Ice and tears
posted in Alaska, Fall, Family, Grief, Illnesses, OmegaDad, OmegaDotter, OmegaGranny, Weather, Winter |In The Book of the Dun Cow
I find myself, at times, tempted to just throw my head back and howl to the world, “Maroooooooooned!”
Most of the time this summer, however, I have been merely frozen.
Like a rolypoly bug, I have curled in upon myself, not bothering to write the blog until nagged to by BlogHer’s automatic “We Miss You!” email that explains, sadly, that the ads are being withdrawn until the blog is updated. Not bothering to look at my email. Not bothering to respond to emails, or calls. Not reaching out to local acquaintances. Just sort of surviving, with a feeling of “One must go through the motions.” Reading a lot. Dealing with family things, but mostly with half a mind, or a pane of glass or frozen ice between me and everything else.
Now and then, I pull myself together and do something related to mom’s death. At which point the ice shatters, and a piece stabs into my belly and I find myself gritting my teeth, pulling my hair, pacing, finally crying. Afterwards, I carefully retreat back behind the ice, back where it’s safe and it doesn’t hurt.
It was a cold and rainy summer here. It was sunny and warm here while I was in Arizona, dealing with mom’s hospitalization and death. But shortly after I returned home, the gray horizon-to-horizon clouds moved in and the temperature dropped and it stayed chilly and drizzly and shadowy. We broke a weather record for most consecutive days with rain, and the lovely little current-temperatures-versus-average-temperatures graph on Big City’s NOAA weather page showed consistently below average temperatures. The sun didn’t come out until the first day of OmegaDotter’s new school year…
OmegaDad had his surgery early in the summer, and recuperated slowly. Then, a week and a half ago, he awoke with a bump on his elbow—which I assumed was some kind of bug or spider bite—which, by the end of the day, had morphed into a horrible angry red baseball-sized swelling. To give you an idea of how ugly it seemed, I was the one who insisted we go to the emergency room for it, since we had missed closing time at the local urgent care doc-in-a-boxes. (Normally, I’m the one who wants to wait; OmegaDad accuses me of generally wanting to wait until he’s passed out on the floor before I grudgingly admit that he needs to see a doc.) Anyway, the thing turned out to be a staph infection (not MRSA, thank heavens for small favors!), and we spent the week traipsing off to the osteopathic surgeon’s office on an almost daily basis to have it drained and bandaged and tut-tutted over. The prognosis on Friday was if things hadn’t settled down by this Monday, he would have to go to the hospital to have elbow surgery; but, in the meantime, the doc upped his antibiotics. This, thankfully, turned the tide, and by Monday the doc was most pleased and allowed us to stop packing the wound with gauze and let it start closing naturally.
So this week I finally wrote up an invitation to family and friends to our scattering of mom’s ashes, which we’ll be doing in mid-October. This, of course, cracked the ice and led to a torrent of tears. Then I retreated back again. Tonight, I pulled together email addresses and sent it out. There are more names and email addresses I need to get, but this is the majority of them, I think. The ice cracked again. Since OmegaDad and OmegaDotter are asleep, my outlet is here, at the blog.
OmegaDad wants me to find a grief counselor. I haven’t the vaguest idea how to start. As I am not religious in the least, I don’t have—or want—a priest or pastor handy to turn to. And, as I am not religious in the least, I do not want counseling based in belief of heaven or hell or the afterlife.
I am at a loss.
In the meantime, the season is rapidly turning towards autumn; trees are yellowing, leaves are falling, blossoms are fading. Winter is on the way.
