death of a parent – Terri LaBonte- Reinventing Myself in Retirement

Mourning Backwards

I thought that grief was supposed to lessen over time. I could swear I missed my mom more this past holiday season than previous Christmases. Despite having an overall holly jolly time, I hit a rough patch the last week or so before Christmas. I felt like I crammed a lot of riotous, rollicking activities into the time between mid-November and mid-December. Once I found myself past the flurry of events, I realized I had cleared a wide, fresh pathway to feeling sad. One day, I got it into my head to go to a mall and the Christmas Tree decoration store my mother and I frequented several times. I would normally never consider going shopping so close to Christmas, but I had a few errands that I thought I could knock out quickly. Of course, I didn’t knock them out quickly. It was a bit of a hard slog made even harder because of my mother’s absence.

I have many happy memories of my mother associated with Christmas. Most people would say that they love Christmas. Why else do songsters keep belting out “It’s The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year?” To my mother, though, Christmas was an art form. It wasn’t like she was one of those crazy Christmas light folks on television, but there was something intensely special about the way she threw herself into the season. There are so many holiday moments that she engraved permanently into my brain with love. It makes me so happy that I have these memories. Without a doubt, those memories enrich my experience of Christmas, even since her death. There is also a sadness tied up in those memories that breaks through every year at the holidays.

Every year since I can remember, my mother used to take me Christmas shopping on a special day. She did the same for my brother. Ostensibly, the trip was for each of us to buy a Christmas present for the other sibling. In truth, there was another agenda that I did not perceive until well into my teen years. My mom would take us on these outings to buy a present for our sibling… and so she could see what delighted the kid on the shopping expedition with her. She explained to someone once that she would watch what caught my eye and what I “oohed and awed over” as I wandered the stores looking for a present for my brother. I was never very good at telling anyone what I wanted, so she would watch my reaction to items in the store for ideas about what might enchant me on Christmas morning. She always did great.

My shopping day with my mother continued until the December before her stroke. As she aged and became frailer, we had to adapt what we did and for how long, but we always had a wonderful time. We’d look at Christmas decorations, listen to Christmas music, buy stuff we didn’t need, and revel in being together. This shared annual experience was so much a part of who we were together, I even tried to arrange a special transport to take her to the tiny mall in our town that last December of her life. Unfortunately, before I could get the authorization and organize everything, she started to let go of her hold on her “regular” world and began to head down her journey towards the next life.

My shopping trip right before Christmas this past holiday screamed “mom” at me. It just felt so much like something she should have shared with me, as she had so many other pre-Christmas shopping trips. Suddenly, I missed her with a physical fierce coldness that seemed to simultaneously freeze my respiratory system and melt my digestive system. My knees wobbled alarmingly. For a few moments, my brain seemed to spin around inside my skull and I thought I might faint. I was standing in a depressingly long line at JC Penney’s. I grabbed a shelf on one side of the line and waited for the feeling to pass. The intensity of the pain did pass, but left some emotional havoc in its wake.

Someone once told me that one key to managing depression is to HALT. Don’t get too Hungry, Angry, Lonely, or Tired. I realized that I was all four of these “halts.” I couldn’t do much about being hungry or tired while standing in line, unless I called out for pizza and a sleeping bag. I don’t think I’ll ever stop being lonely for my momma. I could, however, choose to stop feeling angry and frustrated with the massive line at Penney’s. I used the rest of my time standing in line observing the shoppers around me and the clerks at the cash registers. For the most part, the shoppers were pretty disgruntled and the sales clerks were serene and polite. I decided I would try to flip the script. When it was my turn to pay, I made a special effort to be pleasant and grateful.

I transacted my business at Penney’s and moved on to Macy’s. Some weeks ago, I bought a wonderfully warm, fluffy robe at Macy’s. The weather finally cooled off enough by the middle of December for me to wear it to water aerobics class. That is when I discovered that the Macy’s sales associate had neglected to remove the security tag. Macy’s is about 40 miles from my house, so I originally decided to just live with a grey plastic device flopping at the side of my robe. When people started looking at me funny at the pool, clearly wondering if I had embarked on a life of crime, I thought better of that tactic. That was my motivation for going to the mall less than a week before Christmas. I brought the robe to get the Macy’s people to untag me.

When I got to Macy’s, it seemed that people were even nastier than they were at Penney’s. I purposely let several people go ahead of me because they were unhinged and I thought it would be helpful for the sales clerk if she didn’t have to balance her priorities between Miss Christmas Crazy Person 2019 and me, who had been waiting in line ahead of her (to say nothing of the fact that I would not have had to drive 40 miles and stand in line at all if the first sales clerk had removed the tag in the first place.) I smiled at the clerks supportively and even suggested that they take care of another timebomb of a shopper before they waited on me. I found it strangely serene and comforting to engage in these small acts of kindness. I said a little prayer to thank God for His blessing in helping me find this little coping mechanism.

I was pretty proud of myself until I left the mall and realized I was still very hungry and… lonely. I drove to a nearby McDonald’s. McDonald’s was also a holiday tradition in my home. For some unknown and clearly irrational reason, I didn’t like McDonald’s hamburgers as a child. I did, however, love the French fries. On Christmas Eve, my mother would fry hamburgers at home and my father would go to McDonald’s and buy French fries. When I got older (and over my antipathy to McDonald’s hamburgers), it was a special treat during Christmas vacation for my brother and me to ride our bikes to McDonald’s alone and have lunch. So, as weird as it sounds, McDonald’s has a sentimental attraction for me.

At McDonald’s, I found they converted to a customer-driven electronic ordering system. I stared at the huge monitor and began pushing buttons, trying to follow the directions. Something about the electronic ordering system baffled me. I kept getting to a place in the process that thwarted me. I felt more and more defeated as I kept trying. I felt confused and despondent. After trying several times, I surrendered. I still had enough of my wits about me to know that I should not get back in the car and drive without something to eat. I went up and tried to explain my dilemma to the nice young lady at the counter. For some reason, I was also having trouble finding words to explain what was wrong. I kept apologizing. She never skipped a beat or appeared impatient. She was sincerely kind. Ultimately, we completed the ordering process. I took my number and went off to find a table, embarrassed at the fuss I was making. Once I sat down, I even started to cry softly and discreetly. Another employee, who was cleaning up around the lobby, came over to ask if I was okay and if she could do anything for me.

After I ate my lunch and nourished my psyche with some perspective, I thought about how thankful I was for the kindness of the McDonald’s employees. A fast food restaurant is about the last place one would expect workers to rise above the madness and inject a little humanity into the day. Fast food restaurants are loud, crowded, and thrive on doing things quickly and efficiently. These McDonald’s employees were not only efficient using their hands and heads, they went a step further and used their hearts.

I wanted to do something to thank them. They deserved it. Plus, I had been reminded by my experiences at the department stores that it makes me feel better to do something nice for someone else. I went over to the lobby employee, thanked her, and gave her a hug. I also thanked the lady at the counter. They were both over the moon. I also told the manager how grateful I was to both the employees. I told her that being nice is a superpower. People don’t always realize how much difference it can make to just be nice.

When my mother was shrinking through her last year of life, I often found myself being the kind of person I didn’t want to be. I was impatient, snappish, and cranky all too frequently. I felt like I was losing the best parts of me- the gentleness, the peace, the playfulness, the affection. I was ashamed. I blamed myself… and I also blamed the grief. I believed the mourning was destroying the me I had always been.

In the last year or so, I rejoice because I feel some of those shinier sides of me returning. I notice myself behaving as I would have behaved years ago. It makes me so happy. I also notice that, like on my pre-Christmas shopping day, I am finding more tiny ways to nurture happiness in the world.

For me… and maybe for everybody… mourning is not a linear process. There is no forward or backward. There is ebb and flow. There are zigs and zags. There are swirls and spirals. Mourning gains and loses momentum, depending on external circumstances and internal conditions… like hunger, anger, loneliness, and tiredness. The most important thing, though, is that mourning does not have to destroy. Mourning can also create.

I consider the shot of grief that often accompanies my memories of my mother to be the “price of admission” to being able to re-experience the happy times with her. I think it is worth it to have the odd meltdown now and then in order to access the sweet memories. What do you think? Is it worth being sad sometimes over the death of a loved one to also remember the joyful times and connections? Please share your perspective by leaving a comment. In the alternative, you can email me at terriretirement@gmail.com.

Have a sweetly memorable day!

Terri/Dorry 😊

Saint Dorothy

I scattered some of my mother’s ashes in my backyard on All-Saints Day. My mother hated funerals. She didn’t get the whole “closure” and “gathering together” thing. She thought of them as rather tacky and unnecessarily burdensome to the family.

When my father died, we took the ashes out to an Indian casino after the requiem mass. We left my mother on a seat at a slot machine because watching us scatter my father’s ashes was the last thing in the world she wanted to do. My brother and a couple of cousins and I drove out into the desert a ways to scatter the ashes. My father loved the desert. He also maintained, throughout his life, that he was part Native American despite the complete absence of any confirming evidence. It was a nice idea, but we were clearly inept at scattering ashes. It is harder than you think. It is windy in the desert. There are kind of a lot of ashes. As I tried to release my father, body and soul, to the Great Spirit, my brother kept yelling that I was getting dad all over me. None of the attendees was sure how I was going to go back and face my mother at the casino with a thin veneer of my father’s cremains all over me. Let’s just say that event did nothing to change my mom’s opinion of funerals.

Even though she didn’t like funerals, I knew my mother would have had no objection to her family having a service for her if we felt it would be helpful for us. I always thought I didn’t care whether we had a service or not. My brother didn’t want a service. I figured that I would take her ashes back to California and we could scatter them near where we scattered my father’s ashes. Still, after she died, I did ask the cremation services company to divide her ashes into several smaller quantities on the off chance that I decided to do something different. A few weeks later, it suddenly, for no discernable reason, seemed important to me to scatter a portion of her ashes behind my house. Theologically and symbolically, I believe my mother is a saint in Heaven now, so I decided to do it on the evening of All Saints Day.

I picked out a passage from The Book of Wisdom in the Bible. If you have never heard of The Book of Wisdom and can’t find it in your Bible, please don’t think I made it up. It is one of those books that appear in Catholic and Episcopal Bibles, but is not part of the canon in many Protestant churches. It struck me as strange that, as I am exploring a change in church, I found the very words I wanted in a version of the Bible that a lot of Christians don’t even include. Still, I found comfort in Wisdom:3, which refers to everlasting life. The passage I picked reminded me that it is foolish to think my mother is really dead. She lives in joy in Heaven and I will see her again one day. As I walked up and down the back yard scattering the ashes, I sang the Irish Blessing. I sang that song to her every day for the last two weeks of her life. It sort of became “our song” during that last season of good-bye. When I got to the last line of the song, “And, until we meet again, may God hold you in the hollow of His hand,” I began sobbing. It was the first time I have really broken down since before her death. I feel like I’ve been remarkably calm and composed, especially for me.

I think I know why the blessing song triggered this outpouring of emotion. The song works both ways. The song told my mother that I knew God was holding her in the hollow of His hand in Heaven now. The song also was also telling me that my mother is waiting for me. She is trusting in God to hold me in the hollow of His hand until the day we are reunited forever.

I feel kind of empty since my impromptu funeral. I think some of the grief that poured out of me with the tears left a space inside me that isn’t quite filled up with acceptance and contentment yet. I don’t really feel like me, but I can’t say what I do feel. What is kind of weird is that, maybe for the first time in my whole life, I feel okay living in whatever is. As odd and uncharacteristic as it seems, I am content to float along and experience the life that I am living without feeling a mad compulsion to make that life what I think it should be.

Maybe Saint Dorothy is pushing me into the hollow of God’s hand.

Different people have different thoughts and traditions around death and funerals. Have you ever experienced a ritual that brought you a little “good grief,” as my song to my mother brought me? Please tell us about it. Please share your perspective by leaving a comment. In the alternative, you can email me at terriretirement@gmail.com.

May God hold YOU in the hollow of His hand today!

Terri

Happy Birthday To Me

A few weeks after my mother died, I had a birthday. Birthdays have always been special to me. My birthday is the only day in the whole year that I allow everything to be all about me. Long ago, I stopped looking at my birthday as a commemoration of another year passing. Instead, I look at it as a kind of holiday. It’s Terri Day- the day the world (or at least any portion of the world that so desires) celebrates the unique wonder that is me! That may sound conceited, but it isn’t really. I don’t limit my birthday philosophy to myself. I think everybody’s birthday should be about celebrating that person’s individual, special awesomeness. What difference does it really make if you are another year older, when all is said and done? On the other hand, what a wonderful difference it truly does make that the world is filled with awesome people who are amazing for so many different reasons!

I wasn’t sure how I was going to feel celebratory when, for the first time in my life, I wasn’t sharing my birthday with the woman who birthed me. I say that my birthday has always been “all about me.” That isn’t entirely accurate. Part of that “all” has been all about my mother and me. That very first birthday was the beginning of the very special bond we’ve shared over the past 58 years. I’ve always bought my mother a present on my birthday. After all, my mother was the one who did all the work the day I was born. All I did was show up.

I almost felt like skipping my birthday this year, but my current obsession with busy-ness and distraction forced me to find something special to do that day. Max and I returned from a trip to Las Vegas on September 28 and we visited Disney Springs to celebrate my birthday on September 30. Now, normally, I would not visit Disney Springs on a Saturday when hordes of people walk the earth, but I was pretty committed to celebrating on the actual anniversary of my birth. Max made a few half-hearted attempts to convince me to juggle my birthday celebration to another, non-weekend day. He soon realized that idea was a total non-starter. He ultimately embraced the idea and set out to ensure I enjoyed a special birthday- different from all previous birthdays because my mother wasn’t with us, but special in a new way.

For several days before, during, and after my birthday, Max walked around calling me the “birt-day girl.” He greeted me every morning by calling out, “Happy Birthday.” He sang to me on the gondola at the Venetian Casino during our vacation, which was amazing. Max doesn’t really sing and lives in terror of standing out of the crowd in public. Yet, there he was, singing to me. Without benefit of alcohol, even. The fact that he was singing to me in front of a gondolier and a couple of strangers and anyone who happened to be able to hear him in the fake Piazza San Marco truly demonstrated the extent of his effort to delight me. It touched me deeply and I think I found a way, after knowing him for almost 22 years, to fall even more in love with him.

A few months ago, part of me realized that my mother was likely not going to be alive when my birthday came. I purchased a necklace and paid for it from one of her accounts. I gave it to Max to save so I’d have one last birthday present from my mother. The morning of my birthday, he brought it out and fastened it around my neck. The necklace is a diamond and silver butterfly. The body of the butterfly consists of two interwoven open-heart designs. I chose the butterfly motif because it reminds me that my mother, like a butterfly, is reborn to live in beauty and joy in Heaven. I chose the double open heart design because my mother is the one who taught me to live my life striving to love and to be loved.

When we got to Disney Springs, we went to Starbucks and had a beverage accompanied by a pumpkin scone. As we walked around the shops, I found a pair of earrings that fascinated me. Max surprised me by buying them for me. We had a late lunch at a restaurant I’ve been wanting to try. My mother used to keep a stash of what she called her “hidey hole” money- about $400 in cash that she kept at home in case of emergency. I took some of that money to pay for my birthday meal and the Sprinkles cupcake I bought to take home. Later that evening at home, I put a candle in the cupcake and Max sang “Happy Birthday” to me.

I also received beautiful cards, texts, and gifts from my brother and from friends all around the world. It was as if the Universe knew that this was going to be a tough birthday for me and wanted to provide a little additional emotional padding against the buffeting my heart was likely to take.

You can see I ended up having a lovely birthday, even though I was kind of dreading it. It was a special day, even if my mother wasn’t there to share it with me. Then again, maybe she was. And maybe she always will be.

How do you like to celebrate your birthday? Please share your perspective by leaving a comment. In the alternative, you can email me at terriretirement@gmail.com.

Have an extra special day, whether it happens to be your birthday or not!

Terri 🙂

Busy-ness

Reader Neki commented that it sounded like my last year with my mother was extra special. When I read Neki’s comment, it caused me to reflect. While I was living that last year, I don’t know that I would have described it so. Living that year at my mom’s side was the most painful and most arduous thing I’ve done in my entire life. There were many times when I felt like the pressure of the grief and the stress were unbearable. In reality, though, Neki was absolutely right. That time with my mother was extra special.

As difficult as this past year has been, I would not have had it any other way. If my mother’s fate was to suffer a stroke and decline so heartbreakingly towards the end of her life, I wanted to travel that path with her. Whatever support I could give, I wanted to give. Whatever comfort I could provide, I wanted to provide. Whatever shared joy we could find, I wanted to find with her. The time and effort I spent with her in the past year was my gift to her, but it truly was also a gift to me.

Now that my mother is gone, I am a bit disoriented. The time I used to spend with her and taking care of her needs is now empty. I have a new-found and somewhat unwelcome freedom.

I’m not quite sure how to navigate this new life condition. I feel a bit tender and tentative, as if I am dipping my toe into the water of the part of my life that is all about me. In the days since my mother death, I grasp wildly for activity. I’ve started the processes to finalize my mom’s administrative matters. I’ve gone through most of her possessions. I’ve sent thank you notes to people who sent cards and flowers. My house is cleaner than it has ever been. I plunged myself into a new life filled with new events, new people, and new thoughts. I initiated outings with friends. I began accepting every invitation offered me. I signed up to join a women’s group at the church. I began preparations to survive Hurricane Irma in a manic frenzy, despite my absolute certainty that I would die in the storm. Max and I took a trip to Las Vegas. I’ve been planning a trip to New England to see the fall foliage next autumn. I seem to flit from one activity to another without ever stopping to let my feet touch the ground… or to take a breath.

I do want to try new things now that I have some more free time, but I think this busy-ness is more about not wanting to sit still and feel than it is about expanding my horizons.

The truth is that the hole my mother left in my life is so huge that I am afraid of falling into it. If I stop and stare at that hole, I am sure that it will suck me into its emptiness and I will never recover. My mother was all about light and happiness. Her absence leaves darkness and grief. If I am to honor her memory, it is important that I look beyond this present darkness and grief to find the love she left behind. I can use that love to live in a way that would bring her joy. I can and will be her legacy of light.

The thing is… I’m not quite ready to do that yet. I am still too vulnerable to the darkness to risk getting too close to that empty hole. After so much sadness for so long, my strength is depleted and needs rest to be replenished. So I keep moving and doing, propelling myself far away from the emptiness. I’m sure I will eventually be able to find a better balance between activity and introspection. When that happens, I know I’ll find a way to live more beautifully and meaningfully than I ever have because my mother showed me how. I’ll know my mom will be smiling down on me from Heaven.

In the meantime, I think I’ve earned a little distraction!

What do you think? Does a whirlwind of activity help us heal after losing someone? Or is it just a whirlwind of activity? Please share your perspective by leaving a comment. In the alternative, you can email me at terriretirement@gmail.com.

Have a pleasantly busy day!

Terri 🙂

In Praise Of Chocolate Ice Cream

My mother always said that chocolate ice cream can solve pretty much any problem. Or, if it doesn’t solve the problem, consuming chocolate ice cream will at least make you feel better about failing. I have an abundance of ample curves in places that should be less curvy and more flat because I have spent a lifetime harkening to this advice.

My mother was not too proud to offer her children chocolate ice cream to do her bidding. In fact, I first learned the meaning of the word “bribe” in conjunction with chocolate ice cream. One day, my mother asked if she could bribe me with a fudgsicle to take out the trash. I asked her what “bribe” meant. After she explained, I told her I didn’t really want a fudgsicle, but would take the trash out anyway. I’m sure my refusal of the fudgsicle left her wondering if we did, in fact, share the same DNA or if she had just found me under a cabbage leaf. When we were sick and refusing to eat, she would coax back our appetites by pulling a half-gallon carton of chilly chocolate out of the freezer. Jimmy Buffett might have had his margaritas, but, in our house, the frozen concoction that helped us hang on was chocolate ice cream.

Calories and curves aside, it is hard to argue with her position. Chocolate ice cream is just awesome. It is creamy and sumptuous and decadent. It goes down softly and smoothly and with a sultriness that is almost tangible. I can go up and down the counter at an ice cream parlor touting thirty-one flavors of ice cream, savoring the idea of each of the flashy flavors. Inevitably, I end up ordering chocolate. I would live on chocolate ice cream if I could.

Maybe it is possible to live on chocolate ice cream. When I was a child, we always had waffles with chocolate ice cream for our birthday breakfasts. Don’t they say that breakfast is the most important meal of the day?

At any rate, my mother’s chocolate ice cream cure ran into an ironic snag at the end of her life. I guess she was testing the hypothesis that one can live on chocolate ice cream alone. During her last ten months, all she consumed was food based on chocolate ice cream. She ate virtually nothing except Wendy’s chocolate frosties and McDonald’s chocolate milkshakes. Sometimes, just to mix things up, I brought a thermal bag of ingredients and made her chocolate ice cream sodas. I pulled out a small bottle of club soda, a jigger of half-and-half, a container of chocolate ice cream, a bottle of chocolate syrup and made the ice cream soda at her bedside. I was the Benihana’s of the ice cream world. Her ice cream soda was dinner and a show.

It is hard to imagine how it is possible to survive on chocolate ice cream alone, no matter how enamored with it you are. Day after day, I helped her drink her milkshake or ice cream soda. It was really the only pleasure she could still enjoy. She continued to lose weight and to weaken. She became more confused and restless. She often punctuated short periods of wakefulness and connectedness with napping and detachment. As I watched her fading away, little by little, I realized that it was not possible for her to survive on chocolate ice cream alone.

I wonder if I will ever think of chocolate ice cream the same way again.

What is your “guilty pleasure” in food? What food would you live on if you could? Please share your perspective by leaving a comment. In the alternative, you can email me at terriretirement@gmail.com.

Have a sweet day!

Terri 🙂