What is grief?

What is grief?

Monday, May 20, 2013 marks the 5^th anniversary of the passing of my mother.  Despite the passage of time, I, at moments, feel this loss as devastatingly painfully as I did when it happened at 12:30am in my, then, parents’ house.  As soon as my mother died and her spirit left, it was undeniably my father’s house.  I’d never understood how her spirit filled that home with energy until I felt the absence of it.

Absence.  It is how I experience my mother now.  When I want to pick up the phone and tell her something, I can’t.  She is absent.  When I get emotional at weddings because one day I want to get married and my mother won’t be there to share that with me, I am sad.  She is absent.  When I am curious about what is the inevitable transition of my hormonal state from fertile to barren, I cannot ask her what it was like for her.  She is absent.  When I am beyond overwhelmed with dealing with my father, I can’t ask her how she, good God, dealt with it.  She is absent.

Every year around this time I cry myself to sleep.  TMI?  Oh well… I don’t give a shit.  Well, a shit about things that don't really matter.  That's an interesting by-product of grief.  The death of my mother catapulted me to a new reality that I couldn’t have understood existed until I woke up there.

So, what is grief?  Do I need grief counseling?  Probably not.  What would I do?  Talk about how much I miss my mom?  How much it hurts?  How much I still feel lost and helpless and want to on occasion curl up in a little ball and feel sorry for myself?  Those feelings are never going to change.  I don't need to spend $100 an hour to talk about them.  In fact, it might not even help if you read Psychology Today.

I will say that I’ve changed.  I feel pain like I’ve never known but I also feel empowered.  Albeit in almost a brutal way.  I've learned how to "let go" in a way.  If you need someone to help you kill an animal, your pet, a mouse, I don't know.... because you want to put it out of its misery, I’ll help you with that.   If you need me to help you throw away the entire contents of a space that is full of crap that no longer serves you but burdens you, I’ll help you with that.  If you need to sob hysterically for hours until the storm passes in your heart, I’ll help you with that.

What is grief?  To me, grief is being permanently plugged into what it means to cherish the precious little time we have on this planet and the precious little time we have with the people we love.  And grief gives me the strength to make hard decisions.  Because emotionally surviving the death of my mother didn’t only happen on May 20, 2008 when she died.  It happens to me on a daily basis.

That is grief.

I'm Funky and I Know It

So...  I think I smell bad.  Not like "homeless" bad or "tree-hugger" bad.  More like "old person" bad.  If I had to rate it on a scale of 1 to 100 with 1 being that "sweet baby smell" right after a bath and 100 being that "not so sweet smell" after a very senior person craps his diaper, I think I'm coming in around the 60's or 70's.  Great eras for bad clothing and groovy music, but not so great areas for the smell spectrum.

I just don't think I smell that great.

Now, don't get me wrong.  I bathe.  I floss.  You know when you haven't flossed for a while and when you finally do, it's like you've dislodged a piece of roadkill or something made of pure evil in there?   If you are laughing at this, you know what I'm talking about.  If you aren't laughing then you either 1) have never flossed which is super gross and you need to stop not doing that or 2) maintain a degree of oral hygiene bordering on obsessive and are in the minority.  (I suppose a third option is that you don't think I'm funny which hurts my feelings so don't mention it, okay?)  So anyway, it's not that smell on a regular basis.

I concede that recently I have tried to tone down the toxicity of my personal care products (damn you, Sodium Laureth Sulfate) and laundry detergents, make-up and cleaning supplies.  So hopefully, I am no longer exposing myself to harmful chemicals, but I think the trade-off is that now I kind of smell like an old person.  A lavender-scented old person.

Sigh.

It's like I can't get really clean.  I can exfoliate twelve layers of dead skin at the Korean spa but I feel almost instantly "dirty" again.  Like it's coming from the INSIDE.  Like I have some inner filtration system that's not fully functioning.  Oh, wait.  Isn't that my liver??

Double sigh.

I have a particularly keen sense of smell so perhaps I'm the only one noticing this, but if you've ever wanted to say, "Laura, you smell a little funky," you wouldn't hurt my feelings.  You'd actually validate my concerns and give me one less reason to think I'm a little crazy.

For now, I suppose I'll stick to my lavender-scented routine, Google detoxes I'll never have the Puritan commitment to undertake or finish and know that the only thing that stinks more than me is Cancer.

Learning Something New

It seems appropriate that my first blog post is about learning something new.  Like in "how to blog."  How to make a blog.  How to design a blog.  How to write a blog.  How to remember frankly that I even HAVE a blog.  I'm a bit over extended so this may end up being my only blogpost for 2013.   Me and a million other lost tech souls (otherwise known as "mid-lifers" trying to get in and stay in the social media game).

By the way, me and Twitter have had a few dates and ... I don't see the allure.  I'll stick with my current co-dependent, obsessional relationship with Facebook, thank you very much.  LinkedIn is kinda cute, what with those "endorsements" and all, and I'm sure we'll have a coffee date or two when I'm looking for permanent work in the fall.  My acting website and I aren't really talking right now.   I can't stand to look at her so we must have had a fight or something.  No doubt, we'll sort it out.

So, why blog?  I dunno... I guess... cause everybody else is doing it??  I think some would say they blog to "have a voice."  Or to "put their two cents out there."   Hmmm....  I already have a voice and I have about two cents to my name which I need to keep until I have a job so, why?  Again that question...

I think I haven't blogged before today because the voice in my head (there's only one - for now) hasn't had much to say except an endless stream of whining, complaining, venting, ranting, over-analyzing and a number of other negative activities that have allowed me to let off some super icky steam over the years.   It also proves that I have a lot of freaking awesome friends since they still indulge me when I bitch about the last five years of my life.

The events of the last five years will of course be played out in these posts.  Hopefully, in drips and drabs without entire long, boring stories of "that story" - the one I need to stop telling.

This blog is about the NEW story.  New dreams, new realizations, new things to laugh about (it IS called "Laugh at Laura" - there better be something to elicit a chuckle or two).   A new way of looking at the world.  A new way of seeing myself.  A new way of living.

That sounds great, yes?  I hope I remember I started this blog...