I've been off-kilter recently.
I keep re-realizing that Mom is dead and getting nasty little adrenaline spikes. It's like various parts of my being have somehow slept through the whole thing and are now queuing up to hear the bad news one at a time.
"Hey, hypothalamus: Mom's dead. Yeah. Here's a tissue. Send my kidneys in on your way out, would you?"
I look forward to the day my entire body has been updated and fully accepts the truth about My Dead Mom. No more random jolts of sudden realization followed by micro-mourning every time I think about a childhood memory and have to integrate it into this new universe where the context involves Mom being dead.
This process has come to an interesting head. Somewhere in my brain a connection has been made between the sound of a ringing phone, and Bad News. Whenever it rings, I get another goddamn jolt.
It's Mom! I forgot to call her all week again! Or even worse, Oh shit! Mom's died and that's the nurse calling to give me the news.
And then I remember that I've already gone through all of this, and I feel a little bit dumb because Dead Mom is just so old meme and for a smart person I sure don't seem to be absorbing the information fast enough. You'd think it would go more smoothly, as important as it is. You'd think I could just hold a press conference with every fiber of my body and break it to them all at once, but no.
Every fucking time the goddamn phone rings, I have to go through the same little routine. It does no good telling my ears to stop sending that sound straight to the Mom center of my brain.
It does no good arguing with myself that it's not the sound of my Mom kicking the bucket, it's the fucking gym calling yet again to ask if I want to be entered in a drawing.
Seriously, it's a little nerve-wracking. For a split second, every time the phone rings, she's alive. But only long enough for me to kill her again.
And I thought I hated phones before.
February 18, 2007
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
Having gone through this myself 10 years ago, and watching unfold with another friend just recently too: its a common occurance to have a delayed reaction, and is perfectly natural. When my mom died, everything was hectic and almost surreal. There was lots to take care of and while I consciously knew she was gone, the reality didn't hit me until later. I think because the whole "death" thing is unusual, the mind handles it differently. It wasn't until later that I would see something and think for a moment that "Mom would like to hear about this, I should tell her about it" and then got hit with her death all over again. Its the small things that, for me, hurt the worst. The little reminders of just how much she was a part of my life in so many ways I had never thought of.
ReplyDeleteFor me, the pain never goes away, even 10 years later. I just adjusted to it, like an a constant ache: eventually you tune it out and it becomes part of the background. My life adjusted around it, and although there are still times when I miss her so much it hurts, those times are fewer than they were.
You never do really "recover" from something like this. But you do go on living. And you realize that more than anything else, that's what they want for you. And things do get better.
-Aspasia
I've been told that you should hold off any major decisions in the first year and possibly the second. It's taken me a year to be happy again and even then I get the occasional dream where she's alive and I wake up gasping like a fish.
ReplyDeleteI'm not trying to make you feel worse, even if I am succeeding. I'm just saying that feeling like crap goes with the turf but it will fade. You just have to try and protect yourself from the pain a little while it heals. You're entitled to feeling this way for a long time or whenever you damn well want to. Maybe someone else can man the phones just for a little while.
Sorry for offering advice that you might not need. Best wishes and Good Luck.
N) Might it be possible to change the telephone's ringing sound enough for it to be recognisably different, and so not (directly) trigger the old associations?
ReplyDeleteAlso, my sympathy, though it can't accomplish anything.
Hun, My daddy passed away four years ago this past January, and I still can't smell Old Spice or head a train horn (or even some Elvis songs) without having a mini breakdown.
ReplyDelete(and btw, I'm caffeinatedjoy from lj)
Nertz. That's "hear and train horn", not "head a train horn"
ReplyDelete