Almost a year

It is coming up on the anniversary of my mother's death. Is there such a thing? An anniversary for a death? I'm not sure that is truly something to say, but next week it will be a year since my mother died. A year since my brother and my aunt and I sat in hospice for five days saying good-bye, sharing, bonding, and waiting. The year has flown by and each week has brought something new or nothing at all in regards to my feelings about all of it; life, death, relationships.

My brother and his family are arriving today for a small blip of a vacation to celebrate a cancer free SIL, a niece turning sixteen, and a chance for my brother and I to say, hey, remember last year at this time? Sort of odd how that turned out to be the same week. I was suppose to spend the whole week with them, but a college preview got in the way and so we won't have the whole week, but we will have some days and hey, just being together is nice. I was excited about the chance to spend time with my brother. I've written before about wishing our relationship was more and since last year it has been, and when he asked me to join his family this week well it was a wonderful feeling. Until it wasn't. Because I worried about the whole anniversary thing. Because his feelings are different from my feelings and what if my feelings and my truth hurt him? What if in reliving or telling stories or sharing feelings I told the truth? And what if that truth put a wedge between us or broke that newly, fragile bond?

Then the college visit to North Carolina cropped up and our week of togetherness went down to a couple of days and I figured for a couple of days I could wing it. I would be the older sister ready for his outpouring of feelings that would surely come since he has not been back in a year. I wouldn't have to talk about the dreams that I continuously have where mother is alive, still handicapped, still mean to me, and how in the dream I have so much dread that it is all going to start up again and go back to those days of what I considered pure torture. I wouldn't have to show him her journals where she wrote from her heart, but broke mine. I wouldn't have to admit to him that there were days, even the last day when she went into hospice, where I stepped outside of my body and left my shell to coldly stare at her. What would be the point in sharing that with someone who felt a huge loss instead of relief?

Then April came and with it came a shower of emotions that have made me think that the old Connie, the mother I dearly loved once upon a time, will be able to be in my life, to be remembered without scorn, sadness, and anger. There have been a few days where I have felt that in the last year; times where I picked up the phone to share something with her, times I dialed the phone to listen to her voice on the answering machine. But mostly I was negative and hating myself for feeling that way, and hating everyone else for judging me; because I knew they were.

But now as the year approaches I have  more of a sense of calmness. I have suddenly heard my mother laugh the way she use to laugh when she was really happy and her face was really smiling with joy. I have thought about her holding my daughters when they were born, sitting on my couch just holding them in her arms while they slept and she read the paper or talked or just let me be free to do other things knowing my babies were cared for and loved. I have been open to hearing others happy memories of her and been open to sharing some of my own. While watching a television program the other night the content made me realize something about her and the tears just flowed, and I felt relief.

This week might be a hard one. It might not. I will let it play out how it may. I will probably talk and I will probably keep quiet. My mother and I were not perfect and our relationship certainly wasn't, but neither is life. And I'm still here and living it. I have to remember that.