To Undress

It’s much easier to undress one’s body than one’s mind. Think about it: how many thoughts pass through the human mind in a day? What should I wear? Did I take my pill? What sounds good for lunch? Was that cute guy flirting with me at the post office? How should I handle this tantrum over spilled chocolate milk? Is he really dating a 19/20 year old? Should I go back to school? Does this dress make me look fat? Organic milk, soy milk or conventional? Decaf or caffeinated latte? Brown or Black? Long or short? Why did she have to get cancer? Why doesn’t he call or text? Will I be alone in love forever? Why do I care so much? What are the measurements for the furnace filter again?
Taking off my jeans and black turtle neck sweater, unzipping my boots, peeling off my tall striped socks are simple actions and don’t require much thought. It’s like I’m on auto-pilot—the same way I was after my mother died and I had to decide what kind of container to cremate her in, or what she should wear at the family viewing, which pictures to include in the slide show. Some things we do with a numb mind, others we do because our mind won’t settle down.
I’m going to make it my goal to try to undress my mind from time to time. I think it will be good for me. To sit in utter, mindful silence. To give my brain a break from the traffic noise of life. Silence. It craves it. Silence. Not even the chiming of my neighbor’s old clock, or the echoes of the traffic outside my apartment, the ice hitting my window, sounding like tiny tap dancing ants, will stir it.
Silence.
Peace.
Self-love.

Why I'm Here

I'm a 28--almost 29 in February--single mother of a sweet 4 year old daughter with unruly red curly hair. My mother died from cancer last May and I'm learning how to live my life without her; although I'm constantly reminded of her when I look at my pale and blue, veiny hands. They look like hers. The same hands that prepared food for us, brushed our tangled hair, checked our soft foreheads for fever, and held our hands when we sat on the thin, papered doctor's beds to get shots. I miss her every day. One of my favorite writer's was right when she described grieving the loss of a loved one. Abigail Thomas in her book called, Thinking of Memoir, wrote this about dealing with the death of her husband, "Sadness, yes, I was prepared for that, but not the kind of grief that clobbers you, the kind that ambushes you when you're walking down the tea-and-coffee aisle at the market." This is what grief does to a person. It comes and goes like the Iowa snow in January. It hit me the other day when I opened my coat closet on a chilly fall evening and found my mauve stocking hat. My mother gave me that stocking hat last winter--her last winter--and I stood in my new apartment, smelling my hat and was ambushed by such a strong feeling of loss, and melancholy that my knees gave out and I fell to the floor. I've never cried that hard before. The tears came from deep inside and my chest hurt. I walked into my bedroom and set the smooth black box with the photo of us girls on top, on the floor. My mother's cremains are in this box. I held the box and lay on the floor, my head warm and achy from the tears. When I settled down, which came as quickly and unexpectedly as the hysteria, I placed the box back on the shelf under my nightstand. The cremains sounded like tiny pebbles sliding around the bottom of the box. That's what I'm left with of my mother's physical being--bone fragments, gritty and resting in a sealed box that my sister bought at Hobby Lobby. Anger. It's a familiar friend of mine these days! It comes and goes just like the sadness and hysteria. This is why I started a blog. Not because I want to post drunken photos of my friends, or proudly post the skinned knees and cute happenings of my four year old. I’m here in this moment to work through the emotions of loss, although I will write of other topics as well. I hope for this to be therapeutic, as cliché as that sounds and perhaps help others that have watched a love one die from a terminal illness. Life is complicated and sad at times. As Joan Didion writes in her memoir of loss, entitled The Year of Magical Thinking,
Life changes fast.
Life changes in the instant.
You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
The question of self-pity(3).


Truly,
MK