How things are
I’m so, so, so glad I have a great therapist. That is all.
Every week she tells me to just be how I am, to feel how I feel.
It worries me that I haven’t cried since my mom died—does it mean that I am so fucked up and repressed that I can’t feel anything?
I guess I think this because there were years—actually years—during which I never cried. When I cried in college, when I first fell in love and felt deeply attached—I felt I wouldn’t be able to stop. I figured that’s why I never let myself cry before. It was really not sustainable, crying that much.
So I worry that’s what’s going on now. But I’m trying to trust myself. The situation was/is just weird and unnatural. My mom was fine, then she had symptoms that turned out to be a return of her cancer, but there was no pain or mental impairment, and then she died.
There was no tearful goodbye, no heartfelt talk, just some strange half-acknowledgment that we wouldn’t see each other again.
My daughter and I half-joke that she really isn’t dead. “I think she’ll come out of the earth” she says. I tell her that nana was cremated, and she—in her inimitably quick way—says “Okay, then she’ll rise from the ashes!”
It’s not that either of us long for this (well, I can’t speak for her, but I don’t sense that’s why she’s saying this)—it’s that we expect it. She wasn’t dying. She just died, I guess.
It seems you’re doing what you can right now and that’s all you can do. And processing, lord knows how long processing can take. I love the response about rising from ashes . I struggled after my brother‘s death, because he had been cremated and for the for the first time I understood why Catholics didn’t cremate. I like the idea of rising from ashes though. Love you
((nodding)) What Rachel said. It's all a weird process that never ends. Just this morning, I thought I could turn around and talk to [my brother] Davey. Sometimes I want my cousin who recently shot himself in my aunt's yard to show up in my dreams so I can yell at him about decades of stuff.