I came here to do an update post on what has been going on in my life over the last year… only to realize that it had been a lot longer since I had last posted. Which means I have a lot more to update y’all on.
We’ll start at the beginning of the year:
Instead of doing resolutions, which I inevitably fail at within a month or two (as most of us do), I started using January as a planning month, a prep month, for the new year. This has been going on for a few years now, and has worked out relatively well, though it does take a little bit of getting used to. With January being all about planning, each month after has it’s own goal – eleven things that I find important to where I am at, eleven things that will help me to curate my life to what I want it to be.
This year was no different. Several of my goals for the year had to do with my faith and I especially looked forward to those.
But 2023 had different plans for me.
In January, my mother and I both came down with the flu. (The flu. Not COVID. We both tested several times and the results were always negative.) This lasted a little over a month, and was awful.
I went back to work in mid-February, and my mom, having contracted the flu after I did, was feeling better, but was not quite 100%. She struggled with being hungry and having the energy to do anything, but that’s how we all feel when we’re sick, right?
Unfortunately, a few weeks later (February 27th), she passed away.
She was not just my mom. She was my best friend, my roommate, my business partner (in MeghanH Editing), and my Disney-trip pal. And she is greatly missed.
Her passing was completely unexpected. In fact, I spoke to her earlier that day while I was at work. She called me to tell me that the Walmart app wasn’t working, thinking (for some reason) that I would be mad at her because of it. She knew I had to go to the store after work and was trying to make life easier on me, as going there is out of my way. I told her to quit being silly and that I would call her after I left to see if there was anything else we needed. When I left work, I tried calling her two or three times, but she didn’t answer. (Honestly, this was typical of my mother, but thinking back about it now, I remember having an uneasy feeling that I couldn’t pinpoint at the time.) I ended up not stopping, instead heading straight home. When I walked in the garage (we typically went in and out that way), I announced I was home and chuckled when I asked her why she wasn’t answering the phone. She didn’t respond (also typical of my mother), and I talked to her as I was walking through the house looking for her – telling her that I didn’t stop at the store on the way home, even saying I was considering calling in the next day because I just wanted to spend the whole day doing nothing with her. When I got to the other side of the house, where her room is located, I kind of stopped before proceeding around the corner and through the door. I knew immediately when I saw her that she wasn’t there anymore, even though I could see her body lying on the bed. But it didn’t quite hit home in my brain because I said her name a few times, shook her shoulder (she was cold), even told her that it wasn’t funny (my mom had a wicked morbid sense of humor). I did all the things that you are supposed to do when you find your loved one deceased, though I can barely remember much of it all. Thankfully, the first responders sort of took care of everything after that, including keeping me sane for the several hours that they were here, letting me talk about her, talking to me about their dogs, even trying to get me to adopt the station cat that none of them wanted. When it was finally time for the funeral home to take her body, I asked Bill, one of the firemen, if I had to be there for that. He wasn’t sure where I planned to go and seemed a bit confused until I told him that if I watched them try to take her, there was a good chance I would not let it happen. He walked me outside and we stood in my side yard talking about the stars in the sky and how big the moon seemed that night. Before I knew it, all of them were standing around me, and talking to me, kept moving so that my back would be to the road when she drove past. And there we stood for another twenty minutes before I was finally able to walk back inside my house and let them all go. The silence was deafening. I just sat in there and cried.
Life changes in ways you never expect them to. And that was the first day of my unexpected life change.
The next day I had to call my sister (I am the oldest of two, and my mom and I had been estranged from her for over a year) and my aunt (my mother was the oldest of seven, but only one was in contact with her at the time of her passing, a newly rekindled relationship that both were excited for), one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. My sister decided she was coming out for a few days, my aunt wanted to know when the funeral would take place so she could be there.
I did not have a funeral for my mother. And here is why. My mom would have hated it. She used to joke about how funerals were for people who should have treated the deceased better in their lifetime to come and “mourn” and she wanted nothing to do with that. And every time she would say it, I’d remember this guy at my father’s funeral crying and saying how much he loved my dad, how they were best friends. When he walked away, my mom very nonchalantly said to me and my sister: “They hadn’t seen each other in seven years and your father hated him.” Hate is a very strong word, and one my father would not have used, but I understood what she was trying to say.
Instead I had a ceremony at her graveside. We’ll talk about that in a second.
My mother was a very faithful Catholic and always seemed very proud that this was something she passed on to her oldest daughter. Even though she was now gone, and all I wanted to do was stay in my house and never see anyone in the real world again, I knew that me not going to things I planned to do at church would anger her, so a few days later I went to a talk that Father was doing on forgiveness, something I had been planning to go to since I heard about it. It was the first time that I told anyone from church (other than a different priest) that she had died. I just sort of blurted it out when she asked me how I was doing, not sure how it was I was even supposed to tell people this. Within a few minutes, she had told other people I knew there (we had all been part of a year long Lay Ecclesial Ministry program), taking the horrible pressure off of me to say it.
I was convinced and always had been that when mom died, they would have to commit me because I would not be able to handle it (and those first few weeks, I didn’t handle it well at all). I was most sure of the fact that I would be all alone. I found out that night that I was not. People I had liked and enjoyed speaking to, people I thought were just classmates, proved to be way more than that, way more than even friends. They proved to be family.
To celebrate my mother’s life in a way I found most fitting, a friend of mine (a co-worker that my mother loved) and I went to a plant show (my mother and I both gardened quite a bit together) and a Strawberry Festival together. (The plan had been for my mother to join us, and I feel like she really was there with us.)
My sister came out that same day, and while I was at mass the next day, where my mother was being remembered (my sister is a lapsed Catholic with no interest in setting foot in a church even for her mother), my sister went to my dad’s grave to see him privately.
The next day we went to the funeral home where just the two of us were there for her burial. Bill (yes another Bill), the man from the funeral home who helped me set everything up, and the guy who drove the hearse were the only ones there with us. As I wanted it. As I think my mom would have wanted it. My sister and I have always had a very interesting relationship – at times close, at times the worst of enemies – and having not seen each other in person in over ten years, and being together after my mother died, the awkward between us was sometimes so thick it was suffocating. Neither one of us are or were willing to be emotional in front of each other and have the same wicked morbid sense of humor that my mother had, something I had warned Bill about, so to keep ourselves from showing emotion, we both asked questions about the apparatus that was lowering my mother’s coffin into the hole, curious if it had ever broken. (I had seen an episode of Murder, She Wrote where the coffin had fallen over in the middle of a scuffle, and the body fell out, but it wasn’t the body of the person who was supposed to be in there.) When my sister asked the hearse driver what the weirdest thing was he’d seen at a funeral, half listening I swear I heard him say something about a sword fight (and now I expect someone to have a sword fight with my sister when my time comes). We decided after that we would drive to Orlando and walk around Disney Springs, just me and her together.
The next day was the ceremony at her graveside. Nothing really completely planned out, as there hadn’t been much time for that. Just someone from the church coming to say a few words. My aunt and her boyfriend came from Tampa to be there. A couple of those friends I mentioned above came, two unable to because one was comforting a dying fur-baby at the time, the other comforting her, both there in spirit by my side. My favorite Deacon (and now my Superman) and his wife also attended. That day I was very angry about the situations graveside, but looking back later, I knew it was all my mom’s doing. You see, the “someone from the church” never arrived. And it wasn’t until that Deacon I spoke of called around to find out when the person would be arriving that we found out the person would not be arriving because no one had told him to come. (Apparently there had been some miscommunication in the office, miscommunication I hope never happens to anyone else ever.) The one day that Deacon forgets his book is the one day he has to sort of ad-lib a graveside service (with the help of the internet and the Holy Spirit). And to be honest, I think THAT is also the way my mother would have wanted it. Deacon’s wife said a few words, I just… couldn’t, and thankfully my sister chose not to speak aloud the poem she brought along with her (my mother would have hated that haha). Everyone went back to their life (some had taken time off from work that day to come out and be there with me) and my family (me, sister, aunt + her boyfriend) went to Cracker Barrel, one of my mother’s favorite restaurants, for lunch before my sister and I went off to do a bit of site-seeing and retail therapy. (Interestingly enough, when I got home, by myself, the first thing I did was go out and do some gardening. I felt so very close to mom that day.)
My sister headed home the next day. I had hoped we would be able to spend some more time together, and maybe have a relationship now, but alas, that never did happen.
A month TO THE DAY of my mom’s death, my job (of over a year and a half) fired me. The first time I have ever been fired from a job. The reasons given were bogus: My customer service (I had actually just had three compliments that day alone, and was mentioned weekly in customer surveys) and my behavior (I don’t even have bad behavior outside of work). While my manager escorted me from the building, me unable to say goodbye to the team member I had been working with all day or the three customers I had been helping before being called back to the office to be fired over speaker phone, she said to me, “You’ve just been… different… since your mother died.” That comment hung in the air as I stood there looking at her, unsure that I had actually heard the words that came out of her mouth, before she slightly shrugged and I turned to go.
To say it’s been an interesting year is an understatement.
The plan had been to celebrate our birthdays once again at Disney (us being two days apart), and that good friend who went to the Strawberry Festival with me has a husband who works for Disney, her intended gift to us being to take us the park of our choosing. My mother and I both always loved Epcot. So, for my birthday, that is where we went. Epcot. And we made sure to go on Frozen Ever After, one of my mother’s favorite rides, and Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure because she would have loved that. Two days before, for her birthday, a couple of the ladies (this friend, one of the friend’s from the graveside, and the two who missed it) went to a gorgeous tea house in Lake Alfred, a place that I had heard about and wanted to take mom, but unfortunately never had the chance to. She was remembered both days as we enjoyed things she would have loved, and knowing I had such good friends there with me made it even better.
I loved my mother. It was me and her (and my cat) against the world. We did everything together. There were so many things that I didn’t do because I didn’t want to take time away from me and her. And she, for the most part, encouraged that, because she loved spending time with me as much as I loved spending time with her.
Since her death, I have been overloaded and overwhelmed with emotions. Those “stages” of grief have come all at once, and are sometimes debilitating. But at the same time, I feel like I have finally been let out of a cage that I was part of putting myself in. I finally feel like I can fly.
My relationship with those ladies I mentioned above has continued, I have made more friends on top of that, and have started dating – DATING! – something I haven’t done in over ten years. I have joined organizations at church and found a purpose again, something I fear I had lost when my mother died. I have a life that I never expected to have, and though I miss her more than words can describe, I have found a happiness I never thought I could have. I have had a renewal to my faith, found a love for myself I never had, and can look in the mirror and really like what I see, despite my flaws.
So… yeah… in some ways 2023 has sucked. And in some ways, 2023 has made me look forward to what 2024 has to offer. And that makes me happy.
Beautiful Screamer 