I’m just waking up, its about 10 35 am as I write these lines.  Yesterday I went to a Boston Media Makers meeting, always a lot of fun, and a friend asked me how I was doing.  As I described my efforts at trying to get back on my feet, the feed back I got was along the lines of “I don’t know how I could do that so soon.”  As I thought about it I  began to see my situation in a new light:

Mark lent me a book on grieving that I would dip into a little that night.  What I then realized was…  how kind of strange my way of dealing probably was compared to..  I don’t know, the norm?

My mom was first diagnosed with cancer, I’m not even sure but I think.. about 10 or so years ago?  That news hit me hard in the gut and sorta woke me up to the mortality of lifet.  To one extent or another I’ve probably been preparing to loose my mom since that day.  I know “you can never be prepared to loose your mom,” but..  you can build a psychological attitude that might carry you through it. 

So when I say preparing I’m not even talking, necessarily, about a conscious enterprize.   I mean we could talk about something as simple as what you are attracted to as far as books, music, movies, or what sort of things start to occupy your mind.  I mean look, you know she’s not going to be with you forever, you know that day is coming… and the question is, when that day comes, how are you going to cope with it?

So, when Beth knocked on the door to tell my father and I that my mom had died, when we drove to the hospital and I then saw my mom’s dead body….  my reaction was….  well how do you put that into words?  Maybe listen to my last podcast recorded an hour or two after that hospital visit!  

But what I was thinking in my head was like “Matt this is real, you’re going to have to accept this, your life will be forever very different and your job now is to cope with this.”  

The first week was insanely difficult: sadness gripping your body, shaking your soul, feeling like you are somehow reaching beyond the world of the living with your sadness..  Like somehow your grief is transcending time and space and..  I don’t want to say you are renouncing life..  but you do see life in a different light.  Normally we don’t think about this sorta thing but look: #1 We are all on this planet for a short time, and #2 Everyone whom we really bond with, really love, will one day loose us or we will lose them…  and this is life!  

Somehow that short window of life seems less important.  Our lives, what meaning can you make out of them?  They are our joyful participation in the sorrows of life?  It’s a little dance we do with creation, for a time?   When life seems so small in the scheme of things..  and your tears are still reaching out.. where at this order of magnitude for how you are thinking about anything.. nothing really matters anymore..  but way out here you’re mom still matters. You still love your mom, and you’re still crying out for her, to her, and of her.

This sorta thing lends perspective to life like nothing else I can think of. Here’s a question for you: “What’s really important?”  The answer seems to be love..  I mean if your love for your mom matters beyond so much.. you see the love you have for any number of things.. people, whatever.. as sorta meaning more then anything else.

A couple hours latter:

So I mean isn’t that beautiful?  To look at life and think that love is the most important thing?  This way of thinking about life, this sorta psychological attitude, is not one that leads to waist lands.. this leads to lives worth living.

Creeping up on 3:30:

To bring this more down to earth there’s all this stuff I should be doing today, it’s late afternoon, and I still haven’t been able to bring myself to do that stuff.  My reaction to this is to not be too terribly happy with myself…  But when I think about what I’m going through, I guess I should be more forgiving of myself?  I don’t know, but I do need to get to work..  At least posting this will be something. 

This entry was posted on Monday, January 7th, 2008 at 8:32 pm and is filed under Mom and Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.