Starting again

I haven't submitted anything in a while. It's been almost 6 months since my mother passed away, and it's taken this long to climb out of the fog. It's surprising how many areas of your life are affected by something like that. There's the depression, which puts a cloud over everything and just takes the joy out of things that used to be so interesting. The sense of loss, which makes everything good that happens seem to matter less because no matter what, it can't heal the pain or make up for what happened. And then there is the guilt. The nagging feeling that you should have been able to prevent it, or that you should have done thing differently because you should have, some how, known that this would happen. My mother had cancer, and while there was a point at which I knew, logically, that she was not going to "get better" there were still no way of knowing when she would die, or how long we would have together. In the months before she died I often found myself thinking "what if this is the last time we do this or that" but it's impossible to plan for these things. It's taken me this long to realize that. Plus, because of where I work and what I do I was constantly feeling like I should have been able to DO SOMETHING to prevent this...but I couldn't have. Guilt is an insane feeling--powerful, ruthless, and insane.

I was by her bedside when she died. I don't think anything can prepare you for that sort of experience. It was traumatic and painful and yet I don't know that I would have done anything differently if I had it to do over again. When my father died, I wasn't there. I talked to him on the phone the day before (a Friday) and was planning to come see him the next day (a Saturday) when my sister got a phone call saying that he had died and that was it...I never saw him again. We had a closed casket ceremony, at my sister's request, and so I literally never saw him again. With my mom, I was in the hospital room almost around the clock for the 5 days before she died--it was one of those situations where they knew it was going to be any day now. After the first day and a half she was no longer able to communicate, so we just sat there, watching her succumb to the pain, begging the docs to increase the pain medication. It was incredibly traumatic. When her eyes rolled back in her head, it was this insane feeling of both incredible loss and relief that it was finally over. It's taken months to get over what can best be described as post-traumatic fog.

It's not as though life stopped. It's kinda like when you are driving down a major highway and then enter a long tunnel under a large body of water. You keep driving, but you aren't entirely sure where you are, and you are just doing what you need to do to get to the other side. You can't see what's around you, and can barely see very far in front of you. You just go through the motions so that you don't get hit, and keep telling yourself that you have to keep driving or otherwise you will never get where it is you need to go. No one wants to enter the tunnel, but once you are there, you just do what you have to do to survive.

So what happened while I was in the foggy tunnel. A lot actually. My fellowship ended and I was offered a was offered a rather coveted position in the office of the director--which I took. It's a nice promotion with the maximum advancement potential legally available to someone coming out of my fellowship. Normally I would never make such a boastful comment out loud, but somehow it seems okay to blog...I mean, how modest is blogging anyway, right? Plus, I have no idea if anyone will actually read this, so why not.

I've also made some rather fun purchases. I got a 42" HD plasma screen television. I bought that right after my mother died, as an attempt to bring myself out of the funk I was in. It didn't work at the time, but I am rather enjoying it now. Plus, I got it at a rediculously low price. Originally at $2,500 I got it for $999, which included someone coming to my house to make sure I installed it properly. There were many factors that lined up just right to get me that price, including a bunch of sales and promotions, and the fact that the "newer model" was just released...the only difference being a metal border vs a black one. A picture of mine is on the left, and the newer one is on the right. You can see that there isn't much difference. Mine was rated well on CNET and I happen to like the metal color.

I also bought a new MacBook and a video camera. I have always been a PC user, but my husband needed a new laptop because the screen on his compaq was dying, and the thought of buying a vista machine was giving us both a headache. He didn't want to learn a new operating system either, so he took my dell laptop and I got the new mac...yeah! The video camera is a sony mini DV and I plan to video my sister's wedding. It works nicely with the mac, so this should be a lot of fun.

Okay, more aobut that later. I need to go meet my husband for lunch, then do some actual work after that. It has been really quiet this morning.