OmegaMom

Thank you all for your kind words and thoughts for my family and me.  Tonight is the last night I will be around a computer for the rest of the week, as we are packing up Mom’s stuff and moving it back to the house tomorrow (this includes the computer), so I wanted to say my generic “thank you” now.  When I get back home to Alaska, I will be sending more personal notes.

It’s been very strange.  The first few days I was on autopilot, and I don’t remember who I talked to or what I said.  But my sister-in-law showed up the evening after Mom died, and OmegaDad showed up the next day, and my brother flew in on Friday, so I’ve been surrounded by family and helped by them–doing things that I found myself simply unable to do.

The box…Well.

In the midst of my daze, I managed to make the arrangements to have Mom’s body picked up and sent for cremation the day after she died.  We picked up her ashes on Friday afternoon.  Since we are going to scatter her ashes where we had Dad’s scattered, I had them give us her ashes in the most basic, simple cardboard box.

It was amazing how light it was.  Back in 2004, when my dad died, and we had him cremated, I was astonished by just how heavy the box of ashes was.  But Mom was so tiny, so wasted away–she weighed less than 100 pounds before she went into the hospital, and the box was just…light, compared to Dad’s.

I found myself petting the box, stroking it like I had been stroking her hair when I put it up into a French braid day after day at the hospital.  It’s just a plain cardboard box, with “TEMPORARY CONTAINER” stenciled on all four sides, and a certificate of cremation in an envelope taped to the side, a label with her name stuck to the top of the box.  But I carried it carefully, hugging it to me, as we took it back to the house.

I told OmegaDad later that evening, “That’s all we have left of her…”  I was weeping.  He pulled me into his arms, hugged me, put his head against mine, and said, “No, that’s not all you have left of her.  You have years of good memories, that’s what’s left of her.  Remember that.”

So, yeah.  Lots of memories.

The way my grief has manifested itself is in a constant state of disconnection.  I find myself wanting to talk to her about things, to tell her about what’s going on, all the time.  ”Hey, Ma, you were born in Riverside, right?”  ”Mom, did you marry Frank before you went to junior college or after?”  ”Mom, how on earth did you manage to keep Grandma from knowing you were living with Dave for seven years?!”  (Mom was Bohemian, very artsy, not constrained by dry social mores!)

We visited a blogging friend of hers, stopped by his art gallery downtown.  I found myself wanted to call her up afterwards to tell her how R. says business is just horrible, even though the media keeps saying “things are getting better!”

We stopped in another art gallery, and there were pieces there that kept making me say to SIL and OmegaDad, “Mom would have loved that!”

We went to the Western Art Show in the square downtown, and there were all these things I wanted to share with her…the dog in a tie-dyed T-shirt with the pink rhinestone collar…all the people…the excellent bronzes…the splendid paintings of Kachinas.

I find myself caught up suddenly, each time one of these things happened.  I wanted to talk to her–but I couldn’t.  And I can’t.

Oh, it’ll get better, slowly but surely.  But there are questions that we can’t answer now, because she’s gone.  There are fun and interesting things I see that I can’t share with her now, because she’s gone.

So that’s where I’m at right now.  Again, thanks for all the caring notes and comments.  They mean a lot to me.

OmegaDad tells me I need to write down memories while I’m indulging in them.

My mom–when I was a child–was into hooking rugs out of a variety of cloth that she scrounged from old clothes at the second hand store.

One of the rugs she created was of the Seven Bridges of Konigsberg.  A classic mathematics problem, it was the start of Graph Theory.  So:  In Konigsberg, there was an island in the middle of a river, and there were seven bridges that led to that island.  Somewhere along the line, someone realized that there was no way to traverse those seven bridges without crossing one of the bridges twice.

My mom, being an odd duck, used the Seven Bridges problem as one of her hooked rug subjects.  I grew up with that rug, with the knowledge–imparted to me by my parents–that you simply couldn’t cross all the bridges once without crossing one twice.  I spent many hours on my tummy on that rug, trying first one route, then another, sure that I could figure out a way to cross those seven bridges without doubling back.

I never could.

Many years later, while in the midst of my final attempt at getting a bachelor’s degree, wherein I discovered that it might be fun to get a minor in mathematics, I took a class in graph theory.  It was the hardest damned class I ever took.  It was made less hard by the fact that I spent so many hours trailing a finger across one bridge, then another, trying to figure out a classic mathematics problem in the form of a hooked rug.

That was mom.  Another of her hooked rug masterpieces was a rug inspired by a flight over Midwestern farms divided by a small river.  The fields of crops were staggered–based on the soils they were on, different crops were in different positions, and it so happened that the river was following the course of an old fault.  So a crop of corn, say, on one side of the river turned into a crop of corn on the other side of the river, but shifted by two crop fields down the river.

Somewhere, I have a picture of Mom and my two aunts, sisters to my father.  It’s from before I was born.  My aunts are dressed in lovely, picture-perfect ’50s cocktail dresses, the full skirts swirling around them.  Mom, on the other hand, is dressed in a black pencil skirt, a dark turtleneck, her hair severely pulled back, a cigarette in her hand.  She looks the utmost urban sophisticate, my aunts look like debutantes.

I remember when my first True Love had to leave, and I was left bereft and heartbroken.  My brother’s graduation from An Illinois University was happening, so we all piled into his mom’s Volkswagen van for the long drive to exurban Illinois for the ceremony.  I was dazed and sobbing from the ending of the dramatic love affair.  I spent the few hours to the ceremony sitting on the floor of the van, with my head in mom’s lap, sobbing my heart out.  She spent those hours stroking my hair and letting me vent my angst.

Mom was born in California, but spent many adolescent and childhood summers in Arizona, trekking to the various mountainous areas in Central and Northern Arizona.  When she grew up, she always remembered those times in the pines of Flagstaff, Prescott, and small town Yarnell.  So when she and Dad were thinking about retiring, she began agitating for retirement to Yarnell, Arizona.  She and Dad subscribed to a realtor’s magazine for northern Arizona, and began daydreaming.  Much to the family’s surprise, one day we were told by Mom that Dad (who hadn’t left Chicago since he returned from the Japanese occupation after WWII) had (OMGWTFBBQ!!!) purchased a ticket to Arizona to view a property they had seen in this realtor’s listing.  Three months later, they were packing all their worldly goods to move to nowhere, Arizona (aka “Wilhoit”).

After they moved, I would visit them there, in this tiny not-town in the middle of nowhere, Arizona.  I would sit at the kitchen table hanging out with them, watching through the sliding glass doors as the sun and the clouds would create ever-changing patterns across the valley between their house and Yarnell, highlighting the small canyon that was a feature of that valley, limning the small hills with light and shadow.

I would return to Chicago, to my city life, with my city friends, and find myself, at times, standing on the beach of Lake Michigan, seeing the sun set on the clouds building up across the lake, looking like the mountains of Arizona, and my heart would break with “home” sickness.

So when Dad needed to have back surgery, I chucked everything to move out to Arizona to be with them, to help out with the driving, the groceries, etc.  They had long since moved into Prescott, once-upon-a-time-state-capitol…So I sojourned in their house in Wilhoit, a town of maybe 250 people, and drove up the twisty-turny White Spar Road to the town of Prescott to hang out with them.

They introduced me to strange, secretive gold miners.  They showed me ancient rock art that few people had ever seen.  I would hang my head back against the back seat of cars at night and watch Cassiopeia and the Scorpion rise (at different times during the year) against the backdrop of the Milky Way, which I could never have seen so brightly and clearly even fifty miles from the city.

Mom would spend the evenings poring over the old USGS topo maps of the area, quick to leap upon any small marking that said “ruins” or “spring” or any other interesting feature.  In the morning, Dad would ask her what was on the agenda, and she would pull out the latest map, point to the feature, and say, “We’re going there…”  And go there they would.

Mom was always looking forward.  Her childhood during the Depression, her father’s search for work, his working for the government as an IRS agent, all made her willing to look Forward, rather than Back.  She was an explorer, always.

There is more.  But now I am drunk, and tired, and sad.  My very best friend in the whole wide world died this afternoon.  I can’t ask her, now, “Ma, am I remembering this right?”  I can’t ask her where they were planning to go on that particular day.  I can’t ask her where the photo is, the one of her with her new sisters-in-law-to-be.  All I can do is be thankful that I was there for her, and that she was there for me.  She was my very best friend in the whole wide world.

I miss her already.

RIP GrannyJ–1927-2010.

It occurred to me this morning that having this picture on that post was a BAD IDEA, given what weird pervos might be searching on the term h@rd-on…So here it is, split out by itself.

A gratuitous shot of the dotter, sitting on my Big Red Lips.  Look at how big she’s gotten!  We had to buy her a new bicycle because she’s grown so much.  Also, because she left her bicycle lying in our neighbor’s driveway and it got smashed when the neighbor backed out of the garage.  (She had to pitch in some of her own hard-earned money to get the replacement.)

Spring has finally arrived Chez OmegaMom.  The snow has completely melted from the yard.  Robins are serenading us in the morning and deep into the “night”.  The gloaming is creeping up; it is 11 p.m. as I write this, and it’s still late twilight outside—sunrise was at 5:51 a.m., sunset at 10:05 p.m.  The trees and shrubbery are filled with leaf buds, which I swear seem to grow as you watch.  You can definitely see the changes from day to day.

Within a few weeks, all the houses on all the streets in our area will be hidden from view again by the riotous abundance of greenery surrounding them.

And, as happens each spring, the rhubarbs get a hard-on.  Thick, red, hard penile stubs emerge from the ground in clumps and look infinitely pornographic for a few days.

Then the hard-ons explode into wildly wrinkled, alien looking baby leaves.  A week or so later, suddenly the plants look like ordinary rhubarbs:  the aliens have vanished.

It’s an amazing transformation.

Alas, the pics we had of the hard-on stage were out of focus, but here we have some aliens emerging from the penile cocoon:

Here’s a more pornographic looking item; imagine it without its crinkled taffeta skirt:

Brains for the vegetarian zombies:

The rhubarb plants give my hubby and me something to giggle about in delayed adolescence.  Then, later in the year, they give my hubby rhubarb to make pies.

I, unfortunately, am not fond of rhubarb pie.  Hopefully we’ll be able to ship one off to OmegaGranny.

Aside from that, I have been walking in the mornings, enjoying the sunshine, the explosion of growth, the rich smells of moist dirt and growing things.  And getting mosquito bites—of course.  And raking—endlessly—the yard, in bits and pieces.