I am speechless at the realization that it has been nearly ten months since I last wrote here. This had been meant as a tool of catharsis and healing, or at the very least a document of my grief process. That being said, I suppose there is nothing to have documented anyway. I'm in stasis. To say I have moved much further past where I was ten months ago feels, at the moment, like a lie. I have been surviving my life at the bare minimum, by breathing in, breathing out, sleeping, eating... microscopic progresses are made and then erased every day. I knew when I first embarked on this journey that I would be paralyzed at this precise point, and - true to form - I have not disappointed myself by not disappointing myself. The greatest divide in my life now is the divide between what is grief over the loss of what I lost last year and what is grief over the loss of myself now still.

I am stale, stagnant pond water.

I can't believe I drafted this simple repost so long ago in anticipation of this moment. I knew it to be true at the time, but I also knew it to be true that I didn't fully understand it yet. Now I do.

you have to experience grief in all four seasons in order to begin healing.

Today it has been five months since my mother was legally pronounced having passed from this realm.

It is - for lack of a better word - fascinating the way that you feel the anniversary of a death before you recall it consciously. My mother randomly comes to mind at seemingly irrelevant times, and then only later, suddenly, do I know why, when amidst this endlessly confusing ebb and flow of days and nights the universe clandestinely conspires to somehow make me acutely aware of the date.

I want to share something now. I remember the morning I initially walked into the hospital room and saw her body for the first time. I won't go into detail about this moment specifically because I am incapable of handling it and, like a child confuses emotional pain for life-threatening, so do I feel like the mere memory of it will suffocate me. I also won't because, quite practically, I can't; attempting to recall that level of pain is like trying to recall the pain of a severe physical injury, which is to say it is so immense that you can't remember how it feels unless you are literally in the moment of feeling it. It is a feeling - much like an orgasm - that forces you to be so completely present in your body in that instant in time that you cannot ever regain its intensity by recollection.

What I want to share came some moments later. I had occasion to find myself sitting alone with her body for a few minutes. And I remember so intensely feeling the urge to take a picture of her. It wasn't until, between tears, I pulled out my phone and turned the camera on that I stopped myself and realized this might be considered curiously morbid. I never took one. Instead I sat and I wept in cataclysmic fear that her soul was being caged inside a hellish purgatory within her forecably and falsely revived body.

I have considered why I felt compelled to take a picture of her a lot over the past five months. The problem of it has turned over in the back of my mind constantly, working like a gear, my subconscious sorting and deciphering it. I've told no one about it. Probably out of a displaced sense of embarrassment and self-criticism. I have, beyond anything else, thanked the universe for whatever brick was dropped on my head to get my attention before I completed the act of it. The image of my mother's apparently soulless yet "alive" body haunted me daily for months after her death. As it stands now, if something reminds me of it I am disturbed at length for quite some time, so if I were to ever accidentally see a photo of it I cannot imagine how I would react. 

But suddenly I am awash with understanding on this day. I have solved it all and it has presented itself to my consciousness in a neat, surreptitiously wrapped complete answer: I wanted to take a picture because I knew (subconsciously) that I would never be in the presence of her physical body ever again. I knew it was the last time I would lay eyes on her in that form, in person, especially even technically breathing, with a beating heart, warm. It was the last time I would ever see her, for all appearances, Alive.

It was nothing more than that.

Mercury is about to return forward, and I feel it's trek out of retrograde like warm water trickling down the back of my scalp.

Mightn't that be a small puddle I see shimmering off distantly, beyond these rolling black sand dunes I've found myself surrounded with?

I'll hold my breath rather than dare utter the H-word. This will only last a moment, so let's record it here for prosperity.

The morning of October sixth I had a deeply profound dream about my mother. I made detailed notes about it in my phone when I woke up, but I have taken great care to avoid talking or writing about it since as it makes me emotional. However, given my state carried over from last night, I now feel this might be a cathartic moment for me to write it out. 

Momma was lying alone in a white bed with my father, sisters, and I all around her talking to her. We were able to ask her questions about what happened when she died. For whatever reason we didn't ask about the afterlife really, but we asked about the moment she died and whether or not she was gone when we felt she was. She said she was. It was less like talking to her after she died and more like time was paused between her death and us releasing her body. She was confirming and affirming the decisions we made, about how we handled her death and memorial and everything related. It was mostly Daddy asking these types of questions, although I asked a few as well. Haley was there but always in the background, not saying much and holding her emotions, similar to how I recall her being at the time. Molly and I spoke to each other some times.

"Is anything like this ever going to be done to us again?" my father asked, exasperatedly. My mother replied that, no, we would never have to experience anything as painful as this ever again, for the rest of our lives.

Then Daddy asked about her plans to communicate with us after death, like if she would and how might we do so. The subject of dreams immediately came up. The dream began to focus more on me then. She was standing in front of me, as I was sitting, and she handed me an old piece of paper. On it was my handwriting, and something I had evidently written as a child. It said something to the effect of

I like to sleep, but nobody ever says hi to me there.

I took this as her validation that she is and has been communicating to me through my dreams herself now. I began to cry immediately and I wrapped my arms around her waist. She seemed puzzled at my reaction.

Then I woke up.

For in grief nothing 'stays put.' One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral? / But if a spiral, am I going up or down it? / How often -- will it be for always? -- how often will the vast emptiness astonish me like a complete novelty and make me say, 'I never realized my loss till this moment'? The same leg is cut off time after time.

C.S. Lewis

It has been just over four months since my mother died. It is interesting how differently each individual person I mention that to reacts. When I expect someone to say, "Already?" they say, "It's only been that long?" 

I don't know if that feels like it is a long time or not.

I've been alive for one thousand years, so I suppose it isn't.

09/27/13 dream (hummingbird visitor)

I feel confident that my mother sent this to me last night, either as a message from herself or as herself: a hummingbird.

This morning I awoke around 4:30am, as I typically do in this house these days. Finally after a couple of hours or so I allowed myself to re-attempt sleep and I managed to slip back under, something I am rarely actually successful at doing. 

I had some odd and interesting dreams. The bulk of them are too nebulous to translate here, but I know that one ended with a hummingbird. It did not fit into the rest of the shitty dream I was having, which was a nightmare that involved my left ring finger being crushed and broken (yet another amazingly creative "symbol" of my subconscious...). It - or, perhaps, she - swooped in out of nowhere, the hummingbird did. I saw it buzzing and flitting about. All dream thoughts and actions ceased as my awe was immediately captured. It was beautifully colored in iridescent blues and greens. It immediately reminded me of my mother. I thought to myself how beautiful she would find it and how it actually reminded me of she herself. It reminded me of a video game we used to play that I have not thought of in many years. It flew around briefly and then came straight to my right ear, tickling my neck and acting as if it wanted to enter my head, which caused me to wake up with a start.

Moments of clarity and surety are such a rarity when one is in the midst of grief that for a moment like this to arise so undeniably feels nothing short of miraculous.  

Here are some keywords for myself to remember:

Hummingbird - infinity, eternity, continuity, messenger, stoppage of time, resurrection, beauty, past, independence, recovering of the self...

Ear - memory, promise, need, attention, guidance

Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything. / But no, that is not quite accurate. There is one place where her absence comes locally home to me, and it is a place I can't avoid. I mean my own body. It had such a different importance while it was the body of [her] lover. Now it's like an empty house.

C.S. Lewis

Time. Tabs. Telling.

If synchronization is a positive sign from the universe that you're on the right track, then what does it mean when you're aligned with the thing you thought could be poisoning you?

Do I have permission now?

One second I'm a Gaga, then suddenly the Gaga is me.

(Being with you made her disappear.)