OmegaMom

Last year, on the day you died, I stopped in the gift shop at the hospital.  There had been a bright, colorful cat or cow sitting in the window (I can’t remember which now) that kept calling to me as I passed by it, saying, “Your mom would like me!”  So I finally stopped in, thinking that the color would light up your hospital room, and the silliness would make you smile.

When I handed it to you, you unwrapped the bag it was in, and you smiled and went, “Oooh!”, just like I knew you would.

And then, just a few hours later, I was watching you suddenly gasping for breath.  I was watching the respiratory therapist trying various different things—an aerosol, a higher rate of oxygen, an oxygen forcing mask, as opposed to the “on-demand” mask you had had before—as your O2 levels dropped and your heart rate plummeted.  We were telling you to calm down, to try to breathe deeply.  I said to you, worried, “Mom.  You’re rattling, Mom.  You need to slow down.”

I remember the respiratory therapist calling the doctor.  I remember thinking to myself that this couldn’t be happening so suddenly, that you had been—if not your normal self, at least chipper and alert and amused by the toy I had brought you—just an hour previously.

I remember the doctor coming in, and putting her hand on my shoulder, and saying, “Kate.  Kate, I need you to step outside and talk with me a moment.”

I remember going out of her room, and leaning, dazedly, against the wall, my eyes focusing far far away, as the doctor told me that I had to make a decision.  I remember looking at her, at her sorrowful eyes, and knowing what I had to say.  I was crying.

“Stop the machines,”  I said.  “Take her off the oxygen,”  I said.  “She wants it that way,” I said. 

She pulled me into her arms and murmured something—I don’t remember what—and then we went back into your room.  She told your favorite nurse to “make her as comfortable as possible”.  She told the respiratory therapist to pull the oxygen mask off. 

The nurse shot you up with morphine.  A lot.

They all touched me as they left the room.  There were hands patting my shoulders.  There was Elizabeth the nurse holding my hand.  The doctor hugged me again.

I sat there an hour with you, holding onto your hand.  Your heartbeat went slower and slower.  It was so odd, Mom, because you would be quiet for a minute, and then take a breath, and then be quiet again.  The time between breaths got longer and longer.

And then you were gone, and all I could do was hold onto your hand and cry and cry and cry.

I took off your wedding ring then, and put it on my ring finger.  It’s there still, with my engagement ring and wedding ring.

And I had to go back to your little apartment, the one that we had worked so hard to make colorful, and cheery, and yours, and I made phone calls, and I cried.

It’s Mother’s Day, Mom.  It’s your day.  Normally, I would be calling you up and telling you what OmegaDad and OmegaDotter had gotten me, and would be asking how your flowers were, and what you had been doing.  I’d be able to ask you about Girl Drama, and get advice from you on how to handle it.  I’d be able to whine to you about how OmegaDad didn’t get the job in Spokane.  We’d talk about OmegaBro and his family.  We’d chat about Andy and Dana and Georgene and Jim and your local breakfast bunch and what the Queen Bees at the facility dining room were doing lately and what you had for your latest blog posting.  I’d tell you about how I’m on Grand Jury duty, and what it’s been like.  You’d want to talk politics, and about Bin Laden’s death.  I’d tell you that OmegaDotter is suddenly up to my shoulders, when she was just below my boobs just a year and a half ago.  I’d tell you that the rhubarb are exploding, and the lilacs and forsythia are budding out leaves, and I’d ask for your advice on what to do about the forsythia never blooming.  We’d be making plans for my normal June visit, and deciding where I could drive you, what odd little out-of-the-way places you wanted to investigate and photograph.  I’d tell you that this has been a bad year.  I’d tell you that I’ve gained a lot of weight.  I’d tell you that I suddenly look old.  We’d talk about the fact that here in Suburban Alaska, we’ve been having weather that’s a helluva lot like Monsoon Season back in Arizona.  I’d lament about the puppy’s tendency to put anything and everything into his mouth, and how he’s so desperate to play with Wooley the cat but Wooley the cat can’t stand him.  You’d laugh at my description of Wooley getting fed up and rearing up and boxing Seward—bap bap BAP—and the dog yelping and running away with the cat chasing him.  I’d tell you about the Alaska mini-vacation we’re taking next weekend.

Y’see, Mom, that’s what I miss the most.  Just being able to chit-chat with you, because we never ever had awkward moments in our conversations.  They always just flowed, one topic to the other.

I miss doing the crossword puzzles with you.  I miss kissing you goodnight.  I miss pulling the car to an abrupt stop because you saw something that intrigued you.  I miss your encyclopedic knowledge of wildflowers.  I miss being able to ask you questions about Dad, and about the family.  I miss your wide interest in so many things.

I miss you so much.  I love you.

(The funny thing is, you’d be telling me, “Pull yo’self together, Katya!  You need to join a club, get out, meet people.  Stop wallowing and turning into a mushroom!”  I hear you, I know it’s what I need to do.  But I had no idea…no idea…how hard your death would hit me, love.)

It has been a bad day.

We had our family meeting with the therapist.  When we got home, OmegaDotter was to do her homework before heading to the gym.  OmegaDad headed off to the bathroom.  OmegaDotter finished a couple of problems, then looked at one and started whining about how she couldn’t do it.  I got snarky.  She got whinier.  I got snarkier.  She got hysterical.  OmegaDad emerged from the bathroom.  It escalated.

I ended up shouting loudly at OmegaDad for quite a bit, then storming out of the house.

I found myself at a local bookstore-cum-coffeehouse.  I bought a book.  I got myself a hazelnut mocha.  I got a slice of key lime pie.

While I was eating it, I began to cry.

Because, you see, key lime pie was Mom’s favorite type of pie.  And today is her birthday.  And she’s not here.  And it just sucks in general.

Argh.

I am trying to get a copy of my grandmother’s death certificate so that I can close an account that has both my mother and my grandmother named as owners.

This is turning into a bureaucratic nightmare.

It seems that having a birth certificate listing my mother as…well, my mother, and a death certificate listing my mother’s mother as my grandmother does not suffice to establish that I am, indeed, my grandmother’s granddaughter.

But, nooooo.

I have to send them a copy of my mother’s birth certificate.

Which, of course, I don’t have.

I have plenty of copies of her death certificate…

My paralegal passed me on to her local “investigative services” company.  They listened to my tale of woe and said that, alas, it would be just as quick for me to order a copy of my mother’s birth certificate.

In order to get a copy of my mother’s birth certificate, I had to send a copy of my birth certificate.  And submit a “Sworn Statement and notarized Certificate of Acknowledgement”, which required a visit to the local bank to get it notarized.  And pay more money.  And wait more time.  Oh, yes, and I couldn’t upload the document…I had to fax it.

So, out of all this, some financial advice for all and sundry:

1. If you’re going to just pass your money on to your kids, put them as beneficiaries on all your financial instruments.  Alas, there was a mixup in communications with my mom, and she thought we had put me on all her accounts as “pay on death”, but it was only the accounts at one bank and none of the investment accounts.  It was so nice to have the real estate in beneficiary deeds—all we had to do was record mom’s death with the county, and her properties were automatically distributed as noted in the beneficiary deeds.
2. Another option is to do a living trust, into which you write all your financial instruments.  That way, you have dealt with all the paperwork, and your heirs will not need to do anything.
3. If you have an account that has a co-owner who has died, get that person’s name off the account pronto.  Oh, it is so easy to let these things slide—after all, don’t we all have plenty of time?
4. If you have stocks and bonds that you have purchased in small amounts, and have those certificates, you can always put them into an investment account and name people as beneficiaries, rather than having the certificates sitting in a safe deposit box.
5. Once again, if someone is named as a co-owner of your stocks or bonds and passes away, immediately remove their name(s).  Once again, this would be easier if you had them in an investment account; that’s what the investment people are paid to do.
6. If you’re going to be the executor of someone’s estate, and you’re going through various papers and see something, like, oh, say, a person’s birth certificate, or an original death certificate, grab it and put it in your ever-so-vital “estate folder”.  Do not say to yourself, “Oh, there’s mom’s birth certificate!  Wow!” and then put it right back where you found it.  Which place you will not be able to remember, and, furthermore, which place may be many many many miles away from you when you need that document again.

All stuff I have learned this past six months.  Sigh.  Now all I have to do is wait for mom’s birth certificate, at which point I can close that account, transfer it to the estate account, put the stocks and bonds into the estate account, and then divvy it all up.  It’s not like it’s a whole helluva lot of money, but the fact that it was in bits and pieces made it more difficult.

It’s the end of Thanksgiving Day.  We’ve had our turkey and cranberry sauce and yams and beets and pumpkin pie.  We played in the snow and built a snowman.  OmegaDotter and I dressed up for dinner.

I’m thankful that this year is almost over.

I’m thankful that I have an amazing, thoughtful, creative, loving, smart, funny guy like OmegaDad.

I’m thankful that I have a talented, creative, smart, funny, silly, beautiful girl like OmegaDotter.

I’m thankful that I had GrannyJ for as long as I had her.  And Jean.  And my dad, and my oldest brother.

I’m thankful that I still have family members who I love and cherish.

I’m thankful that we’re warm and safe and reasonably happy.

Happy Thanksgiving to y’all.  I’ll show you OmegaDotter’s Thanksgiving speech—which she delivered before we started eating—tomorrow.

Weeks, months, years.

I am tired of it all, right now.

In addition to suddenly being bereft of all ties to the older generation, we are dealing with the younger generation in the person of our dotter.

It is, we guess, attachment issues.  And possible ADD.  The only good thing that is holding me up right this moment is the fact that the Bad Days are coming exactly 24 hours after a therapy appointment…which, when I realized it, lifted a bit of the misery and gloom and desire to just walk away, get on an airplane, and fly to Arizona where I have a house of my own, free and clear, because if there’s such a direct correlation in response, then maybe, just maybe, the therapy might be helping.

Maybe.

And, hell, what we’re dealing with here is minor, compared to serious attachment issues.  I haven’t the vaguest idea how people deal with major attachment disorders in their children; this is wearing enough.

But, to break the mood of this post, I will pass on Allie Brosh’s latest, over at Hyperbole and a Half.  I hope it makes you howl with laughter, the way it did for me.

My dad, looking intense.  Jean, pregnant with OmegaBro.  Eldest brother Dean, looking ready to erupt into a tantrum. 

All three of the people in this photo are dead now. 

I never thought Jean would go so quietly, so peacefully.  She was a feisty woman, strong, opinionated, rabidly, radically liberal, passionately involved with Native American culture, raspy voiced.  She was my dad’s first wife, and they were divorced not too long after OmegaBro was born.  During my childhood, the boys would come stay with us for one weekend a month, but they lived only two blocks from my grandparents, so I saw them all the time.  While there was a rather bitter anger between dad and Jean, it didn’t matter to us kids until we were older, by which time the anger was gone.

She would travel to pow-wows in the Black Hills of South Dakota, and Montana, driving in her VW with the boys.  She wore her coarse, raven black hair in braids, always wrapped with Native-American leather wrappings; in the spring and fall she wore hand-made beaded moccasin boots everywhere.  Both were gifts from friends at the pow-wows.

I remember when OmegaBro got his Ph.D. at Small Mountain University.  My parents were living in Prescott then, and the brother’s commencement ceremony was at the end of winter semester.  They all were slated to drive up for the ceremony…but a blizzard swept in, so my mom and dad decided it was wisest to stay at home.  But Jean motored her way up to Small Mountain University Town from Phoenix, bulling her way through the blizzard in a tiny rental car, to see her son get his long-awaited doctorate.  Then she drove back down to stay with my folks, and they sat around and drank beer and talked late into the nights about all their friends from their younger, wilder days.

The lawn they’re standing on, in that picture?  It’s right in front of my grandparents’ house.  You’d walk straight down the street they’re standing next to for two blocks and end up in the small bungalow that she bought a few years after the divorce, the house that as of today belongs to the eldest son of the little boy in that picture.  The scene yanks me back to my childhood, to Halloweens at my grandparents’ house, the huge piles of dead leaves that swished and crunched under your feet, the tall graceful elms arching across the streets.  Memories of eating at Jean’s house with my brothers, playing with her half-wolf dogs and endless numbers of her Siamese cats named after sports cars.  Picnics at the beachfront park on Fourth of July, watching the fireworks.

The people are gone, the elms are gone, life has changed so much.

In The Book of the Dun Cow, there is a dog, Mundo Cani, who joins forces with the hero, Chaunticleer the rooster and helps him defeat The Evil.  At times, Mundo Cani erupts into a miserable, lonesome howling of “Marooooooooooned!”  I read the book years and years ago, once, but that image always stuck with me, a sort of archetypal outpouring of grief and mourning and lonesomeness.

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. 

I’ve been busy, because two and a half weeks ago OmegaDad suddenly discovered he had a (very typical) middle-aged man’s problem that needed “routine” surgery.  My last blogpost was written while we were waiting for the “routine” surgery.  Need I say that the phrase “routine surgery” has become somewhat…um…tainted for me after the past year?  After all, my mom had “routine” pacemaker surgery, and my dog had “routine” abdominal surgery, and both died.

So it was amazing how the tension went out of my shoulders as soon as I got OmegaDad back home from the outpatient surgery and things went swimmingly well.

Okay, they went swimmingly well from my point of view, not his.  He is still not happy, because the healing is taking longer than a day or two, and thus he can’t do all his normal activities, nor can he sit for very long and veg out at the computer, wandering the twisty, turny passages of the Intartubes.

The nice thing about the whole affair for me is that it has kept me busy.  I’ve been cooking, schlepping out to the chicken coops, mowing the lawn, reminding about pain meds, washing dishes, in addition to handling the dotter’s affairs—all of which is normally split between the two of us (mostly on his end; OmegaDotter’s schedule keeps me plenty busy normally).  The busy-ness has made it so that mom’s death has been pushed into the background of my mind.  Oh, it’s still there, and easily ramps back up when anyone wants to talk about it, but it’s been pleasant not to be constantly feeling like there’s that black hole in the pit of my stomach.

In the meantime, there are two stories I want to mention here that have caught my attention in the past week.

First off, there’s the press-and-blogger viewing of “Wo Ai Ni, Mommy”, a documentary that follows an 8-year-old from China who is adopted by a family from the U.S.  The film will be premiering on PBS in August; this is the trailer:

When I first watched that trailer, many months ago, it broke my heart.  I imagined OmegaDotter—also 8 years old—in that situation, being taken from her family of four years in the U.S. (Faith was living with a foster family for 4 years) to be adopted by a family from China.  I thought about how she would feel, what it would be like for her, and watching Faith cry that she wants to go home to China just…well…words can’t say how much that hurt.

Two bloggers—Malinda and Peach—were invited to the preview.  While I think that the original plan of the documentary was to be a feel-good happy-happy adoption story, they got a different feel from it.  Read their reviews (linked on their names) and see what you think.

The second story is that of the hoo-rah at ScienceBlogs.  The gist:  ScienceBlogs is a collective blog about (surprise!) science, with a stable of about 70 bloggers from all walks of science, including science journalists, medicos, physiologists, professors, physicists, biologists, archeologists, mathematicians, etc.  It started in 2004 2006 and has gained quite a reputation as the go-to place for science on the web.  This week, however, a blog was introduced called “Food Frontiers”, which was an “outreach” of PepsiCo.  It was given the same prominence as all the other blogs (all invited to join), but was obviously a corporate thing bought and paid for, though not explicitly labeled as such.  And, interestingly enough, while previous semi-corporate-linked blogs had been introduced beforehand, this one hit the SB front page with no warning whatsoever.

Well.  The shit hit the fan.  The question of the firewall between editorial and advertising was debated far and wide.  A subset of the bloggers left the site in response, with pretty candid “farewell” posts explaining why.  A number of other bloggers said they were dubious, at best, and were considering leaving.  One blogger sniffed that it was all a bunch of hysteria over nothing in a very disparaging way.  The management (and, probably, PepsiCo) decided that this was a Bad Scene All Around, and removed the corporate blog in question.  All that’s left is the post mortems.

I watched this with great interest.  My immediate response upon reading the original “hi, there!” post on Food Frontiers was, WTF?!  This is an advertorial, damn it!  What’s it doing not being marked as such?!?!  Ewwwwwww!!!!

For those who don’t know, an "advertorial” is what publishing calls advertising posing as editorial.  In the journalism world, such things are (alas) often necessary to pay the bills, but definitely clearly marked as advertising, usually done in a totally different design than the remainder of the magazine.  Including an advertorial in the midst of the magazine, using the same design, giving it the same editorial weight as writing by the staff, and not marking it (clearly, plainly, obviously) as advertising is a big no-no.  I mean, it’s taboo.  Really, truly.  As someone who spent 10 years writing and editing in business journalism, I can tell you (and those bloggers and commenters who think the whole uproar is a tempest in a teapot) that no matter how you feel about journalists and the ethics of mainstream media, when I say “taboo”, I mean totally, utterly, absolutely, no doubt about it, this is a line in the sand, TABOO.  You do not do this.  And if you do this, and someone finds out, and you are called out about it, you lose serious credibility as a journalistic source.

Period.

It’s like, say, having sex with your sister, that’s how taboo it’s considered.

I was appalled, myself.  I guess I have that verboten written upon my subconscious in letters of fire or some such thing; it was such a visceral response.

(Interestingly enough, I think mom’s response would not have been that emotional.  She was very pragmatic and less likely to imbue the journalism biz with idealism.  However, she would definitely have thought it was a sincerely bad idea, and rolled her eyes at how stupid it was for the management at ScienceBlogs to take that approach.)

Anyway, here’s a round-up of all the ScienceBlogger’s takes on the subject, and various commenting from other sources, courtesy of BoraZ (one of the bloggers at SB).  Alas, it’s not in chronological order; every search I’ve done on various search sites hasn’t produced one, so…start at anything dated July 7 and work your way forward.

…about Mom.

Actually, I’ve had two dreams that I remember so far.

In my dreams, she’s been sucked into one of my weird and wacky adventures, but I am so glad to see her.  SO glad.  I wonder puzzledly how we got her out of the hospital…

…And then it strikes me:  OH MY GOD.  Everyone thinks she’s dead!  I told everyone she was dead!  What do I do now?!  How do I tell them?!

Sort of like one of those dreams where you realize you’re about to give a speech, but you’re naked and you haven’t prepared for it, or you’re about to take a final for a class only to realize that you not only don’t know anything about the class, but you don’t even remember where it’s being held!

Important events in my life—new home, new city, new husband, new child—these things typically show up in my dreams about six months to a year after the change.  The sooner it happens, the more important I know it is to my psyche. 

It’s been one month.

There are days when life goes on, when things are okay, and then there are days like this, when I weep and feel like there’s a black hole in the middle of my body that is just sucking everything down.  I wake up and say to myself, “Aw, ma!”; I go to sleep and I think about her; I try to gear myself up to write thank-you notes to everyone on my blog and her blog and emails people have sent me and I can’t, because doing that just brings it all back.  There’s a contract for probate sitting on my desk and I can’t bring myself to fill it out and send it.  There’s an annuity claim and all I can do is read it and say, “I don’t want the damned annuity!  I want my MOM!”

There are bills to pay and subscriptions and utilities to cancel or change into my name and accounting to be done.

I am in a fog.  I say to myself, “Pull yo’self together, child!” like my mom would do, and it doesn’t help, because I can’t.  She was the one who was my anchor back to the shore at times like this.

Aw, damn.  It just hurts so much.  I’ve never hurt like this in my life; it’s like a dramatic broken heart except that even when that happened to me in the past I knew I could always…go to my mom for help.  And now I can’t.