Tag: Sisters

We are Blood.

I am sitting in my car waiting. As I have sat inside and outside of schools, doctors’ offices, and in cars, all these years.

Always sitting with my sorrow, I wait.

I wish my mother was here, I find myself saying out loud, welcome tears spring to my eyes. Also, I am still surprised by them.

My health feels like a constant betrayal, as if. Am I owed good health, not headaches, not body aches, not a loose stomach, not fatigue, not depression, not anxiety, not sleeplessness? How is it that I of all people “deserve” good health? I know that I don’t. But my mother would have had wisdom about it. I am lost.

The sky is as gloomy and dismal as my mood. It follows the grief of Palestine that is ringing in my ears, my heart, and my mind; abuzz with adrenaline from witnessing genocide. Don’t we remember Rwanda?

So many families, generations lost. I think.

How do I preserve mine? We’re fractured. My sister doesn’t speak to me, specifically. My parents are dead. Holly is dead. Our children are many including Holly’s and those that have joined ours. We are all a legacy.

We each and all matter.

Even though I feel lost, unmoored, untethered, and without roots, I feel my family lineage breaking in my body; I know that it is now my responsibility to be the strength that holds the generations together. Even though my sister has chosen not to be with me, we are vital. We are a link to the next generation. We are blood.

Grief

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Grief has no kind of timeline.

It follows strange pathways through my body. I’m tired of feeling it.

I had the thought two days ago, I want to forget her. I will gather all the things in my home that remind me of her. I will box them up and make them disappear from sight. Memories only lead to grief when your someone is murdered.

My phone rings from a good friend of thirty years.

We never talk talk. Just catch up via social media.

It triggered the same panic that I get every time the phone rings, someone is dead. I answered it. Of course no one is dead. We had a lovely conversation filled with laughter and her voice just exactly the way I remember.

I still fear answering my phone. I get a jolt of adrenaline and panic.

I’m tired of my grief. I am choosing life, I promise you. But grief just comes ambling in and you are stricken by lightening. You choose to regroup, get on with whatever it is you were doing, or curl into a singed ball.

I hear a certain performer and remember she loved going to concerts with her kids. I see a certain flower and remember her love of tulips. I smell a food and think of her cooking. I cook and the kitchen is messy, I think of how messy she was. I unlock my car and think of how she broke my lock and how furious I felt. I drive her son to football and know that she would have been a great sports Mom.

Forty something years of memories that cannot be boxed up and made to go away. Though I am tired of my grief I carry on.

Today I Said No

Today I said no.

I said no to something that might have been sweet and good, something that I would enjoy and that would make me feel good about myself – helping other people.  It was something that was even noble.  Can I be honest and tell you that I need some things to do that make me feel good about myself?  The recent Stations of the Cross exhibit, which I was a part of, was profound for me in that it was a thing that I did, for me.

Today I said no.

No because there are other good things, needs, jobs for me to do.  And I have to be careful as an addict, to not feed that need to help others.

Things are going on in my family, screaming out to me, which need resolution and clarity and my time.  My children are of the age that they need my daily prayer, daily.  My attention, fully.  My love and affirmations, honestly.  This takes the kind of attention that I haven’t had for them as of yet.  My widowed mother living alone needs more of my attention, care and to be blunt she needs errands accomplished.  My sisters each deserve my love and attention in a way that I haven’t ever had the courage to give them.  My marriage isn’t perfect; it has holes that need patching even though, after eighteen years together, we know it’s for life.  We’re in the boat together but we’ve sprung a few leaks.  No one’s sinking but we deserve to give the time that a good marriage requires.

So, today I said no – no to something good.  So that I could say yes to being a mother, a sister, a daughter, a wife and more than anything I said yes to be a writer.

Today I said yes.