Wrapping it up

Everyone blogs for a different reason; as a reader, it is my opinion that most blogs are products of a simple indulgence - look what I am doing, look what I have done. There's a term out there for it: Micro Fame. A way to selfishly share their lives without having to reciprocate and listen to others. The selfishness can easily be offset by reading other blogs, so essentially you get a bunch of people relating to others without interaction -- unless you comment each other, of course. I'm still amused by the "look what I'm doing every five minutes" style of blogging, even though I don't agree with bombarding people with so much useless information; I'm not really interested in knowing that you stubbed your toe 5 seconds ago and that your last fart smelled like bacon. It's interesting, though, that blogs have provided us the ability to know each other's intimate thoughts, yet still keep us at a safe distance, disconnected. It used to take effort -- a phone call or personal visit -- to find out how and what a friend was doing. Now, we place our emotions and experiences on a 24 Hour Buffet -- I've put it all out there... please take what you like, when you'd like.
I don't have a problem with this new system. In fact, it makes me all the more appreciative of the "old" ways; a phone call from a friend can make my day. And in cases of my dear friend Danielle, it is sometimes the only way to keep up with her trials and tribulations in another hemisphere. And her blog is something to admire, because it is also a great resource of how to survive when suddenly moving to Brazil in addition to her intelligent editorials and daily events.
Sometimes my own blogging was sporadic. I've always tried to keep the the right priorities: This is a blog about life, not a life about a blog. Quality over quantity.

Ultimately it comes down to this: This is a blog about my journey through grief and transition. Anyone that has lost a parent, or both, understands what an adventure it can be. The fact is that my journey will never end... it simply becomes a bit easier; I know how the path is paved, but sharp turns inevitably pop up whenever I think I know where I'm going.

Six years ago, I spent a week at the United States Naval Academy, in preparation to attend that prestigious institution. The competition was fierce, but I made it to the summer program, a good indication that I was on track to gain my admission. I wrote to my father, the Army man, every evening and detailed my experiences. He was so very proud that I had made it there. On the last day, we were subjected to yelling, questioning, and intense physical exertion -- your average boot camp stuff -- but most of us were spoiled 17 year old kids, so this was extreme. I just remember doing push ups as they mopped up the sweat and tears off the floor in front of me. Then, suddenly, we were sent outside to the main courtyard, greeted by the Navy band and the Dean. We were soaked in sweat, and now rain, yet we were overcome with so much pride... we freaking survived. I remember cheering, hugging strangers, and feeling euphoric. At the time, I considered it the proudest, most challenging time of my life.

A month later, I pressed my ear to my father's chest as his heart beat its final time. I planned the funeral and gave my eulogy to a standing room only crowd. I buried my parents together, after having held onto my mother's ashes for 12 years. The next few months became the most difficult challenge of my life.

I received the congressional nomination required for admission to the academy, but it no longer made sense to go. My only support was gone. Later, I got accepted to all the UC's that I applied to, but I found myself unable to go. New challenges -- a house, a business, a crash course in adult life -- all prevented me from going off to school.

I try not to use becoming an orphan at 17 as a scapegoat. But I cannot deny the catastrophic change it has caused in my personal development. There was a reason that I excelled at many jobs I once held, but never stuck with: It just wasn't where I was supposed to be. There was a reason I couldn't make house payments: I wasn't supposed to be a homeowner! (yet.) I just felt like I was living someone else's life. Even after being criticized by people I considered friends at the time, being told that my chances were gone, that I should find a trade and stick with it, etc etc... I made it. On the flipside, there are the friendships that have endured through all of this, that never doubted me. Those friendships make the naysayers hardly even memorable.

Five years later, I am here. I'm sitting in the UC Davis library, doing what I've only dreamed of: Putting off studying to write a blog post. Haha.

Every day I have my "I can't believe I'm here!" moments, and my friends always tease me for being the one that repeatedly asks, "Don't you just LOVE it here?" Finally, I am directing my own life. I am no longer having to react to circumstances beyond my control. I have choices, something I missed for a very long time. Best of all, I have the love of my life by my side.

The transition is over, and there is no longer any uncertainty.
I am retiring this blog.

But I'm still around, and I'll still receive comments. So if for any reason you want an update, let me know.

And if you're in town, we'll share a Cafecito con Leche.

2 Days to go...

A great find from the garage:


I don't know what it is about this picture, but it makes me happy, angry, and really sad all at the same time.

I still don't understand how it went from that nice happy family, to

the widower and his daughter, to

just the daughter.

This version of the photo perfectly illustrates how I've been feeling for the past few months. You may look at me and see someone who's got it together... but this this what it's really like. It hits me hard to see the actual photo when I've been so used to the latter version.

I miss them. It's so unbearably painful today. I can feel my heart wringing out the tears like a common sponge, each twist accompanied by a pain whose depth is more than I can even fathom, much less describe. It's awful.

Perhaps tomorrow will be a better day.

This is the most difficult time of my life.

I can't wait until this weekend is over.

Less than two weeks until I move. I've reserved the moving truck and have only a few fixes on the house left to do. Tomorrow's adventure? The GARAGE.
When people hear this, they automatically assume that it's piled high with junk and forgotten belongings. This is only a half truth.

The garage was my father's domain. It was his workshop. He ran a business that supported us for so many years from that garage. If he wasn't in front of the TV with his giant bowl of popcorn, he was out there. Even when temperatures topped 110 in the middle of august, he was out there with some swamp cooler he had rigged up, or most recently, the air duct that he installed onto the main a/c unit that provided air conditioning directly on him.
That's where he reported to work everyday. He had the discipline that only a military man could have. Every tool was inventoried. He was amazingly organized. He could fix ANYTHING. (which is also why I never made it to the doctor's office for injuries.)

It's hard to explain the clinginess that we go through when people die. Yes, death is natural, blah blah blah... but it's so unnatural in a sense that one day they're here, the next day they aren't. I know that I immediately felt the need to cling to anything that reminded me of him. I'd stand in his closet and smell his clothes and cry. Does that make me weird? No. It's one of those things that people do that no one likes to talk about because it could potentially sound weird to non-mourners.
Those days are long gone now; I donated his clothes, his suits, his shoes... his bed is gone and so is all his bedroom furniture. I've saved the important things. I'm glad that I did that years ago, and I'm glad that I did it alone.

But that garage. There's a lot of baggage there. I am going to find all sorts of things that I don't need, but that may have value. Then what? Tools are great things to have, but I don't need ALL of them. But their replacement value is high. Is my father laughing at me for schlepping these things all the way to Davis? Or is he pissed that I just threw away some really awesome tool?
Or.. wait a minute, it doesn't matter either way because he is dead and if he really cared about his things he wouldn't have died. ::insert bratty face::

All joking aside, I have really put this task off as long as I possibly could. I'm looking forward to finding things that I haven't seen since my childhood, as well as being reminded of things that I've pushed out of my brain for so long. It's going to suck, it's going to be sad, it's going to be funny and it's going to be tough.

It's the last physical evidence that he was here.
... and I have to take it all apart.

Trash. Donate. Keep.

I've been busy -- more so than when I use that phrase as a simple excuse. Honest to goodness busy. The kind of busy where you don't even know what the date is or what is happening in the next few days; you just wake up and tackle whatever is coming your way with no planning.

The kind of busy where you look down at you legs and swear up and down that you JUST SHAVED THEM but realize it's been more like a week since they've been anywhere near a razor.

My entire life has been reduced to boxes in a storage unit, and it's oh-so-wonderful. My house is now empty and uncarpeted, and I've taken refuge in what was once the ferret room, with only my mattress and laptop to keep me entertained. It's a bizarre waiting-for-the-future-to-get-here-already feeling. I am very ready to get to Davis and do my school thing. I am tired of working in the corporate mess that my animal hospital has become -- and I'm tired of working directly under someone who is, well, stupid. There's no other way to put it. My supervisor was promoted due to seniority rather than intelligence or common sense or TACT and everyday I try to keep my eye on the prize and not get supremely irritated. Ah, the mediocrity. I will not miss it. I will miss the dear friends that I made there, especially Chrissy. You don't really meet people like her very often because they just don't exist in great numbers.

I am very thankful that I've been in the workforce for 5 years with only a high school diploma as my highest level of education. I've been fortunate to nab jobs simply because I nailed the interview; I really have nothing on paper that gives me any intellectual credibility. I know the reality of what difference an education can make, and I'll never take that for granted.

It's also been a lonely past few months... my ferret and my grandmother died in the same weekend, Mark went back to school, and I sorted through an entire house and lifetime of memories. Trash. Donate. Keep. That's been the summary of this transition. Danielle is in Brazil, and I'm secretly jealous that she got to start her new life before me, and that she's in the middle of what will become my favorite chapter in her memoir.

I'll probably talk more about the grandmother's death in more detail as the emotions hit me. I'm so removed from it all right now that I haven't gotten past the initial shock of it all. I know that once I get to school I'll really want to tell her all about it because that was something that would have made her incredibly happy. I'm really not sure if I'll go to Mexico again, because she was my reason for going. I do have other family there, but it would just be odd. The 1000 miles to get there would pale in comparison to the emotional journey I'd be facing. We'll see. I'm trying not to think about the fact that the three people that were instrumental in my upbringing are all dead now... and I'm not really done growing up. It's a constant feeling of WAAAAAAAAIT don't go just yet there are more questions and I need your answers.
Luckily, even if the answers aren't there in real-time, I still hear them in the back of my mind. That's really the best reassurance there is.



I found this when I was going through my dad's old tax paperwork, and it made me really happy. My father was as new to grief as I was when my mother died, and yet he was such a pro when it came down to it. He listened, he was honest, and he got me through it. And finding this -- the fact that he held onto it -- just reminds me of how remarkable he was.

And that pretty much sums up my grief at this point in life: Uggggh they were so great why the hell are they gone? (insert sounds of frustration here)

And... that's about it.
I'm just standing here,
smack in the middle of a tight rope walk,
suspended between where I was and where I'd like to be...

but without the urge to jump.

What I Least Expected

I don't blog because I don't feel like anything new is going on. I don't feel that I have any witty stories or experiences worth sharing... yet when I do have the urge to just sit and write, I get this feeling that too many things have happened since the last post and there is just no way to provide an update that could include everything.
Makes no sense to me.

Also I am trying to cut the habit of only writing when something is wrong. I've figured out that I don't like talking about the bad stuff, so I write instead. But when things are great or nice, I'm quick to talk about it and leave it off the blog.
I'm sure this isn't uncommon.

So this is a mix of both. Normally I'd be sitting here talking about the past, how I miss my father and how his death affects me to this day, the little things that constantly remind me of him and prod at my heart in an unpleasant manner and the other intricacies of grief that sneak up on me on a daily basis.
Thursday, July 12th, was the 5th anniversary of my father's death.
There is something odd about 5's and their multiples. Something... like if you were to write out the number of years since a person's death, it would look like this:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

Why? I'm not sure. I always thought it was something specific to me; my mother died when I was 5 so when I turned 10, the 5 years that she had been gone equalled half of my life and it scared me a bit... and when I turned 15, the ratio of time she had been in my life had been reduced to a third... so 5 has always been this alarming number to me.

But this 5 year anniversary was different. Instead of having it cause me to reflect on the past, it opened my eyes to the future. A certainty that I would normally consider arrogant had appeared before my eyes.

The days leading up to the 12th threw me for a loop. I couldn't find my car in parking lots (my big red truck had become so elusive), I wanted to just stay in bed, and a skin condition that popped up a year ago around this time mysteriously surfaced again -- Almost to the day it did last year.

The 11th was uneventful, a quiet dinner alone followed by the squink squink sound of a windex bottle as I wiped windows and mirrors clean... the occasional glance at myself in the mirror, the reflection of a slight smirk as I realized that once again, I was trying to postpone any sad feelings by distracting myself with the celebratory feelings of finally removing that rust stain on the bathroom sink.

I'm no stranger to feeling alone, and although that feeling has substantially decreased over the past year, it is around this time of year that it reaches it's peak. I surrendered to this feeling yet again, and armed with my cup of tea, I went to bed. I laid there for about an hour until the phone rang. It was Mark. It was 2am. He was at my door.

When I felt most alone, he was there. It was like a dream.... but I should have known better. He's Mark, he's amazing, and although I don't expect him to do these things, I am fully aware that he is capable of making me incredibly happy. The kind of happy that makes your eyes well up when you think about it, the kind of happy that you wish you could cut into pieces and give to your friends because it feels like so much happy shouldn't all go to one person.

The kind of happy that makes you certain of your future.

.

It's so quiet in my house.
I want to smell my father's coffee, my mother's perfume
hear the whirring sound of his machines as he works in the garage, that bellowing laughter of his,
or the soft sound of my mother singing some song in Spanish

sometimes i hear them, just for a moment, and it's comforting. And then it's just sad.
Because it gets quiet again. I'm the only one here.

I get like this around my birthday, usually. Adding another year to my age immediately reminds me of how long they've been gone.

But this year it's hitting me early. I can't even explain what has been going on with me these past few weeks. I've lost my sense of time it seems. I'm standing still in a dark room and the days are flying past me and I can't seem to take hold of anything. I can't grab onto the dates long enough to take care of menial tasks like returning phone calls or taking care of those routine things like bills and chores...

And I'm numb. I can make a list of the wonderful things in my life but they prove to be no match against this relentless current that keeps pulling me down. What's most frightening is that I'm losing the energy to keep fighting; struggling to keep afloat just doesn't seem worth it anymore. Because with every new breath i get pulled under again. I just want to stay under, I want to close my eyes and let this game be over already. I don't want to play this game anymore.

But that's ridiculous. And I know that.
So perhaps I've been so busy fighting this inner battle that I've failed to notice what day it is and who I've neglected.
It's affecting my health, and in all certainty, if you are reading this, it has somehow affected you.

This is not who I want to be, and it's frustrating that my situation and circumstances are really changing who I am to the very core of my character. I feel like I am turning into a hopeless, negative, cynical person. I feel it most when I try to envision my future and I see nothing, or when that tiny voice tries to tell me that things are going to be okay and I dismiss it as nonsense.

I don't like where I am right now. I don't like who I am right now.
But I don't feel that I have any control over it anymore.

So I'll keep doing what needs to be done, keep my animals fed and the utilities turned on, and I'll just wait. Something good is bound to happen. I'm clinging to that tiny shred of optimism; it's all that I have left.

Just what I needed most

Cold mornings, numb fingers, delicious hot chocolate with the perfect ::shhhhwoop:: of whipped cream floating on top...
Since the age of 5 until last May, these things had been my weekly routine.

I first started out helping my father sell at the local street fair. Actually.. I just went along with him instead of staying home alone. Little by little, I started helping him set up the booth and talking to people... and before we knew it, I was a fierce little salesgirl.

And then I'd bring my rollerblades with me and skate around the entire place, and pretty soon everyone know who I was.
It's a bit interesting to note the transformation that took place around that age. After my mother's death when I was five, I was pretty withdrawn for a while. I didn't want to play; I was just sad. There's this giant gap in my memory where I don't remember anything at all the months following her death. It's just this dark period in my childhood.

The street fair turned this shy little girl into a talkative, friendly little kid who could always be found with some remnant of lunch stuck to her face and grass stains on her jeans. Looking back, I was pretty funny to look at. My father had no idea how to comb a little girl's hair, he had no idea on how to dress me... i didn't really have time to worry about what I was wearing because I was too busy worrying about my scalp being ripped off my skull from the intensely tight pony tail he had inflicted upon me.

I became a fixture at the street fair. I knew where every booth was, I knew all the gossip because the adults thought that I was too young to understand what they were talking about.. ("Dad! Did you know that so-and-so has a boyfriend now because she says she needs the organisms that her husband won't give her?") So maybe I was clueless.. but I became an invaluable source of fresh news.
Everyone watched me grow up. They kept me in check; I couldn't do anything without it getting back to my father. Eventually the rollerblades came off and by the time I could drive, I would just set up the booth with my father, leave for the day, then come back to help pack up.

Then he died.

I took over the booth and did it by myself. I found comfort in hearing stories about my dad from vendors and customers alike. I never felt orphaned when I was there. If I missed a day, I'd get grief from my neighbors the following weekend. And when my birthday rolled around, they'd surprise me with cake at 6am. I never once felt alone when I went to the street fair.

Street fair season runs from October-May. I said my goodbyes last May with all the intentions of returning in October. But I didn't go back. I was in such a rut emotionally and I really felt that I was done selling at the fair. Because I was a mess, I barricaded myself for while and didn't call people back when they called to see if I was okay. I just didn't want to talk to anyone. By the time I was okay, I felt dumb for not keeping in touch with people, which just continued my avoidance of their calls.

So last weekend I finally went back. And it was fantastic.
I lost my old space so they just put me in an empty one for the day... but people still managed to find me. I really expected to get yelled at for not being there, but everyone was so nice and just happy to see me again.
And... as funny as this sounds...
I was a total Street Fair Celebrity.

While I was waiting for my space, I made conversation with a new guy.
"So... have you sold here before?"
"Oh yeah, I pretty much grew up here. I've been coming here for like 15 years or so."
He didn't seem to believe me until 5 different vendors walked by and greeted me by name. One lady even started with the classic "I've known her since she was this big!"
He then looked at me. "So you weren't kidding."
"Nope."

I went to buy some coffee, and after a brief conversation, he wouldn't let me pay for it.
My breakfast burrito was free.
Later when I was hungry, I went to buy some yummy dates and pistachios. My attempts to purchase those were denied with a smile and "This time its on me" in Spanish.
It was just so nice. By the end of the day I was exhausted, I didn't make as much money as I had hoped... but I was happy. Really really happy.

And for a moment, I felt my father pat me on the back.

I can't wait until next weekend!