a milestone it was. Needless to say, it is not going in the store. I doubt I could part with it now, after that revelation.

It’s been a long time since I created anything. I hadn’t realized just how long. It felt good to have needle and thread in hand, to absorb myself in the art. It is a simple pleasure that made the summer bearable and I know it will help me through the aftermath.

It’s amazing, how much beauty can come of pain.

And so, life goes on. I’ll be seeing a doctor (hopefully tomorrow) to see what I can do about the anxiety and the insomnia. I feel a little better today than I did yesterday, because some of the problems in my life got suddenly resolved this afternoon. In fact, so many fortuitous things happened in such a short time that I have to wonder if, perhaps, someone had a hand in it. Whether hers or someone else’s, I don’t know, but I do feel a little bit bad for skipping the ahku dua today after the beginner’s class chat—I was skittish of having to think of my mother, and I told them as much. I looked over toward the shrine and said, “I offered to you on Friday, and will offer again this Thursday, but I’m tired of tears right now.”

 And that’s when things suddenly started to go right. I lay down to go to sleep for a bit and when I got up it was like the whole world had changed for me and tilted in my favor while my eyes were closed.

I’m still weepy, I’m still anxious, and I’m still tired—but it’s not as bad as it was. I feel hopeful, which is a big improvement.

Against the Swiftly Shifting Tide

And suddenly it breaks. Shatters really. A month goes by and you look around and take stock and realize you haven’t stopped running since it happened. The magnitude of the loss strikes like lightning out of a blue sky and everything changes in an instant. It’s that moment when you’re confidently swimming along just fine and then suddenly notice you’re getting tired and won’t be able to make it to the shore.

That’s when you drown.

Grief is like a finger print—it’s unique to each of us, and there is no way to know how it will be for you until you are there and dealing with it. In Hollywood blockbusters, we see a picture of grief which is all wailing or silence, anger or sorrow, acting out or sobbing. We see the tortured man suffering inwardly as he tries to contain his feelings, maybe taking his emotions out on something or someone in a bout of rage. We see the tearful woman breaking down in her kitchen in a private moment. Sometimes, when filmmakers are feeling particularly daring, we might see those gender roles reversed.

 But how come we never see the people who blame themselves for the death, who convince themselves that they amount to “murderers” for not caring for a loved one properly, despite all the reassurances of the doctors and nurses that they had done everything right? Or the people who develop somatic symptoms matching those of the person who died, and have panic attacks because they come to believe, however irrationally, that they must be dying too? Or the people who have nightmares about their other family members dying, and then become insomniacs for weeks on end because they fear their own dreams? Or the people who keep having flashbacks to the moment of death, reliving the suffering of their loved one over and over? Or those of us who experience all of the above?

My chest is tight and I haven’t slept in ages. I’m tired, but lying down just brings torrents of…stuff …washing over me. Stuff that makes me get up and pace even though my legs ache from pacing: irrational fears, flashbacks, pain in my throat, obsessive worrying over what are ultimately small stupid things, a hollow stomach that doesn’t feel full even when I’m over full.  What do I do for that? Call my father? I did. Not enough. Beg a friend to come be with me for a bit? I did. Not enough. Pray? I did. Not enough. So I've turned to my last resort: I dug out the health care card so I can make a doctor’s appointment on Monday. I have a phobia of doctors—of medical care in general, really—and it takes a lot to push me to that point.

But I’m there.

 I want this to stop and I no longer care how I accomplish that. I read the little glossy pamphlet about grief, the one they send you in the mail the week after your loved one dies, and it says clearly that this is the point where you go get help—when the grief overwhelms you and life grinds to a halt and you feel desperate. This is when you talk to a professional. This is when you stop trying to face it alone, because not everyone can just “tough it out”.

Because when I look back, I’ve been swimming toward that distant shore for a long time. I’ve been swimming since I first got the call about her cancer diagnosis, since I first knew there was a limit to the days we had together, and since I first started to worry about how many were left. But it wasn’t just her. When I start to recall the last six years, I realize that, though her cancer dominated my life, my life wasn’t a cake walk anyway:

I left a job to make sure I had a job, took a hellish job to avoid having no job, and then lost it anyway. I moved back in with my parents and worked for minimum wage for a year despite the four year degree (with a 3.94 GPA) and three years of job experience. I’ve moved five times in those six years (not counting helping my parents move to Minneapolis), had three different employers and five different teaching positions. I’ve dealt with medical problems, financial problems, psychological problems, and spiritual problems.

Not that good things haven’t come of all that. Not that I haven’t reaped the rewards of perseverance in the face of adversity. Not that I haven’t had successes and shining moments and good times. I don’t regret any of it. I don’t wish it hadn’t happened. I’ve accepted that whirlwind of personal chaos as necessary and weathered every storm knowing that in the end it would be worth it…but, it’s still okay to be tired after all of that.

I want ground under my feet again. I want sunny skies, for at least a little while. I don’t need an end to all troubles, just a break from them. And it’s okay to admit that I need help to get there, that I can’t swim that last mile…

Dreams of my mother

I dreamed about her last night and a fairly painful and intensely personal conversation with her followed at my waking. Something is already different—I could feel it in her response. It’s like she’s just now realized she needs to address these things with me and wants to before she finishes her journey. I can’t decide if keeping it from her in her final days, if pretending that nothing was wrong between us, was a merciful decision or a cruel one. I can’t decide if I did that on her behalf or on mine. I wanted to retroactively fix the relationship we’d had all my life by simply deciding it no longer mattered.

Her memorial is today, a few hours from now, and this is not how I intended to go to it—thinking from this place in my mind. I’m dressed up in newly purchased clothes. Because this has been billed as “a celebration of life” and the only dressy clothes I had already were black and that seemed inappropriate to the spirit of this gathering. Blue and white. That’s what I will attend in. The clothes are a bit too small for me (small town shopping is a bitch if you’re a 4x like I am) and I have to wear a slimmer underneath to look right in them. I put them on a few hours before so I could hopefully stretch them out a bit and assure myself that they won’t break in the middle of the event.

It’s all so mundane and so catered to what other people want and think. I’m always so worried about whether or not I’m doing everything “right”. Did I dress right? Did I send invitations to everyone I was supposed to? Did I pick the right colors for the flowers? Is my necklace too flashy? Should I wear a necklace at all or go without jewelry?

If I had my way I’d grieve alone at the base of the shrine, just crying and wishing I understood things better. No other people required.

Was I supposed to do that already? Is this supposed to be closure? For who? Me or them?

For better or for worse, it was my mother who taught me to ask these questions. I have spent my life trying to please her, alternately getting angry at her or myself when I couldn’t. She tried so hard to make me what she wanted me to be and I’m just not that. But I managed to fool her near the end…

Is that why I’m having these dreams? Did she find out and now she’s disappointed again? In me or in herself?

I went to a family event at my best friend’s house yesterday. I watched her and her mother as they tried to be calm with each other for the day and not argue. It lasted for most of the time but eventually they bickered a bit because they just can’t help driving each other crazy. Yet…it’s undeniable that they love each other deeply.

So…it’s okay mom. It’s okay that we didn’t always get along. It’s okay that we’re not carbon copies of each other. It’s okay that we had the relationship we did. And we’ll figure out how to go on from here together. I don’t know if you can sense the injuries I limp along with, the damage inside me, but if there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that the flaws and baggage we carry are what make us human. You didn’t do anything to me that every mother hasn’t done to her child. I’m strong enough to see this through.

Love you always.

Home Again

“Is it square?”

According to the cards that lay before me, the answer is yes. That’s shorthand for “You know what you need to do and there are not any hidden issues you need to address”. I was a bit concerned to see the purity card come up. I didn’t think it was a present issue and the cards don’t usual talk about things that haven’t already happened and/or are imminent. I glance at the calendar. I shouldn’t be “imminent” on that  for a few weeks yet.

How soon I forget that bleeding is not the only purity issue.

My home has been vacant and unattended for three months. I didn’t have a lot of time to ready it for my departure when I first left to tend my mother, and it didn’t occur to me that lying in state is not much better for apartments than it is for people. In addition to the random mess from when I was packing, there were Tupperware leftovers in the fridge which had become thriving mold colonies, dead flies and moths littering the dinning room floor, a bone dry toilet which had become stained by hard water minerals, spider webs hanging from everything, and a coat of dust so thick it didn’t even stir when I dropped my suitcase as I looked around in utter disgust.

That was most definitely a purity issue.

But I was too tired to do much about it. I had driven for eight hours through several construction detours to get home, on less than four hours of sleep because the faithful air bed I had been using at my parents finally gave way and popped in the middle of the night right before my trip.

Despite being exhausted, sleep was not on my schedule for the afternoon. It was 111 outside and close to 103 in my third floor apartment. I turned on the AC and waited for sunset, lying on the couch and drinking water to keep hydrated. Five hours later, I had the temperature down to 89 and finally felt rested enough to attempt some rudimentary cleaning—it was still too hot to get any real sleep anyways. I tried to flip on the kitchen light so I could scribble a list of things I needed to do on the pad attached to the fridge only to discover it was burned out.

Did I mention Set’s card was in the reading as well?

This is par for the course for us. In the back of my mind I know he’s just stirring up my world because I need something to do to keep me from thinking about the look on my mother’s face when she couldn’t breathe. Her eyes still haunt me, and I’m happy to have distractions from that. I spent part of the night getting rid of the dead bugs—I’ve had enough death for a while—and then ended up hanging out a friend’s house until late so the AC had a chance to work. I threw some clean sheets on the bed when I got home and collapsed into the moderately comfortable 79 degrees that was just cool enough to let me get some sleep.

I started the real work the day after—vacuuming things, scrubbing things, washing things, disposing of things… it took me all of today to even make a dent in what needed to be done and I imagine the better part of tomorrow will pass before I am finished. I’m taking the opportunity to rearrange and organize my space a bit differently—I’d like to start the new year off from a different place than the one I have been living from. From a place of courage and growth, instead of a place of waiting and fear. Changing my physical living space is a nod toward that goal.

But not all of my problems go away with just a good scrubbing.

There are still flowers that need to be ordered for the memorial. There are still relatives and friends who need to hear my voice on the phone and confirm that I’m okay. There are still the dozens of people here in our hometown who haven’t heard yet but will when they stop me to ask me how my mom is…

But if I put the shrine in a different place and get rid of that table I hate it makes me feel like things are normal again. If I move everything around, for just a moment my heart doesn’t notice that something is missing.

I deleted her number from my phone. But gods help me…it feels strange to not be able to call her. I glance at the special stationary I bought to write letters for her. I know the two aren’t that different. In my heart, I know she can and will hear me and that she can and will respond. But…things are different.

So I move everything around because that’s a difference I can control instead of one I simply have to accept.

Keeper of the Archives

I dare not claim I understand what happened that night, and to be honest... I try not to think about it.

 Four days after, I dwell again in the world of the living. Among people whose life-long ambitions and momentary goals shine through their brisk pace in the skyways and malls of downtown Minneapolis. The Wells Fargo center is a hub of activity—clicking heels echo against fine marble and the smell of crisp dry cleaned suits and professionally light perfumes fill the air. I get the sense that everyone around me is there for some modern purpose—opening new accounts, transferring money, tracking investments, renegotiating mortgage rates.  But we are there for a different purpose.

“I need both of you to sign,” the young man running the safety deposit vault says as he slides our IDs back across the counter.

We go with him to get the box and the sounds of the world disappear into heavy silence. In the small room we take it to, there is a single fluorescent light buzzing on the wall above a table, and we sit in the institutionalized chairs as we dig through the box looking for a small stack of envelopes. My father hands me one of the most faded ones and nods.

“Those are their citizenship papers.”

I look with reverence upon the faded images of my grandparents. Then I pull out my notebook and start writing. There is information on these forms that I need. Birth places, immigration dates, early addresses. All of it precious clues that will help me trace the family line as I go in search of names—in search of ancestors.

Because life doesn’t stop when someone close to you passes.

 Because our obligations to the dead do not end with those closest to us.

I know in my heart that my mother is traveling in the duat on her way the great halls somewhere beyond the liminal spaces I see in my dreams. I want her to have a proper ancestor shrine to return to when her journey is complete 66 days from now—but I do not want it to be empty save for her.

 There are other names to write on that list.

My experience with the spirit of E.M. just prior to her passing and my experience with Nebt-het the night of…my view of things has changed. My priorities have changed. For now, my mother’s name will be spoken often by those who knew her in life. But I know that, eventually, she will no longer be the most recent, most oft remembered name in our line. Eventually, she too will be a distant ancestor who exists mostly in faded pictures and aging legal documents. Someday I will suffer the same fate. For any of us to be remembered, all of us must be remembered. Future generations must look upon former ones with reverence and respect and feel the power and weight of their family history. Archives make that connection possible: without archives to back the names of the living, the names of the dead are swiftly forgotten and the power of the ancestry quickly lost.

I find other papers and scan them with my phone so we don’t have to spend too long at the box. An hour later, I leave with what records we have, prepared to research the rest. I am matron of the house now, I tell myself, it is my duty.

I am honored.

Gone from my sight...

It is over.

I have not had time to process what I have seen and heard and experienced, but...I did not expect it to be like that. I don't know what I did expect.

Maybe I expected a Hollywood death where my mother would rasp her last words then look skyward to speak no more.

Maybe I expected a death like my grandmother's where my mother would pass silently in her sleep while no one was watching.

Maybe I expected it wouldn't happen at all, that she would miraculously awaken from her comatose state and suddenly recover as she has done so many other times.

I did not expect the wild sounds in her chest and the wide eyes as she struggled to breath. I did not expect the long bone shaking moans or the gurgling and the choking. I did not expect the convulsions in her abdomen or the stiffness in her arms.

The nurse came after my panicked call to the hospice 24-hour line. She looked over my mother calmly even as my mother's ragged breaths heaved and ebbed in tides of what looked, to me, like agony.

"This is normal," the young nurse nodded, "we see this a lot. I know it's probably not as peaceful as you thought it would be, but it's normal."

She went on to explain that my mother's lungs were failing. The noises came from fluid gathering in them. It is distressing to hear, she told me, but normal. We had done everything we could do. We had given her enough morphine, enough sedatives--she was as comfortable as any dying person could be, the nurse assured me.  That made me feel better about what was happening, but it didn't make it any easier to watch as my mother struggled to die.

I prayed. I begged.

Please don't let her keep on like this. Please let her go.

And the spirit of E.M. was there and the other spirits of her family were there--I could feel them. Then peace came over me--wings from the corners of my sight wrapped around me.

Stand at the end of the bed and let me borrow you. 

I had been reading the Raven Kaldera book again when my mother first started her convulsions, so I was in the frame of mind I needed to be in to listen to her speak, to follow her directions.

I did not lose consciousness, but I felt my body stand differently and something shifted in my eyes and hands. There was something other than me radiating from my form and I looked toward my mother and whispered almost silently--so quiet even the nurse who stood next to me didn't hear. I don't recall the words now, but they were words I had no business knowing. I felt my mother leave her body and in the same moment, mine went limber again and the feeling was gone.

The body continued to fight for breath, but the gasps became even and mechanical. Four gasps. Pause. Four gasps. Pause. Four gasps...

"It's just her body now," my father told me as I sat next to him--my father, the man who doesn't believe in spirits, "it's just her body going through the motions."

And so it was. It took a few hours for the last breath to come and when it did, it was a quiet whoosh and then nothing. It was peaceful at the end. The room was empty of both the living and of spirits when I said a quiet goodbye as we waited for them to come and take her body. After she was gone I went to my room and picked up my prayer book. I flipped to the section on Nebt-het and read the prayer aloud. I felt wings again briefly, and then I slept.

Waiting for a Moment

I wait.

She is beyond us—in another world. Her connection to our waking reality is tenuous at best. And there is a point when she has gone too far to come back. A point when there is no hope of her speaking or eating or drinking anymore. It is the point when a decision is made. When they bring out the morphine and the sedatives and sleep becomes life for her—and, eventually, it will become death for her. It is that moment when preventing her from suffering is all that is left to do… but also waiting and watching and getting more drugs for her and talking to her silent body and holding her cooling hand.

I am confident now that she is truly done with this life—she is truly ready to go. There will be no more years, no more months…not even two weeks…

I wait.

It is near.

And the dark lady is in our home now. She waits in the threshold of my mother’s room, guarding the line between our world and hers. And the dog is fearful of that cloaked woman, but I am no longer afraid… because she is not the only presence here. Sometimes I hear their voices briefly—the ones who walked before my mother. There is a man with them now—the ancestor who was almost lost, the one whose name had been forgotten by all but my mother, the one who sent me the tiger to help me find the name again, the one whose Ka I fed that he might walk by day and journey to meet her before the end. He has reached my mother in time.

I wait.

I sit with her in the dark of her room as a summer storm rumbles away into the night. I tell her who the man is and that I have brought him to meet her on the other side. I tell her that I trust him—that I will be okay and that she doesn’t have to worry about anything anymore.

I wait.

Two Weeks Notice

I don't like our nurse. It's not that she isn't good at what she does, and I am certainly grateful for all that she's helped us with, but every now and then...

"Sometimes, you know, people just have to put their lives on hold for a couple of weeks."

We were talking about end of July, when I'm scheduled to go back home--whether my mother has passed yet or not. It's a rigid date. Not because I have to get ready to go back to work or because I absolutely can not miss my ten year high school reunion, those are reasons but not the reason: it's rigid because I need it to be. Because I need an end. Because I need a point in time where I know I will be free (if only for a short while) from this place of death and dying. Because I need to know that even if she beats yet another timeline, even if she holds on for another month or another year, that at some point, my role in this will have ended.

It's someone else's turn to put their life on hold "for a couple of weeks"--mine has been on hold for three months.

No. That's not quite true. My life has been on hold for six years...

Ever since 2006 when I got the call: "Mom has cancer."

I wasn't expecting to hear those words as a newly minted teacher--twenty one years old and finally out on my own away from the oppressive influence of a woman who had been living vicariously through me. I was ready to make my own way and be my own person. I was ready to call weekly instead of nightly and to make decisions that she would shake her head at privately. But that single devastating call changed everything. There was to be no rebellious assertion of self, because suddenly, the world wasn't about me anymore. All prior disagreements, every complaint I'd ever had, everything she had ever done that I'd never had the chance to confront her about...it all had to be "water under the bridge", they said, because we didn't know how long she had.

Four years of remission--a time when I tried to get myself back on my feet. I took some hard blows on a failing job market and had to move back in with my parents for a time. Eventually, she went back to work. There were arguments, but I was still cautious, still shaken by the thought that it could come back. I helped where I could--she broke a leg, I nursed her back to health--I didn't say some of the things that occurred to me to say when my chest got tight and I wanted to scream. I didn't make big deals out of small things, I didn't push for space. I only stood my ground when I really needed to.

Then she started getting headaches. There was a new tumor. In her brain. Surgery followed. Treatment followed. Remission followed that. But...Dad lost his job and before I knew it, they were moving. Mom was still finishing her last rounds of chemo, Dad had to go on ahead without her so he could start the job that would bring the health insurance to pay for it. I cared for her. I stayed with her and the dog. I packed the house. I cleaned out the basement full of unwanted junk and black widows. I managed the property once they were both gone until it finally sold.

A year passed. I got my own place and started a small business--the first thing I had done completely for myself in several years--and things were going well. I was looking forward to this summer. I had plans. Plans to further my business and my career. Plans to casually hang out with friends for the first time in what felt like forever. Then I got another call. I don't remember all the words, but I remember a few: Tumors. Inoperable. Untreatable. Terminal.

I gave up my summer.

I don't regret that, and I don't resent it either. But I do resent being told, in not so many words, that it isn't enough. Who is a nurse to make that judgement? When will it be enough? When is it okay to want my father or brother to step in? To want professionals to step in? To want to go out into the world of the living and remember that I still live...

When can I finally take my life off hold?

When she dies.

That's the unspoken answer. The answer no one wants to give because it's unreasonable and they all know it is. Because the truth is, we don't know when that will be. It might be two weeks, two months, two years...we don't know.

The room got quiet afterward as the nurse quickly tried to come up with other options. There were nursing homes. Some free, some expensive. We could hire help to come in and tend her for part of the day. There were volunteers, neighbors, friends... but she kept looking at me, waiting for me to step in and pledge myself. She kept frowning like she couldn't believe I would consider any of those options. Like I was a horrible person for wanting to leave when it was just "a couple of weeks" extra.

My chest felt tight and my heart sank back into my core as if it could hide from the decision. My inner soul fluttered its wings against my ribcage in warning. My counselor's words came back to me "you have to take care of yourself, it will get to you". How could I take care of myself when I was trapped in a tiny space with an eternally dying woman? How could I take care of myself when everyone around me seemed to expect me not to?

I didn't say anything. My mother didn't say anything. But then, suddenly, my mother's body said something for her. She had a seizure right there in the living room during the meeting. And this time, it didn't just go away. That evening, she went from normal and fairly functional to a rapid progression toward death. This isn't the first time she's slipped, but my gut is telling me it may be the last.

And I feel...relief.

It's horrible. To feel that at a time like this.

 And I blame the nurse--right or wrong--because she was the one who closed the door on me and made me feel like my mother's death was my only salvation. Because she is the reason, that for a brief moment during that meeting, I looked forward to the death of this woman who I am supposed to love unconditionally. In some part of me I can't help but wonder if my mother's soul heard the panic brewing in mine and decided that enough was enough--that it was time to start packing up and leave.

Now my mother sleeps in the room next to me, trying to rest in between bouts of vomiting. She has occasional seizures that make her arms and face go numb and slur her speech. The pain comes in bursts despite medication--up and down the spine and in her head--and there is stronger pain medicine on order and emergency medication in the fridge to tide us over until then. But the pain isn't our only problem. Food and water are suddenly an issue. She can't take anything in and nothing is coming out despite laxatives given in every imaginable form. It's as if her digestive system has just shut down.


So they've given her a new timetable: she won't make it two weeks. Maybe less than one.

And because she's beat every time-table anyone has ever given her, I don't believe it just yet. Time will tell if she will beat this one too or if she is finally done with the race. And because I don't ever want to catch myself hoping for the latter again, I have decided: whether she dies or not, two weeks is when I am done with this race.

And I don't care what the nurse thinks of me for it.