full moon, empty heart

[thejunipertree]

I've started dismantling my mother's room, so that I can fully move into it. Little things like putting away her make-up (which will most likely be donated to the battered women's shelter that the majority of her clothes are going to), storing her stuffed animals in the closet, dusting everything, and setting my own things up.

It's weird, I've been living out of that room since mid-May out of a strange superstition of mine, but I never really moved into it. Sure, my altar was in there and my make-up. My clothes had already been in the closet, since she and I shared it. But, I never did anything to make it 'ours'. To make it 'mine'. She used to hollar at me for referring to it as her room. It was always our room, to her.

I went to Target tonight and bought a few things to make it more of a Tara space. My mother had numerous fabulous qualities, but she missed the boat on decorating skills. Ask any of my friends and they'll spin long tales of framed tiger photos and Native American decorative plates. Bride dolls. That huge and horrid 70s-era hanging over the bed of a naked couple at sunset. It has to be seen to be believed.

The apartment is going to be gutted and re-decorated to more suit my brother and I. Miss Stephanie gave me a two-hundred dollar gift certificate to get started on this. I'll be having a painting party, since the walls are terribly stained with nicotine in the living room. Maybe some area rugs. Definitely new lamps.

And despite the fact that I absolutely hate the current decor, I still feel weird about changing it. It's been my common environment since I moved back home from Philadelphia in 2000. Seeing the cheesy tigers in the living room is almost a sense of security. I hesitate to remove any of it and I know I'll have some problems throwing any of it out.

It has to be done though, so Todd and I can feel more comfortable staying here. He wants to move into another of the two-bedroom apartments in the building. I do not. Not to mention the fact that we have the biggest apartment in the building, with the biggest bathroom, and that I don't think there's even any two bedrooms open right now.

There's an odd feeling of guilt hanging over my head and heart, despite any rationalizing I do. It's only been a couple of weeks and I'm already cleaning house? It seems fucked up and somehow wrong to me. Like I'm bulldozing over her memory. I know it has to be done and if I don't do it sooner, rather then later, then it will never be accomplished. I know myself far too well. I'm lazy and sentimental. I let myself relax about this and two years from now, tigers will still be on the walls and her clothes still in the closet.

I felt guilty enough about moving my altar into her bedroom when she was still at the nursing home, but this is like full-scale.

I cleaned off her window sill tonight, because it had accumulated a metric fucktonne of cat hair and dust. Cleaned it off and set up the multi-photo frame from her funeral service, with all the pictures of her at different ages. The little wood box holding some of her ashes is next to it. I went to move the big box of her ashes, which is still in a handled bag because I'm not quite sure what to do with it yet, and was amazed at its weight. It's so small, smaller than a shoe box. How can it weigh that much? And for that matter, how can a 103-pound woman be reduced to something that little? It makes my brain spinny.

Little things keep coming to me as I move through my days. I pick up my knitting and realize I'm never going to knit her that cream coloured scarf I had her pick out yarn for. I listen to the cat purr as he tries to climb down my throat in the middle of the night and think about how she'll never shout at him in the wee hours to "Get the fuck out off of me!" We used to laugh at that and tell her that the neighbours were going to think she had a man in there. How scandalous! She won't see the tree I decorate this year for Christmas (the only part of the holiday I enjoy) or help me hide the presents I buy for the Engineer. I don't even know if I'm going to get a tree this year. She won't finish that book about the Boelyn sisters I bought for her and thusly stole for a week because I was unwillingly sucked into the story. She'll never make her crystal wine glasses sing for us anymore. I tried to do it myself, on Thanksgiving, but I couldn't. The Wee Ninja's Chris kept telling me that I needed to drink more out of the glass, which I did, but I still couldn't wring a note out of it. She won't see me graduate mortuary school. Hell, she won't see me start mortuary school. No more being exasperated at Todd's snowboarding gear in the hallway or more ever-growing book and shoe collection in the living room.

None of it.
It's all gone.

And I don't know how to handle that. I don't know how to wrap my mind around the concept that I'm never going to see her again.

I've lost a lot of people in my life, some of them very close to me, but none of them have had this much of a presence in my life. How am I supposed to do this? What am I supposed to do? How do I know if I'm doing it correctly?

One of her friends called me a week ago, to see how we were holding up. I didn't answer the phone and I haven't called her back yet. I don't even know what to say to her. How I'm holding up changes every day, every minute. Her best friend called today, when I wasn't home, and spoke to my brother. She wanted to know how we were and to let us know that her nephew died recently. Seizures in his sleep. They found him the next morning. This is the same woman who also just lost her twin sister to advanced diabetes. The nephew who died was her twin's son.

When it happened, I had to tell my mother about the death of her best friend's twin sister and it killed me to make her cry. I couldn't even tell her until two weeks after it happened because I found out during that very nasty period we had in September when she wasn't coherant and we thought she was going to die any minute. And I couldn't even sit behind her and hold her when I did finally tell her, like I always did when she cried, because she was in that goddamn wheelchair.

I held her like that at the oncologist's office, the day we were told that if she didn't receive more chemotherapy in the next couple of months, she wasn't going to make the rest of the year. I told her everything was going to be okay, that we were going to get through this.

I was wrong, wasn't I?

The doctors make me so goddamn angry. There were so many things that could have been done differently, SHOULD have been done differently. If they had been done, she might still be alive. And not in the nursing home, but here. Where she belonged. When I think about it, it makes me want to scream until my throat is raw and bloody. It makes me want to hit things.

I've got this big empty space in my life suddenly and I don't know what to do with it.

Fuck.

I'm going to bed.