Notes on My Life

I have found it difficult to write lately. It seems that I have lost the habit. I feel like I have nothing to say, nothing that I want to say. I have been trying to face everything sober, and am having to learn that that is not easy. Alcohol for me is not the problem now, it is cannabis. I can’t use it anymore, at least not at this time. My addictive tendencies are too strong, combined with the will to escape, these two forces together are too much. There is no ‘taking the edge off’, there is just complete annihilation. There is no stopping me once I have started, and the emotional toll it takes on me after is just not worth it. The most important thing I can do now is stay sober, in the sadness and grief that surrounds me like an unwanted fog. Even cigarettes, they are a means of escape. I am rewatching Stranger Things, and watching Hopper reminds me of this. He always smokes, taking from a smashed soft pack of Camels. He smokes to escape, to push down the pain of loosing his young daughter, a pain that forever changed him. There’s the few moments of escape that the cigarette offers him, to forget, or perhaps to remember in some part of his subconscious, an act of punishing himself, disguised as an act of momentary relief. I know this game, this deep psychological game of emotional resistance, of passing the time with the pain. It was why I started smoking again in California, to pass the time, to take a break from the emotional horror story that I was living. Yet I knew I was punishing myself, hurting my breathing, my breath. The refined act of living is breathing, and I was consciously making it harder for myself by filling my lungs with toxic smoke. Punishing myself for years of unresolved questions, memories, and problems, disguised as a break from the present, a present that was bringing all of these things to light. Will this awareness now give me the strength to stop? I hope so.

This morning I woke up late, the kids watching the TV at 9:30, and still watching, on a Sunday morning. The cat, the one that’s left, sleeping in the sunny spot on the bed, waiting for me to get up. Made coffee, with chocolate, snuggled on the couch with my daughter. It was lovely, just being present, enjoying the kids doing what they want to do. But then I went out for a smoke, and one turned into two. Now I don’t want to sit with them, so they don’t smell me, and I’m writing in the study. Even cigarettes, not only alcohol or cannabis, separate me from them. What if I were able to just be fully present? How much would that change my relationships with them for the better? I owe it to myself, to them, to find out.

I must find my strength, trust myself, to take one step at a time forward into the future, the new world without my mother in it. I can create my life now, gone is the source of panic, of the world ending, as it has already ended. Left over is me, my wiring, my own deep issues and fears, and I can deal with that now. The catch is that the grief is here now, requiring a new rhythm, one of much rest, and patience for myself. I must sleep early, sleep when the children sleep, so that during the day I can work, and grieve, and do good things for myself too. For the hours I have are short, and the demands form before are still there, and the desires to create good things in the world through my work. But I have to be honest with myself and admit that the grief is overwhelming. It must be allowed to overwhelm me, but in ways that don’t hurt me, or others. I must learn to live with it, to carry it with me, to set it aside gently when I must tend to other things, other people, and to not forget that it is there, so that it doesn’t surprise me at opportune moments, like an angry, wounded dog. But for now I will have another cigarette, let the kids watch another show, knowing that both will delay the inevitable, but for now that is ok. My silly, adolescent grief is still here, but I will put it to rest, let it go, with the end of this winter break that we have all spent together, watching too much TV and sleeping in late.

The cat is dead. My fury love, my source of comfort, the yang to the yin of his brother or cousin Tigre, a royal black lion of a cat in winter, fluffy, with a mane framing his face and his Egyptian nose, died suddenly yesterday morning. He was cuddled up at my feet on the bed, and when I stuck one foot out of the covers at 6:30 or so he put his little paw on me to say hi, yes, I’m here. At 7am he went out when Tigre came in, and at 7:15, when Cyrille turned out of the gate to catch his early flight, he saw his lifeless body on the side of the perimeter wall of the property. He stopped to see that he was already gone. He tried to call me, but I silenced the call, not wanting to wake the kids, then saw a text come through to look at my WhatsApp, and when I did, I saw the terrible, unbelievable news. Réglisse is dead. He is outside, already gone. Don’t wake the kids.

So I ran out to find him, and picked up his floppy, warm body and cried and cried. Not this poor innocent creature, who loved us so much, brought us so much joy and comfort. This loving beast that was still so young, who I thought would be around for years and years as part of our family. Not another loss. Not now. He was part of my plan of recovery, of convalescence. Work a bit, write a bit, cuddle and nap with the cats. Now one is gone. Now what am I supposed to do.

Never have I felt like such an adult. Cyrille is not here, for a couple more days. I have a dead cat in the doghouse, the dog house that I bought for when we go away for a few days and need to feed and shelter the cats, something that has probably never been really used until now. Now there is a dead cat in there and I have to dig a hole in the cold ground and bury him.

Now I am devastated. I am more shocked by this senseless and sudden act than by the death of my mother. At least her death was warned, was impending, immanent. Réglisse was alive one moment and dead the next. The bed was still warm from where he’d been sleeping. Not an old fat cat with health problems, he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. I can only assume that he was hit by a car from one of the four houses on our dead end street, at 7:10 in the morning, on a Saturday. This seems ridiculous, but it’s that or he landed on his neck and broke it from a height of five feet. This seems even more preposterous that the unlikelihood of the first explanation.

And why God, why? Why would you do this to us now? Losing my mother was a spiritual experience like no other. I was lifted up into my faith, into my belief, and now this: completely senseless and hurtful, it is breaking me. There is no peace from this, no release, only further heartbreak in a place where I’d prayed for peace and comfort. Why this now God? Do I not deserve some respite for all that I have given? I feel that I am being tested. Does everything happen for a reason, or are somethings just random and can be horrible. I don’t know where this is going to take me, I am still too far down in it. I’m still looking out of the corner of my eye when I hear a noise, as I think it’s him. I broke down sobbing on the way home yesterday, as I was aware of the familiar feeling, usually so subtle, that I was happy to go home and see the cats. But yesterday, it was just one cat, for the first time, and I cried and cried and cried. Why would God take such an innocent, perfect, loving spirit away from us, from me, in a time when he was so deeply needed.

Why God, why?

Here I am, sat down to write. The urge is gone, the sense of urgency that I had before has withered and died. Now I am back at home. Suitcases half-unpacked, I’m avoiding completing the task. My husband starts travelling again tomorrow, which is Saturday. It seems unfair that he is off to sunny Greece to sell wine, to shmooze with people at a fancy dinner while I am home in cold and grey Champagne with the kids. They deserve better than this, than me, right now. The winter vacances start tonight. I’d hoped we’d go skiing for the first time as a family this year. The kids are finally old enough to really enjoy it and we would do well to have the time together. Instead they will go to the centre de loisirs, sort of a day camp for people who must work and have no grandparents to look after the kids while they do so. That stings more than ever. Mine are both dead now, and his are unable or unwilling to do so. My husband’s father is on his third wife, third time’s the charm, as they say. No insult there, they are very happy. They are meant for each other, when you see them together it is clear. It’s also easy to be happy when you have no worries, no kids, in financial retirement. It’s hard though, that they are the only married couple in the family other that us, and we’ve been married the longest. We have no one to look to as an example of what it looks like to grow and change as a couple through thick and thin, though kids, moves, new jobs, life crises, loss, troubles, and most of all, our own growth and changes. We have only us, and other divorces, many divorces. When the going gets tough, you divorce. There is no working though, no making amends, no handholding though troubled times. There is just divorce, blaming the other for irreconcilable differences, no reconciling. There are kids torn away from their fathers, for at least part of the time. Broken families, and damaged children, left in the wake of their parents’ dissolution of whatever it was that they once had that made them want to make a family in the first place.

I’m sitting on the bed in my office at home, surrounded by my half-unpacked suitcase and all its contents. The smell of the last three weeks is hanging on my clothes, a combination of the hospital, the care home, and sadness. A light but stinging, pungent smell that I don’t completely dislike as it seems to be the only thing left of what’s happened, evidence that it did in fact happen, all of it. I’m still quite shocked by it all, though shocked seems to strong of a word. I’ve imagined the emails I will write, to try to at least finish this with some sort of financial reparation. Charging us for January rent at the care home seems fucking absurd, and fucking insensitive, seeing as she left there on the verge of death on the 31st and only returned for a few nights, to an incompetent staff and not the correct meds, meds that she needed to sustain her comfort and keep nausea at bay. We were all basically left to fend for ourselves, told by the med techs that we needed to administer the liquid xanax, morphine, and haldol, the meds they give old people to zone them out, instead of helping them to manage the pain while remaining conscious. This is so difficult to write, as now I’m in the processing part of this, away from the non-stop panic of the actual situation, stuck in between fatigue and overwhelm, not quite able to keep up with the rapidly changing needs, responsibility, and troubleshooting. Now I can look back and ask myself what the fuck happened. It’s scary, did I do something wrong? Did I do my best, along with my sister and Bettie. Were we left with the rope to hang ourselves, forced out of the hospital too soon, unable, unprepared to care for Mom?

None of this matters, I realise, at least not in the emotional realm. I take a break to have one from my last packs of cigarettes, and I check in with myself. I feel terrible. I am in between times, in a void that cannot be measured. My grief is mixed up with everything else, and all parts of my consciousness are jumbled together. Mostly, I want to stay still, do nothing, be sad. But my children are home today, as it is Wednesday and there is no school in France, so I am home with them. Today I have set, and will keep, the bar low. I have made pancakes for breakfast and cleaned up after all of us. The floor needs to be vacuumed and mopped but I will leave that for another time. I shake out the rugs, doing just a step above the minimum so that at least they are clean. I have started laundry so that the kids will have their uniforms clean for Friday, and the boys’ favourite sweatshirts will be ready as well, if they chose to wear them again tomorrow. I will shower and wash my hair and get dressed, nicely, or at least not in sweatpants and a hoodie. There is homework to be done, but that will wait until later. I will take them to their hip-hop class after lunch, and I will have an hour to myself. During this hour I will buy a new plastic tablecloth for the dining room table so that they can have a place to draw that is clean and fresh. I will have to measure it first, as I always forget the length, so I will have to find a measuring tape. This I wanted to do before I left to the US, but didn’t have time, so I will try to at least pick this up where I left off. A tablecloth and a pretty basket for the boys’ room, so that they can pick up their clean clothes at the end of the day, the ones they’ve strewn about to find the right shirt or whatever as they got dressed in a hurry in the morning, or on the days they are home, the remnants of the many outfit changes they inevitably make throughout the day as they play.

For now, it is the mundane tasks I must conquer, the absolute minimum, so that I can keep our lives going with some sense of normalcy, while I adjust to my new normal, a world that exists without my mother in it.

I am home now. After everything, all the things, everything worked out and I got home. It was a long, sad drive to the airport with my sister. She had a friend with her as a buffer. She probably arranged it just like that so that I wouldn’t talk to her; wouldn’t trap her in the car on the long drive and force her to talk to me. Since then she has contacted me to pay for her hotel. Rudely, with no kindness, and with the tone of a teenager. She is now 34. Turned 34 on the day our mother passed. This could be seen as Mom’s final act of narcissism, we joked about this before it happened. It is not so funny now. In our dealings over the last week I was there, I found her full of rage and sadness, but mostly rage. We had one good night together, re-potting plants at Mom’s place on her little porch, with me sitting and smoking. Maybe she wanted my help? I have no idea, because she has the same problem I do, she has w very hard time expressing what she wants and then when someone doesn’t live up to her unexpressed expectations, she gets mad at them and totally resentful that they haven’t read her mind. Same as me.

I’m certain how she feels about me now, after this trip. She hates me, despises me. It’s a venomous hatred, sly and cunning, like a rattlesnake stalking its prey. I can do nothing right by her. She has her reasons, and they are valid, let me be clear about that. From years past, when I fucked her over, deliberately. I thought we’d moved past it, that I apologised enough, but apparently I haven’t. She hasn’t forgiven me, and has no plans to do so. I can do nothing right by her, even now, especially now. I have to consider grief in this equation, and give her room to be however she needs to be. This was one of the mistakes I made years ago, when our father died. I expected her to act a certain way, to show me basic care, respect, and consideration and when she didn’t, I punished her for it, just to prove that I could. To prove that I should be listened to, to prove that I was in control. I broke her in a way that she had never been broken before. I knew I would break her, and I did. I did what I did with calculation and precision, with full awareness of how much it would hurt her. I knew it would destroy her, and I did it anyway. How was this so easy for me? What was I doing, and why? Perhaps if i can fully admit to what happened and why I can fix it, or maybe I can’t ever do that, and maybe I have to live with that for the rest of my life.

I came home to zero fanfare or welcome from my husband. After 3 weeks away and the loss of my mother, I’d hoped for a nice warm lunch to welcome me home. Nope, not today. There was practically no food in the house, no fuss made at all, so I ate a bowl of cereal and I went to sleep. Woke up briefly to the smell of some sort of dinner cooking, and fell straight back to sleep. I woke up in the night with a dead phone but had my watch on, and it read 5:30, so I started to get up, and stumbled downstairs to make coffee. Come to find out there is no coffee. After weeks away, filled with tragedy, loss, fear, abuse, sadness, and difficulty, I am not even welcomed back by coffee. There was not thought given to me, to what I might like. Is this too much to ask of your partner of 14 years? Too much to expect? I really don’t think so.

But based on these two people, maybe I deserve this. Maybe I’ve been such a fucking asshole in my life that it doesn’t matter what I do now to make up for it, these ‘loved ones’ are going to hate me. This is what I’ve sown. So what do I do? Divorce, move on, take the kids, in the hopes that I can save them at least from the years of dysfunction that would inevitably follow? Put up with the grief abuse of my sister? This fucking sucks, all of this on top of the one thing I need and want to do, which is to grieve the loss of my mother.

*

Hell is other people. – John-Paul Sartre

It’s 9:04 and I should already be in the shower, but I don’t want to. I would love to spend a few more minutes avoiding the inevitable by smoking a cigarette but even I can’t justify that time wasted. Now I am on a countdown, and have an appointment to see mom at 10. I will take a shower and let it wash all of the noise and static away, the filth of the last few days, the worry, and try to meet her with a pure heart to say good bye. I must drag myself to make myself move, tired from the night before with a low, steady panic coarsing through me.

Off I go to say goodbye

I’m taking a minute to check in with myself before heading to a 10pm meeting. I realised today that I’m six months alcohol-free. Not sober – I’m stoned right now. I don’t mind it, it’s softening everything, which I need right now. I don’t fly off the handle, but instead can talk through arguments. My triggers seem dulled, or I just don’t care to be triggered anymore. I’d love to chalk this up to my spiritual evolution but the cannabis sure doesn’t hurt. The pain of loss and death is too real, too much, too soon. I need coffee.

I feel my body and mind preparing to be in an uncomfortable place. You have to face yourself in these things, I’ve found so far. It’s easy to run and hide during the day, when your mind bops around from one thing to the next. But at night, in a group of alcoholics, not so much. You’re right there, facing yourself along with everybody else. I just don’t want to burst into tears in a group of strangers, not right now. So let’s see. Biggest part of life is just showing up, so here I go…

*

The meeting was great. I really had to settle into myself. Trying to go brought out my deepest fear of being seen. How many times have I wanted to disappear, to become part of the wall? Years and years of being unseen, where first? Tonight I felt comfortable after just a few minutes. At the heart of each meeting, it seems, is someone sharing their story in detail.

Now I lay on the bed, taking inventory. I am exhausted beyond belief. It is a new level of exhaustion. Very deep, into my bones, my soul aches. Pain is fear leaving the body. I feel the fear of not having my mother, it is a childish fear, a childish feeling, true and primal. My body aches in many places, but not from the usual groan of household labor, but from this gutteral sadness. I have smoked too much. If I could, I would non-stop chain smoke cigarettes, a disgusting habit that I’ve returned to like a sling made from self-loathing. Anything to punish myself, to cling to a former self that felt nothing. How shall I take care of myself now? She is gone now, I tell myself, as I hear two urgent train horns sound, as though they are exchanging an emphatic greeting, and they go trugging along in the night with their freight.

It is my last night here and it is late. I am alone in the hotel room, with public TV on in the background, allowing some news from the real world to seep in, It’s not good. The trains still pass, with their engines long gone. Tomorrow I will be gone, too.

Here I am, the morning of the day before tomorrow, when I go home. Waking up in the hotel by a marketing call from France, which for some reason I answer. Hello? Allo? No one responds to either, and I realise that the background noise is from a call center, so I hang up. Awake, kind of, I get myself up as I see that there is still five minutes left for breakfast, so I try to make it at least once during my stay. I go downstairs to the American breakfast to discover that nothing is fresh, nothing is natural, from coffee creamer to syrup, everything has been put into single serving disposable containers, plastic which likely seeps into the food products. Nothing is natural, the real thing, but instead a simulacrum, what we thing that juice or jam or syrup should be like, made from chemical counterparts and flavour enhancers. But I sit, and watch a bit of Kelly and Ryan, as its’s on, and think about what they are really like, if they really like each other, as Ryan Seacrest stretches himself, in a forced lounging position across his director’s chair, wearing a rust coloured turtleneck and a grey blazer, a nod to the chicness of Regis before him. You sir, are no Regis Philbin, a man that made bitchy banter light even when he and Kathy were at their most venomous, it seemed fun. These two are a bit sad and tired, like me, and don’t seem to be having very much fun even though it’s Friday.

In the breakfast room the ladies seem to know each other already, as one grown daughter and mother pair chat with the woman working. She is happy to be having a date night tomorrow with her husband, the first in three years. I quickly learn her whole story, she was married as a teenager and had her first child before twenty. Breastfed her last for two years, so had no date night before, but now it’s time. At some point, I tell her that I too have twins and we chat a bit. I tell her that Mom has passed and we talk about cancer and death. She lost a cousin recently, who was more like her sister, they would FaceTime at the end of her shift, when she was cleaning up from breakfast. She died from cancer at twenty six and left two young children and her husband behind. So suddenly, and so young. She tells me to let my mother be present, to speak with her, to ask for signs and be open to receiving them. Yes, I agree, and I contemplate how differently I might have reacted to her saying this if I were who I was even a month ago, but I’ve changed now. Absolutely, I already have, I think. I already am.

Now I sit back on my bed, contemplating waking up, sobering up. Feeling the soft cloud lift from me and feel the damper of reality set in. Calls to make, things to do. Make a list and try not to panic. Move slowly but deliberately, when all I want to do is languish in the hotel bed for the entire day, entire week. But there are things to be done, dependencies to take care of now, so that this chapter can be closed properly. Prepare for the future, which feels so foreign to me, so strange that it has already arrived. With inheritance comes responsibility, as well as a chance to rewrite the story, deciding what to take along and what to lead behind. Today I must stay sober, and guide things without pause, or too many, at least. It’s hard to face the emotions without a cushion, as they can rise up at any moment, unanticipated, and smack you with grief, or absence. It is tricky to convince yourself to be ready, to let them flow or tumble in without resistance.

So now I will try to make my list, and get through it.