This isn't going so well

I keep thinking that the reason I’m not sad/crying about my mom is that I’m mad at her for all the reasons I have to be angry. But it occurs to me that if I am not mad at her, I might be sad. I am not sure what to do with that.

The idea of going to this bullshit “celebration of life” that my mom didn’t want to have makes me feel nauseated. Actually queasy. There will be all these people who were my mom’s best friend. She was so good at that.

I just want to run away and disappear in the shadows of the bay laurels that line dry creeks surrounding the location of the gathering. I know those roots and that gravel. This sounds so emo, I know. But I guess I am emo right now.

Some of the time I start writing whatever it is I’d read (in my head, not on paper) at the…ceremony? Then I think there is no way I can be there, with those people. They know someone who is not my mom. My mom is not bad. She is just a different person than the woman who will be depicted in slideshows (created by her husband’s daughter who was truly terrible to me when I was up there for my mom’s dying week.) They shouldn’t have to lose that person. But I don’t know how to be there among them.

What if I read something I write—it would be light and pithy yet make people tear up a bit—and I cry? What if this celebration, this gathering of people, means that I have to understand in a particular way that my mom is dead? I say that she is dead all the time. I like the word. But the idea of never seeing her again, or mostly her never seeing the kids again nor them her, is still not quite part of my understanding of things.