The Goldfinch

I started reading listening to The Goldfinch today. There will be very few spoilers, if any, because I just started reading listening to it today.

In the beginning, Theo tells of how his life is marked by his mother's death - life before she died, and life after she died. I think for anyone who has lost someone they love, someone who has always been a part of your life, an important part of your life, feels this way. He says that no one ever made him feel loved like his mother did. How she made the normal seem special. He states that she uses a Mary Poppins voice. He states that she was beautiful too. When he remembers her, he remembers what she had on that day and that is how he always pictures her, in those clothes.

In March, it will be two years since my mother died. The first three months following her death, I sobbed. I sobbed as I gardened. Doug would walk up to me with his arms outstretched saying "Oh, honey." I would wave him away. I needed to sob. I would sob at work - sitting before my two monitors, sniffing and staring straight ahead, blowing my nose. At the end of the day I would thank my colleagues for not making a fuss, not noticing that I sobbed all day. I couldn't really stop. Then her birthday rolled around and I hiked for her at a local state park. This is what I am going to do in her memory on her birthday as long as I am physically able. I went to my daughter's house for both Thanksgiving and Christmas. I needed to be with her and her family and to be with people who love me. When someone I normally communicate with said I didn't get in touch that first year, I was shocked. I suppose it was true. The first year I muddled through. This second year has been easier.
I still miss her terribly, I think about her often, she is with me all the time. I see her in my face when I look into the mirror. I look just like her and when people tell me so, it is such a compliment. Like Theo, I always thought my mother was beautiful.

My mother was, for most of her life, very heavy. This led to a lot of the end of life problems she experienced - heart damage, joint issues, knee replacements. In the end, she walked with a walker with a swagger, moving side to side. Despite my mother's weight, I always thought she was beautiful. Oh, I hated it when she frosted her hair when that was popular and when she let the girls at the beauty school work on her, but to me, she was beautiful.
Like Theo, no one ever loved me as much as my mother. She was always there to listen to me. She would pet me over the phone when I would call her to complain of being ill. When I shut my finger in the trunk, I ran to her house so she could take care of it for me.

For most of my growing-up years, my family was very poor. My mother was a cafeteria worker in our school so that she could be off with us when we had school breaks. My dad was an insurance man for whom success came late in his career, coinciding with when all three of us left the house. Like Theo's mother, my mother made the ordinary feel oh so special. When I was very young, my dad worked in a factory. He must have worked the afternoon shift, because in the evenings, it was just mother and us kids. Mother would poor a little Dixie cup of pop or kool-aid for us and serve popcorn in Melmac bowls. She would play albums of classical music on the record player for us - Swan Lake, The Nutcracker, Porgy and Bess. I loved those nights and from those nights with the record player began my love of music.

Mother wasn't a great cook, but on our birthdays, we could choose what we wanted to eat. There was one thing she made well and that is what I always requested - spaghetti. Her sauce would simmer on the stove all day long. Often when we went camping as a family, she would cook the sauce over the campfire and everyone camping around us would all talk about how delicious it smelled. She would make a home baked cake and while she cleaned up the kitchen, my dad would put the three of us in the car and we would drive to a drugstore called Hooks, (which is CVS these days,) and he would allow us to pick the ice-cream we wanted to eat.

Just as Theo states his mother used a Mary Poppins voice, I always called my mother Pollyanna. She was usually positive, no matter what - a trait she learned from her Grandma. Often I thought she was naive or unrealistic. At Christmas, no matter what was going on in our lives, it was supposed to be wonderful. I am mostly positive and get this from my mother's example.
Now when I think of her, I think of talks we had or how many times we told each other we loved each other - especially in the end, in the hospital. It was all we needed to say. Now, I mull over conversations, savoring every word. I recall disagreements we had and now that I don't have her any longer, I regret some of my negative behavior and bad attitude and smart mouth retorts, but this was in the years I was a teenager. I know now she was just trying to raise me up the best she could.

I'm fortunate that while doing my job I can listen to podcasts or books. I have a degree in English and used to be quite the snob about how the actual reading of a book was superior to listening to a book. I'm glad I got over this.

I've just started reading listening to this book and thus far, I like it. Today, it made me think of and remember my mother which is always good.

Me & Cheryl Strayed

Mammoth Cave National Park, 2011

 I hike. I'm a hiker. I have gone through a lot of pairs of hiking shoes and boots. And, socks. I once became friends with someone on the trail when she gave me her dry (dirty) socks to put on my feet because my socks were soaking wet.
My love of hiking was instilled in me by my mother. Our family vacations were spent tent camping. Mother would take off and the three of us kids were left to scramble and keep up with her. We followed like ducks in a row.
She was my Girl Scout leader. People thought because I had so many badges that she was easy on me but in truth, she was harder on me than any of the other girls. I really had to prove myself.  The sleeping bag I remember from my Girl Scout days was brown and had mallard ducks printed on the flannel lining. These were the kind of bags you would put in the washing machine. Mother would hang them out on the line to dry and I remember how the bag felt and smelled - the flannel kind of rough - not soft like it is, now. When we tent camped, everything smelled delicious of sunshine and grass and dirt and Off! bug spray.

Pink Dust in the Grand Canyon, 2008

 I haven't hiked the Pacific Coast Trail, but I've hiked a lot of other places.

Grand Canyon, 2008

Rocky Mountain National Park, 2005

The scene where Witherspoon is climbing the huge rocks and working to get her pack through, I leaned to Doug and said "that looks like the boulder field." The boulder field is on Long's Peak - a huge expanse of boulders that you have to maneuver your way over, around and through.

Random Internet pic of the keyhole/bounder field on Long's Peak

 Long's Peak is a fourteener - but I called it quits in the keyhole. The keyhole is at 13,000 feet, which was quite an accomplishment for me. You can see just past us in the photo, how it looks as if you are entering Mordor.


Me and Doug sitting in the keyhole on Long's Peak, 2005

 You find out a lot about yourself when you push yourself to the limit. I've always been at my happiest times when I'm out there in nature, dirty, grimy, struggling to climb a mountain or to paddle a canoe into the wind or to slither through a hole in a cave. It is during those times that I've been more than me - that I am me, but that small self who is just a tiny element out there in nature. I've been happiest when the rain is falling on top of the tent or the waves are lapping at the shoreline and it is pitch black dark and all you can see are a million stars.

I read Cheryl Strayed's book when it came out in 2012. I knew I had some things in common with her as I read it. Other parts, not so much. I didn't know when I read it that I would lose my own mother two years later.
I gave her book to someone I thought was my friend at the time. I would later learn that person was never my friend when she abandoned me when I lost my mother. She accused me of being self-centered. I agreed that I was and told her that if she could experience a loss such as mine and not be self-centered, then she was a better woman than I.

I cried when I saw the previews for the movie, and knew it would be difficult to watch. One person who wanted to go with me to the movie was my friend, Julie. You know how when one person goes out of your life, another enters? When the person who was never my friend left my life, Julie walked in. She wanted to go see the movie with me and I would have clung to her and cried. My daughter knew I wanted to see it and we talked about going together. In the end, it was good that we didn't. I probably would have alarmed her with how much I cried and for how long. In the end, it was Doug who sat beside me. Doug being his rock self. He had seen it all before. He was here for the day in day out crying of the first three months following her death.

In the book and the movie,it is implied that Cheryl Strayed's mother came to her as a fox.

 My mother has come to me as a great blue heron. It sounds crazy, but there have been so many times in these past nine months since her death that a blue heron has appeared. My mother's dying wish was to live to see my daughter's child born. Mother died on March 5, 2014 and my second granddaughter was born on June 8, 2014. Almost two hours exactly after the baby was born, a great blue heron circled overhead. After three months, I had started to realize the appearance of the great blue herons. I looked up into the sky and said out loud I know you know, mother - I know you know Aly is here.
Someone who loves me very much was recently asking me questions about the grief I've experienced since mother's passing. I don't know that I have many answers. One thing I've experienced is the feeling of being untethered. In the womb, you are tethered to your mother by the umbilical cord. And despite the fact that the cord is severed phycially at birth, I don't feel that cord is truly ever cut. Now that my mother is physically gone from this earth, I have been questioning my identity - who am I now that my mother is no longer physically present in my life? My dad asked me if I was making too much of it. I said what if I am if it is a comfort to me? I was discussing the appearance of the herons with my massage therapist and she asked me if I had looked up the meaning of the heron and I told her I had not. She answered "well, everything has meaning," and she loaned me a book on spirit animal meanings. It said that the heron was showing me how to look deeper into aspects of my life that will bring out innate wisdom and to teach me how to become more self-reliant - how to ground myself in the earth and my spiritual beliefs and how to become comfortable in uncertain situations and to be watchful. I found all of this to be incredibly interesting.

In my struggle, I've also done some stupid stuff. I didn't do heroin or have multiple partners stuff, but I've treated myself in a distructive manner at times. I've made some bad decisions and acted upon them. I've lost my self-control. I try to rise above at this point in my life - to take the high road and most certainly have not in a few situations since my mother's death. I have cried and wailed and have become angry and I've said things I shouldn't to people I shouldn't have. And throughout, my mantra has been forgiveness and peace. Forgiving myself first. Forgiving others and striving for peace. That is all I can do.

So much of the movie is so raw and real as to death and the way you miss someone. So many things ripped the band aid off for me again. You see things and they remind you. It comes slamming back. And you can hear the hospital sounds and smell the awful antiseptic, sickening smell of illness and death. The little green mouthwash sponge thing on the stick. Toward the end of my mother's life, I was the one she would allow to swab her mouth for her.

In the movie, when Witherspoon falls to her knees in anguish in the middle of the trail - that was me this past summer, gardening with all I had in me - sobbing, tears falling, clawing at the earth, ripping weeds, one moment angry and strong and the next leaning forward on my hands and knees, falling forward, watering the earth with my tears. Doug saw all of that. It would break his heart and I would wave him away.

 My healing from the loss of my mother isn't yet complete. Some people tell me it will never be. Some tell me the second year is even more difficult than the first. I do know that the most growth comes from the most difficult times.


Last photo of mother and me

I hiked this past summer on mother's birthday, July 12. It was a beautiful day and I hiked at one of her favorite spots at one of her favorite parks. I felt her presence with me.
I'm thankful for the raw story of Cheryl Strayed's Wild and the movie. Now I want to go back and read the book again. I know there are those who think I'm too open at times. This is the life of a writer. Tonight, we got into the car and Doug spoke. I said I don't want to talk.
All I wanted to do was run home to the keyboard and write.
Cheryl K. Bennett

Six months

I woke at 4:30 a.m. this morning. Today is the six month anniversary of my mother's death. Every month when the anniversary rolls around, I have difficulty sleeping. This morning I thought of mother, of sitting next to her hospital bed, holding her hand to my face, wishing I could just die right along with her. I asked God to just let me go - to let me go with her. Little did I know at the time that a part of me did go with her. I know this is true because of the hole that has been left behind.
This morning I thought of mother and life and death and relationships.

My alarm sounded at 6:15 a.m. and I got up and took my Welsh Pembroke Corgi, Chelsea, out for a walk. The air was dank. Rotting wet leaves cover the ground. The sky was the color of pewter with darker clouds mixed in. A rooster from a nearby farm sounded and our rooster seemingly answered.

I've thought of her all day. I sat this evening combing through photographs and although I had her all of these years, I already know there aren't enough photographs. I should have taken more.

I looked at my facebook page and started to write something but when I saw my post from yesterday, Little Bee's first day of Pre-K 3, I decided to leave what was positive and full of life and joyful and not mention the anniversary of mother's death.

I've thought of relationships with others. When you lose someone who is so precious, you realize the stupid stuff just doesn't matter. Life is too precious and short. I don't have time for stupidity - for stupid people and their stupid ideas.

I was fortunate to realize how precious my mother was while I still had her. Others have started to realize this since she has been gone. That is sad.

I feel sick and sad and tired and used up today.

Blue on blue

Spring has sprung so I was off to the salon for my Spring Pedi. The polish I chose was Finger Paints - Tiffany Impostor. In my case it was Toe Paints.

For most of the day, I had a great day today. I emailed a friend to tell her I felt as if I was coming out of a fog.

Then, driving home from my pedi, a melancholy mood settled over me. Once again I felt tearful. Last week was a rough week. I shed a lot of tears last week. Each time I feel I have cried enough, I find myself crying again. There are so many things that prick my heart and the tears well up in my mind. Easter was the first holiday since losing mother. On Easter Sunday I drove the two hours to my hometown. I met my dad at church. He still attends the church I grew up in - where I married my children's father, where my children were dedicated, where I took my children to church. Normally, when I walk into the sanctuary, the multitude of memories cause me to be overcome with emotion.  A while back the powers that be decided to remodel the sanctuary. Gone are the cobalt blue stained glass windows (there are no windows), and the pews have been replaced with chairs. The carpet is new, the walls were a putty brown with baby poop brown contrast. It is now more of a multi-purpose room. Therefore, no memories, no emotion. Part of me was relieved. I sat with my dad during the service.

After church, we went out to eat. Then we took my mother's black mustang convertible out for a spin. (A family member will soon inherit mother's car.) The day was beautiful, full of sunshine and warmth, the temperature hovering around 75 degrees. We drove through one of the most beautiful areas in Henry County - Blue River Valley. We drove out in the country and looked at the Big Blue River. After that, we drove east on state road 36 to Summit Lake State Park. State Road 36 took us to the homes of both of my grandparents. We drove out that road for visits with them nearly every Saturday when I was a girl.

Summit Lake State Park is a park where I would go to contemplate life, to camp with my son, a place where I spent a lot of wonderful, special times. Driving around the park made my heart ache.
After mother was unable to hike about, dad used to take mother to the park for rides and to see wildlife. He pointed out to me places where they saw deer and a skunk. When we got out of the car to take a short hike, dad pointed out where he pushed mother in her wheelchair on a trail. For both dad and I, this park was a special place.

When it was time to head back to my house, dad told me my visit meant more to him than I would ever know. He said "we made a memory today - someday we will look back on this and remember when we took mother's car out for a drive." Then he told me that ride may have been the last time he would drive mother's car.

Through losing mother, I have changed. I look at myself in the mirror and the eyes that look back are vacant. I look tired. I am tired.
In these few weeks which have seemed like an eternity to me, I have changed. I am trying to take it slower. I am trying to forgive myself. I am trying to look past ignorance and people who are self-absorbed. In the past, if someone did something bad, I would think jerk! Now, I feel sorry for them.

While trying to navigate life following this profound loss, I have also been struggling with feelings concerning another situation which hurt me greatly. The line between hurt and anger blurred. Where, when and how does that happen? Sometimes I feel that when I am hurt I are being a vulnerable and then when the anger takes over I feel stronger. I used to carry a card in my wallet that read: Refusing to forgive keeps you in the role of the victim. When I don't forgive, I am giving the one who caused the pain power over me. By forgiving them, I am in control of myself and my own happiness. I always try to look at experiences and see what I can learn from it. I try to be the bigger person. I also try to realize where the other person is coming from. I try to think about what is going on in their life and what are they reacting to? I often say "they will get theirs." I have seen this happen over and over. What you give out comes back to you. Holding on to hurt accomplishes nothing. Today, I let it go. In my heart, I forgave, and it felt wonderful. I felt the weight lift from me. I have enough pain to process due to mother's death without allowing other circumstances to cause more pain.

What are you carrying around inside of you? Who do you need to forgive?

A day

One month ago today, March 5th at 9:10 a.m., my life forever changed as a part of me departed this world. It changed me. How could it not?

Despite knowing my mother's health was declining, despite watching her struggle to breathe, despite sitting with her in hospice, clutching her hand in mine, it was a shock. A numbing shock. I still cannot believe she is gone.

My mother is dead, my mother is dead, my mother is dead. I never verbalized these words, but they rolled around inside my head making a horrible racket like marbles in a bucket, making me want to scream. 

I am more contemplative, more serious, more quiet, more tired. Exhausted. Even now, writing these words, a wave of nausea flows through me.

She hadn't yet passed the first time I thought of calling her. We took Little Bee swimming and she swam for two and a half hours. Natalie and I were walking down the hall, hand in hand, when I thought I need to call Mother and tell her about Natalie swimming. Then it occurred to me- I will never call her again. I have thought about calling her to tell her what is going on several times since.  We've had torrential rains this past week and flooding. Mother always watched the weather here and would call me to make sure I was o.k.

Last night a friend came from out of town and was my overnight guest. We ate out last night, we came home, changed into comfy clothes, I made a fire and we talked.

This morning, hair disheveled and eyeliner smudged, we sat, wearing pajamas, drinking coffee and talking.  I laughed. I yelled. I carried on.

We talked and talked and talked. She listened as I went back to the subject repeatedly - "mother this, mother that, since we've lost mother..."

We ate good food-delicious food and consumed some excellent beers.

Today, we drove from Bloomington to Nashville, Indiana and walked a bit. Then we drove the back roads and hills and through mud, with the windows down and sunroof open. We were silent. We breathed in the smells of spring, of earth bursting forth with fronds and green and sprouting and growth. We got a little lost and found our way again.

And I felt more like me than I have in months.

Today was a day. It was a good day.

NEVER FORGET

NEVER FORGET

THE LIVES THAT WERE LOST

9-11-2001

To boldly go where no man (or woman or Asian American or African American) has gone before.





Photo credit:  1986, Bruce Weaver, AP

 Driving to work this morning, listening to NPR, I heard a story on Ron McNair, one of the crew members lost in the 1986 Challenger explosion.  McNair, born in 1950, grew up in South Carolina, attending segregated public schools.  Challenger was his second Shuttle flight.  Ron was the second African American in space.  NPR spoke with his brother and his brother told how he and Ron grew up watching Star Trek.  He said that the real science fiction for them was trying to imagine blacks and whites and working side-by-side.  We have Gene Rodenberry to thank for that.  Star Trek started running in 1966.  I was eight  years old.  I grew up watching Star Trek, too. 

The Challenger crew included Mission Specialist Ellison S. Onizuka, (second Shuttle mission) the first Asian American in space.  Mission Specialist McNair  and two women, New Hampshire high-school teacher Pay Load Specialist Christa McAuliffe and biomedical engineer, Mission Specialist Judith A. Resnik,  second woman in space in 1984.  (The first woman in space was Sally Ride in 1983.) Commander Francis R. Dick Scobee, Pilot Michael J. Smith, who was an experienced pilot, but Challenger was his first space flight.  McAuliffe beat out 11,000 other teachers to be the first teacher in space.  Payload Specialist Gregory B. Jarvis beat out 600 other Hughes Airforce Corp employees for the opportunity to fly with Challenger. 

A space launch is an event that  school teachers take advantage of.  It is a huge opportunity to teach science in a real, factual, exciting, fun manner.  Teachers would have their students watch the launch on t.v.  Because a teacher was on board in 1986-  the first teacher to ever take part in a space program, nearly all teachers across the United States were focusing curriculum around the watch and tuned in with their students to watch on that day. 
All of us watching were shocked.  Stunned.  NASA had launched shuttles twenty-four times successfully prior to this launch.  The concept of failure was unimaginable.  We were all watching live- in real time.  The explosion took place after one minute and thirteen seconds.  A mere blink of an eye.  Normally, you watch a launch and you feel the exhileration and then the camera follows, follows, follows as the aircraft climbs higher into the sky.  With this broadcast, as the explosion took place before our eyes, we were stunned.  The horror of the explosion continues to cause me to feel sick to my stomach.

"The crew compartment shot out of the fireball, intact, and continued upward another three miles before plummeting. The free fall lasted more than two minutes. There was no parachute to slow the descent, no escape system whatsoever; NASA had skipped all that in shuttle development. Space travel was considered so ordinary, in fact, that the Challenger seven wore little more than blue coveralls and skimpy motorcycle-type helmets for takeoff.
In a horrific flash, the most diverse space crew ever — including one black, one Japanese-American and two women, one of them a Jew — was gone."  Full story found here.

A couple of gal friends and I were headed to Florida for Spring Break.  We were all married, in mid-twenties.  I was the only one of us that had a child.  We went to Cocoa Beach and on every motel and restaurant marquee the messages read
our hearts go out to the families of the Challenger crew.

The launch and subsequent explosion took place on January 28, 1986 and we were down at the beach for spring break - April.  The bars were crawling with sailors from ships, all in from Virginia Beach.  They referred to it as "VA beach."  They were on a mission- to clean up the debris from the explosion.  It was everywhere.  Pieces of tile littered the beach.  Did I think about picking one up and taking it home with me?  I suppose.  But it would be something akin to taking a piece from a car wreck when someone dies as a result of that wreck.  It was too macabre.  The sailors had a name for the debris - "space trash." 
The reminders were all around us, even three months after the explosion, that something terrible had happened.  And now, twenty-five years later, we remember.