That weird girl at the gym

I was in the gym yesterday, jogging on the treadmill and wondering when my body was going to relax so I could stop feeling like The Thing, who shakes the ground with every running stride. I was listening to my favorite music on my headphones, probably way too loud for my health, when I started crying. Right there in the aerobic room. Because it occurred to me that I could have played music for my mom as she lay dying in the early morning hours. I read that the last sense to leave is hearing. She loved music. I could have made her last hours a little easier. These are the kinds of thoughts that ambush me when I'm having an otherwise sensible day. I didn't stop running, because the sight of a woman in the gym, standing there on the treadmill crying, would be just way too weird. So I kept running and thinking. Few of us know anything about how to help someone who's dying. We just struggle to do the best we can. If we've called in Hospice, their volunteers seem to us to be pillars of knowledge. I wish I'd volunteered with Hospice while my mom was healthy, because I would have been a much better caregiver in later years if I had. But it never occurred to me to do that. Why would I want to be around dying people? Bad excuse: we are all people who are going to die. And Hospice trains its volunteers. I guess the point is that like Israeli citizens and the army, everyone should do a stint as a Hospice volunteer. Because then we'd be a better-armed nation of citizens.

Baking as therapy

Today is the hunky scientist's birthday. I have robbed the pram; he is eight years younger than I am. So I had no pity the other morning when he looked in the bathroom mirror and commented that he was starting to show his age. I love birthdays. He got his main birthday present a month or so ago (a watch). But I couldn't resist getting some comedy club tickets for tonight. Also, it's understood that I'll bake him whatever kind of birthday cake he wants. To say my boyfriend loves cake would be to call Niagara Falls a brook. My boyfriend adores cake with a passion that is endearing. When he eats cake, icing gets on his face. So I was looking forward to baking something multilayered with filling and a glaze or fluffy icing. But this year, he pointed out a recipe for cherry ricotta strudel in Bon Appetit and said "You can me me that" with hopeful, shiny eyes. Cakes I can do. Strudel I never have. Turns out strudel is a complex project. I started out last night with the dough--it's made with oil rather than butter and has to be refrigerated at least a day. And two pounds of large-curd ricotta cheese had to be drained overnight too, then squeezed out in a kitchen towel this morning.

After breakfast (pancakes with peanut butter and maple syrup for THS; I topped mine with fruit) I pitted 3 pounds of cherries and then set them soaking in a syrup of sugar, lemon juice and cointreau. Then I mixed the ricotta with butter and sugar, eggs and grated citrus peel. After that the recipe called for browning bread crumbs in a skillet with butter and mixing those with a bit more sugar. Finally, it was time to put the whole thing together. Strudel dough is made from oil so you can roll it very thin and stretch the heck out of it. A dough made from only 1.5 cups of flower rolls out to the size of a large kitchen towel! I stretched it until it was very thin, then brushed it with butter, topped that with the bread crumbs, made a log out of the ricotta filling along one side, then put the drained cherries on top of that. When I rolled it up, it looked like a huge banana slug. Now it's in the oven baking and the house smells like a birthday. As I type, I'm watching kids and dogs play in the park across the street. My heart is light.

Talk, write, exercise

Grief can make a person's mind do very strange things. For me, the last few days have been an exercise in keeping it together. I forget nearly everything if I don't write it down. I've resorted to entering calendar items in my phone on the spot if I tell someone I'll meet them or promise anyone anything. If I don't calendar it right away, I forget it. I send myself emails reminding myself to look at my calendar, to be sure I've met deliverables on certain projects at work, water the plants, call my brother, make my boyfriend a dessert for his birthday. I adore celebrating birthdays and ordinarily I'd never forget something like that. But I'm terrified I will. I feel as though I have brain damage. I'm still only getting 3 to 4 hours of sleep a night. I'm trying not to use Ambien and will ask my doctor about a non-addictive sleep aid. Meanwhile I've decided to follow the advice of a friend and start exercising daily in an effort to exhaust myself naturally. I had a visit with my company's very competent EAP guy today and after he listened a while he reminded me that it's early days in my grief process and that it might be helpful to cultivate some patience. "It's only been a month," he said. I looked at him for a minute, counting back and confirming. 32 days. It's really only been a month. I can't sleep, but I keep waiting to wake up. "It feels like it's been forever," I replied. He made me an appointment for short-term counseling with a psych and referred me to a Hospice grief support group. Then he gave me a prescription: "Talk, talk, talk. Write, write, write. And exercise."

Adrift in the night

When I was a very young child, my father spun vinyl and called the tunes at a radio station in Santa Barbara. Every day I'd walk home from first grade, come into the living room, and sit facing our big old stereo console. At 3 p.m. sharp, Dad would play me a Simon & Garfunkel song. He liked to play me "Cloudy" or "April Come She Will." The radio station that almost always plays in my mind has been turning that one lately:

April come she will
when streams are ripe and swelled with rain
May she will stay
resting in my arms again
June she'll change her tune
in restless walks she'll prowl the night
July she will fly
and give no warning to her flight...

My mind prowls the nights these days. It won't shut off and sleep rarely comes without medicinal aid. The two people whose DNA combined to make mine are gone and I am left with piles of memories and knee-jerk urges to lift the phone and call them. Small wonder part of me wishes I were where they are, if just for an hour or so, so we could talk. So I could see for myself them there together, happy, to confirm my imagination. But there will be no flying for me. I am at home here among the living, with my friends and my love and whatever my future will bring, as at home here as they are, there where they are.

Significant Sunday

It's my 45th Mother's Day, my first without a mother. The hunky scientist is off on his weekly mountain bike ride and I would go to church, but everyone will be there with their mothers. Every member who has a mom within driving distance brings them to our church on Mother's Day, whether or not they are only C&E (Christmas and Easter) attendees otherwise. After the liturgy, instead of the usual coffee hour, there's a big Mother's Day luncheon. I'm not feeling sorry for myself (OK, yes I am); I'm just more protective of my feelings than to subject myself to a whole churchload of people celebrating their living moms.

Today, we're having a sports-nut pal over to eat pizza and watch the Warriors trounce Utah (with any luck). I've been dealing with a little problem I hope all this activity will sweep away for a while: no matter what I am doing or thinking, for long periods there is an image in my mind of my mother, sick in bed, struggling for breath, or of her face just after she'd died. I struggle to counteract this image with one of her alive, healthy, and happy, but that just ends up another layer of thought over the one that won't go away. Today is a day to celebrate our mothers. I don't want to think of her sick or dead. Not at all. I want to think of her on all the Mothers Days I can remember--enduring the awful burnt or underdone (sometimes both) pancakes and scorched coffee we made for her when we were in grade school, proudly displaying all the flowers we picked for her or later bought, displaying our cards on the mantel over the dining room fireplace. I have 44 Mothers Days to remember with joy and I'm determined to do that. So happy Mother's Day to my mom. Happy Mother's Day to us all.

Blinders off

I've had a strange urge these last few days to undergo "a rigid search," as character Alex put it in the book and movie "Everything is Illuminated." Grief has a way of putting soft and sentimental shades over my eyes, preventing me from seeing things as I did in the past. I have a strong sense of duty to examine my memories of my mother and me, and remember everything--not just the good things, but every aspect of my relationship with her--so I can retain a whole and true image of her and her impact on my life. And so, slowly, I've begun turning pebbles over and scrutinizing what lies beneath them. I did this literally as a child, when all the world was a museum. After a rain, I'd go out and roll logs back and tip up wide stones. Underneath I'd find pearly clusters of amphibian eggs, gorgeous purple and yellow salamanders, whip-thin newts frozen for seconds before flight to other, as-yet-unturned sanctuaries. Other times I'd discover spiders' nests, dry and safe from the wet world around their stony havens, and the sight of those twitch-legged creatures would make the soles of my feet feel jumpy. I'd put the rocks or logs gently but swiftly back down and continue on my search for comelier wildlife. Now, I think it's time to look at the spiders as well as the salamanders, to see what I can learn from both their worlds.

Grief 2.0

Because I don't like writing things twice, here's an excerpt of an email I sent my mother's sister, who'd written to ask how I was doing:

"I'm OK. Pretty down, actually, and so (I've noticed) is Frank. We sprinkled Mom's and Dad's ashes out in the channel this morning from a catameran called Double Dolphin. I sang part of the Greek Orthodox memorial prayer, and John said a really moving poem he wrote. Before we left, Frank and I picked flower petals from the garden, and we all threw handfuls of them onto the swell as we let the ashes go. It made a really beautiful sight on the water--a yellow and pink and purple and blue floating trail."

I spent the rest of the day in a horrible funk. But I worked for a while, and then I went and got my aunt from her hotel and we went down to a beachside restaurant and drank wine and watched the tide come in and the sun go down and weary families come in from the sand. My aunt said I haven't begun grieving. She has her opinions. I didn't bother to correct her; I didn't have the energy. I know I did so much crying while my mom was declining that I have few tears left now. I suspect most people who meet me on the street can't discern that anything is wrong.

But while I'm not visibly grieving, I'm finding I'm easily stressed, I'm sensitive to noise or too much stimulus of any kind. I feel as though the bones of my spirit have been cored free of marrow and I'm waiting for an infusion of new emotions. In the meantime, I may go through my days looking and acting as though nothing is wrong, or as though I'm mildly stressed or fatigued, or, at the worst, short-tempered. I may engage in deep-thought discussion, I may go to museums and admire views and laugh at jokes and have dinner with friends. But inside I'm carrying a deep hollowness, and the scary thing is that I don't know when it will fill back in. Maybe the filling-in is accomplished day by day, with each new experience. Or perhaps one day I'll wake up and the empty space will be gone. Part of me is afraid to show this part of me; that if I walk through life visibly wounded I'll somehow end up left all alone. But I have a hunch that part of healing is letting my loved ones in, and so I take up my courage and write.

This morning as the sun rose I took the plastic box that held the bag of my mother's ashes, as well as the empty bag, out to the garden. Fine, light dust clung to the insides of these things, and so I couldn't just discard them. I set them down on the brick pathway my mom and brother once worked hard to set in, turned on the pale-green hose and rinsed each article three times in the cool stream, emptying the water and dust into the big citrus tree pots and over the bright orange nasturtiums and pale pink alstromeria. Only then could I consider the box and the bags as just those things, things that had served their purpose and could be thrown away.

Away with the current and the tide

Tomorrow at 10, we'll depart the Santa Barbara marina on a boat called Condor and chug 20 minutes out into the channel. There we will scatter my mother's ashes and let the wind and current take them. I picked up the ashes today. They are in a plastic box that could be mistaken for a container for better-quality shoes. They are very heavy. Frank asked that we collect flower petals from each part of our front and back yard, and scatter them with the ashes. He said that would be "most appropriate." So I'll wake him up tomorrow around 8, and we'll go out before the dew has dried and fill some bags with fragrant rose and lavender. My Aunt Rose, my dad's sister and a good friend of my mother's, asked if we could say a prayer. She's Greek Orthodox, so I know she means the memorial prayer that the priest sings at a person's funeral and at certain anniversaries of their death. It's the only prayer she'd know and it's touching that she's want it said, even though my mother was not Orthodox. I'm not a priest, but I know how to sing the haunting and beautiful memorial. It begins: Evlogitos, ei Kyrie, didaxon me ta dikaiomata sou. I'll say an abbreviated version, because I am the only Greek Orthodox in my immediate family, and my brothers and sisters would probably get impatient with the full-length version.

Even though I'm fairly recently baptized in the Orthodox faith (5 years ago or so now), I find it very difficult that I will not be able to have a 40-day memorial for my mother in the church. I'll have to sing it myself, somewhere privately, in front of a candle to remember her by. Yet even as I write these words, I find them strange. I was non-religious for most of my life (and my mom was for all of her life), and now here I am troubled that I cannot ask my priest to sing my mother's memorial.

Life is a strange and beautiful thing.