tuesday afternoon i was in the little kitchenette at the office. it was after lunch and there was a pile of dirty dishes in the sink.

on top of the pile was a lonely, odd dish.

t'was quite bizarre. never saw the odd dish in the office before. and when i looked for it afterwards, it was gone.

she says hello to me often in strange ways.

maura and i are jealous because she came to buzzy in a dream.

valentine's day is over. magee came over and we talked about how hard the day had been.

for me, it was not as bad as i had anticipated. i was floored the previous night when i opened my mailbox and found a valentine with a dog on it. mom always sent me a valentine with a dog. aunt jane had sent me a valentine with a boston terrier. and i cried because i missed mummy and i cried because i felt so lucky that i get to share her best friend.

the actual day, at work, i was insanely busy. i didn’t give it much thought until i got an e-mail from magee saying that she had been crying all day. and then an e-mail from buzzy about how much he loved us and how he had seen mummy in a dream.

so i sent them the quicktime movie of missy smiling (as soon as her mummy comes into her view) that i peek at every once in a while to carry me through the rough spots.

later that night, magee and i talked about all of the things about which we feel guilty.

she feels guilty that she didn’t spend every minute of every day in the sunroom with mom. i feel guilty that i did not write her a letter every day when i was in california for that one week in december. magee feels guilty that she was gone when mom had taken her turn for the worse. i feel guilty that i wasn’t there for the week that mom was doing great.

there are a million things that we are second guessing.

but when magee tells me what is eating at her, i can easily see that she has no reason to feel bad…and vice versa.

the times that i have had a “valentine” on valentine’s day have been largely disappointing (that is another story for another blog) but i found a remedy several years ago when I decided that I would forget about focusing on whether or not i was part of a couple and focus on celebrating love.

so i celebrated mummy on many a valentine's day. i made a poster for her one year. one year I made her a mixed tape.

some of the songs on her mixed tape are the same songs i included in the party favor i made for her funeral celebration.

and when those feelings of guilt start to creep up on me, i listen to “ain’t no mountain high enough.” and it makes me feel good. because i know that the words are true. that there was no mountain high enough and no valley low enough to keep us from her when she needed us.

when she needed us, we were there. both magee and i had friends who shared their regrets with us about things they would have done differently when they were faced with losing their mothers. those very intimate gifts made us wise enough to make her our first priority, no matter what the consequences.

it will take us a while to make up for the lost time at work and the lost sleep and the lost attention to anything other than her.

but, when i start to beat myself up for my human failings, i remember the way that she looked at us when we dropped everything and ran to her side. and i feel so good about that.

she was loved immeasurably and, with the exception of our teenage years, she always knew it.

and somewhere in the song there are four words that mean so much to me, "MY LOVE IS ALIVE. way down in my heart. although we are miles apart."

her body is dead but her love is as alive today as it was when she was physically in front of us, smiling at us with her eyes. that carries me. she still carries me.

i have taken all of the e-mails that i sent when mummy was sick and strung them together in this blog form in hopes that our story and the things that i have learned might help someone else.

and i while i was doing it, i noticed something surprising.

i work really hard. i spend a great deal of my life at work. but work only came up in my e-mails on a few occasions.

and those were only mentions of how mom loved liz, or how i cried at my desk, or how i kept it together until liz came around the reception desk and gave me a hug when i came back to the office after that first month away.

and work is grueling. but they were amazing to me in october. and they were incredibly supportive when i went back east to care for mummy in november and december and for maura and missy in january.

but when i look over my life as i recorded it over the past few months...work was so incredibly unimportant.

i knew this...but i didn't understand it as well as i do now.

which is not to say that i don't value my job.

because when i look back through the e-mails i sent, and listen to my saved voicemails, i find how much my work has meant to me over the years in the names of the people who i call my best friends.

lisa, who talked me down when i learned that the cancer was in mummy's brain, and who (with her beautiful daughter, molly and son eric) gave me respite from the battle on more than one occasion, was an AE on nissan when I was an assistant print producer at chiat/day in los angeles.


cat — who left me messages of love and helped me with everything from dealing with the fear, to managing the estate paperwork, to finding the baby monitor — was an art buyer with me at chiat/day in los angeles.

vanesa, who promised mom many years ago that she would "spring her" if we ever put her in a nursing home (and who, along with her beautiful daughter carmen, left "smoochies" on my voicemail), worked with me at chiat in l.a. , was my roommate when i was at chiat in new york, and worked with me again at chiat in san francisco.
pen, who sent me e-mails of support and sent mummy a picture of his two gorgeous daughters with a sign with mummy's name inside a giant heart, was an account supervisor on nissan when i was at chiat in los angeles.

carisa, who shared so much of her own stories with me about the loss of her mother, and who constantly reminded me to live in the moment when mummy was still here, and who ran the san francisco marathon while holding my mom in her heart, worked with me at chiat in los angeles and then again in san francisco.

gabrielle, who wrote me cards and letters of support and wrote even more cards and letters directly to my mother, worked with me at chiat in los angeles.


i look around my closest circle of friends and so many of them, like victoria and darcy and analisa (and, by extension, quinci) are people who i met through work.

so, while i didn't find my work important enough to mention in my e-mails over the past few months, my work has given me incredible gifts in the people it has brought into my life.

work is pretty rough right now. it was not fun today...but i do have so much hope for the future. and whether that comes to fruition or not, i know that i have already added some of the people that i currently work with to the list of people that i will hold in my heart forever.

joni selflessly took on a lot of extra weight so i could make mummy my first priority. i will never forget that.

and when i came back after mummy died, i told liz that i had been disappointed that i was unable to get a gospel choir for mom's funeral. she was surprised to hear that mummy loved gospel music. she shared with me the name of a song that had helped her through when she lost her own mom.

when i came in the next morning and listened to my messages, i discovered that she had played the whole song into my voicemail sometime the night before.

so work is what i do. and in the grand scheme of things it is both nothing and everything.