so far so mediocre

So how have I been since mom died? I'm going through the motions. Making up daily/sometimes hourly reasons to keep busy, to keep moving. At first it was the after death details- what to do with her remains, planning out her potluck farewell, dealing with her possessions, her bills, her friends. Most of that is all past me now so I come up with new reasons, new plans to keep motivated. Moved into a new place after two months of searching now I need to unpack, buy household items, nest. I'm running out of boxes to unpack which worries me. I also quit the soul-sucking job so that also takes away from my schedule considerably. Maybe I could take up jogging...But surely that would be a sign of losing myself entirely. Bruce Campbell (in his infinite chin-y wisdom) once told me to make stuff and never stop. Once you stop creating, once you lose momentum, you fail... Of course I'm paraphrasing here; like I'm going to remember what ANYONE said to me in the 90s? So then the next step is creation...

not waiting anymore

On the eleventh of May, 2012, around a month and a half after she was diagnosed with Pancreatic Cancer, Mary Peters (otherwise known as my momma) died. I'll probably go into detail after I pick up a few more pieces.

yup, you guessed it

-would you believe we're still waiting for the now group of doctors to, at the very least, find out whether or not the cancer is treatable? And mom is wasting away, unable to eat, getting more alarmingly yellow day by day.
I'm not even angry that she has cancer. I'm angry that I live in a world where it's necessary to be a squeaky wheel just to get attention that every person alive should be able to take for granted.
She fell down the other day as she was getting out of the shower.
She's not even strong enough to climb stairs without taking a break ON EVERY STEP.
She wrote a grocery list for me and her normally perfect writing was illegible when it wasn't scratched out, scribbled. Shaky. Her attempt at drawing a simple smiley face at the end was heartbreaking. It took her two tries.
You've got to realize that this is a woman who raised three children on her own at a time when that was frowned upon. She was a volunteer fire fighter while she was pregnant. She drove taxi in the 60s. In Seattle. At night. She worked at the post office for more than 30 years and didn't shoot anyone. She's fucking Superwoman for god's sake.
This doesn't happen to Superwoman.

...Wating...

Waiting.
Waiting waiting waiting waiting. And then some more. Also, there's waiting, in case I failed to mention it. Waiting.
Look, I don't care who else you're treating/helping/saving/bandaging/medicating/killing with kindness/preforming surgery on/putting an i.v. in/giving staff infections to/breathing horrid breath on/sedating/draining of precious fluids/or euthanizing. She has limited time left on this planet and it's fucking killing me that she's spending it waiting for you to let her know lab results! FUCKING GET ON THE FUCKING JOB, PEOPLE!!!

So, well, this sucks.

For what it's worth I never really thought much about cancer outside of how it must be sucky and thank god I don't have it. Yet.
Shallow? Self centered? Yes, I agree. And this after watching my grandmother die of it when I was much shorter. It didn't enter into my thoughts, but hovered on the edge as a nasty possibility.
But that's normal, right? Living in a family with cancer in its history is like that. You don't go around with a giant black cloud over your head, waiting for the inevitable lump to form, do you? You go on you live you breathe you move, love, feel and take life as it comes.

And then you go to the doctor with your mom one day and he tells you that she has a 95 percent chance of having only 6 more months to live. And your initial response still isn't as dramatic as, say, anyone else. Ever, if the doc is to be believed.

It has me rethinking my mental state in general.

I'm shaken, but not thrown. It helps that she and I believe that we'll see each other in the next life. That this is change, transition. There's a certain amount of melancholy but we're keeping it in check.
It's certainly possible that I'm dealing with this through a haze of shock but I don't think so. I'm either very well adjusted or emotionally malformed.
Because I guess it's not normal to joke about burying your dead mother in the back yard and bringing her out for special occasions right after you find out her shelf life is about to run out. It's not normal to refer to the last few months of your mothers earthly existence as shelf life. It's certainly not something you want to pass around online like an emo trading card.

As we go through the stages of this I'll be laying it out here. It's past time I use this blog-thingie as a sounding board. Just understand that I'm doing this for my own edification, to help dissect my thoughts and find justification, purpose, sense in the senseless.

more on that, actually...

-Now that you mention it (ok, I mentioned it, whatever) a blog seems to be exactly how it sounds when you say it out loud. It's a blurb in an otherwise lengthy & bustling life. It's a side note, an "oh by the way", a burp, a hick up, a sneaky way of passing literary gas. It's silent but potentially deadly boring. (case in point. Ahem.)

No, really. Say it now out loud to see what I mean.

Weird how different it sounds when you think it, huh? Almost like your brain recognizes ir for the seriously throwy-upy word it is so it kinda breezes over it. Glosses over the crudeness of it. Like shellacking a rabbit pellet.

...in other news, I'm writing again...

where were we?

You know, the more I look around at other blogs the more I realize I don't have the time or patience for it. I see all these people with something to say. Some of it actually sounds most profound. But as I check out these blogs, profound or not, my inherent feeling of irrelevance deepens- who cares what the hell I have to say, think, or feel? Aren't there more important issues at stake here? I should go look into that...