another "hello" from mummy

today, i walked into chuck's office and out of the corner of my eye i saw two "ugly dolls" on the couch. (chuck is my creative director. he does not play with dolls. they must belong to his daughter.)

ugly dolls are obscure. and there are at least 20 different kinds.

the ones on the couch were "target" and "wage."

target is mummy.

"Target is the oldest and the wisest of the Uglydolls. He is also the hairiest. The other Uglydolls are a bit scared of Target's body hair, and wonder why he has so many arms. But they come running to Target when there are questions to be answered. Old age may bring Uglydolls extra arms and whiskers, but it also brings wisdom and foresight. Target is often bailing the other Uglydolls out of trouble and getting them into more sophisticated forms of mischief."

and wage is me.

"Wage is a hard worker, just like you! He works at the local Super Mart and wears his apron to serve his customers best. Does Super Mart know that Wage works there? Nope. But Wage doesn't mind. He likes to put things in bags, especially snacks. Wage is best friends with Babo, but there is always room for one more (you). The two of them can often be found on the sidewalk trying to make friends with fire hydrants, phone booths, and other lonely creatures. Wage hates for anyone to be lonely! What's with that look? Is Wage happy? Sure he is! He smiles on the inside. "

babo is magee, icebat is buzzy and tray is maura.

and, again, i think "thank you, mummy."

because i am struggling right now. i am trying really hard to clearly remember things before the cancer.

i climb into bed every night and close my eyes and try to remember a really good time. and it's so odd that i can't, because our life together was a series of good times.

and yesterday i remembered how she loved it when i gave her the target doll for christmas a few years ago. and she loved it the next christmas, when i gave her the "in case of emergency" box with her children's dolls inside.

and i remembered how she smiled when i brought her emergency box into the sunroom when she was sick and put it in a spot where she could see it.

(we sprung them out of her "in case of emergency" box. because sending mummy to gate of heaven cemetery was an emergency.)

babo, wage, icebat and tray (pictured above) are with mummy right now, underneath her pillow.

i brought her "target" doll with me to the hospital and slept on the floor with it every night. i keep a miniature version of it in my purse.

she always bailed us out of trouble and got us into "more sophisticated kinds of mischief."

i'm still having trouble remembering the last time i saw her throw her head back and laugh. and maybe i'm working too hard at it. i don't know.

but seeing target and wage together on a couch at my office was a very sweet "hello."

i don't want to be the cigarette police.

when the part of me that blames mom for her lung cancer creeps up, i shut it down by reminding myself that, if she had really known what was coming, she never would have smoked a single cigarette. i know that she loved us that much.

and about 80% of the people i work with are smokers. it's odd...here in sunny, health conscious california...but it is true.

and i don't want to be the smoking police. if i thought saying something might change them, i would. but they all know that i just buried mom and their minds cannot connect the dots because they have not seen what i have seen.

but some of these smokers that i care about have beautiful children. magical daughters that one day may have to empty their chemo-enhanced chamber pots.

magical children who deserve to have their loving parents around for as long as possible.

and i look at their bright faces when they come to the office and hope that the odds don't catch up with them.

and i know that if i told the smokers everything, everything that we have been through, it still wouldn't sink in. because it is unimaginable to them...as it was unimaginable to mummy. and she was brilliant.

but she quit 18 years ago and i am so proud of her for that. who knows how much time that bought us.

when i get a whiff of a cigarette, it is jarring. because it is the smell of senseless death and if i can smell it...i have breathed it. i don't think i will ever get used to it.

i opened my door this morning and one of the bushes in front of my house has bloomed overnight.
it is full of tiny white flowers.
and the first thought that came to my mind was "how can that be...when she's not here?"

what to say

people tell me that they struggle with what to say to me. ironically, just saying that is enough.

at dinner tonight, my friend hilary said that she does not believe that things like this are "meant to be." and i agree. i don't think that "everything happens for a reason" either.

i only believe that there are lessons in everything.

i'm not a touchy person. you could pretty much say anything to me and i would be okay with it. i understand where people are coming from when they say "it's probably for the best, she was suffering so much." and though my soul is responding with "having her here, healthy, would be for the best," my mind understands their sentiment. lord knows i was begging god to take her that last night.

and when my friends with living mothers tell me that they can't imagine how i am feeling...i have a little flash of relief. because i love them and i don't want them to understand how i feel for as long as possible.

i was having lunch with a good friend in early february. she commented that i seemed to be doing okay and that it appeared that i had gotten some "closure."

and i explained that "closure" is a myth. that my life is now forever divided into two parts "while she was alive" and "after i lost her" and that the "after" part doesn't end until i end.

there is a little bit of relief in that. that the grief has time to spread out so i don't drown in it right now.

right now, my biggest wish is to get some time between me and the past few months. when i look back, the sickness and dying is so huge that i can't see past it. i want some distance so it will appear smaller and so i can begin to see past it to the things that came before it. the good and sweet things.

buzzy saw her in a dream a few weeks ago. and maura sent me these two e-mails this week:

"subject: She's a snuggle bunny...

I finally dreamt about her last night. In the dream I got home from my trip to TN to find mummy standing in the kitchen. I asked her what she was doing here and she said that she had just gotten back from spending a week in the hospital. So, I told her that she should have told me she was going to be in the hospital and I would have postponed my trip. Then the next thing I knew she was holding missymoo so that she was facing forward and rubbing her cheek to missymoo's cheek, and missymoo was looking up at mummy with pure contentment.

That's all I remember. I hope there's a "next time" I dream about her and that I remember to hug her.

much love,
moo"

and then:

"subject: she came back this morning

I had another dream about mummy this morning and got the hug i've been needing from her. Then I told her that she needed to visit you because you really need her too. She said she'd go see you tomorrow.

You have to tell me if you dream about her tomorrow."

but you have to sleep to dream.


if someone you care for loses someone, don't worry about what to say. just say something. "i'm sorry" is enough. while it may seem inadequate to you, it really helps.

my friend lee articulated the situation incredibly well when her mom died. she said that she couldn't understand how the world could still be turning.

because as i said a few days ago, my outsides look normal, but my insides are ripped apart. and i feel so disconnected.

and "i'm sorry" is enough to tell me that you really can see me. and with those words, any words, you acknowledge the catastrophe hidden inside me.
and that is very meaningful.

last night, magee and i went to see john hiatt and lyle lovett at a small theater in redwood city. they sat on the stage with two other singer/songwriters and took turns singing. john hiatt's first song was one of mom's favorites, "perfectly good guitar." and i couldn't stop the tears from rolling down my face. then, lyle lovett was next, and he played the only lyle lovett song that was on mummy's playlist..."if i had a boat." that song selection made me gasp out loud.

i know that i am made of her...and i know that every day i will see her in the things around me. but sometimes the little things come to me in a way that is so special that i cannot help but feel like she is saying "hello" to me and reminding me that she is here with me and that i am not alone.

sometimes i catch myself saying "hi mummy" or "thank you" out loud.

some days i am okay. magee and i talk about the guilt that comes with the functioning days. "how can i feel okay today? did i not love her enough?" and then there are the days when you are always just a breath away from falling apart.

and it's strange, because your outsides look the same as they did before she died, but your insides are ripped apart. and people treat you as if nothing is wrong. it's so incredibly disconnected.

but when i see little signs from her that stand out even beyond the all the things in my world that are already painted with her personality, i really feel her taking care of me. still.

when i was on the red eye back to d.c. when we learned she had cancer, i wrote down everything i thought i needed to tell her. i wrote that i would see her in so many little things:

tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches, poppies, winnie the pooh, william morris patterns, glasses, crab balls, convertibles, dogwood trees, boxers, brightly colored socks, swatch watches, geraniums, angels, the string that holds up the lid to my washing machine, flea markets, crossword puzzles, john hiatt's music, mystery novels, hadley pottery, spare ribs, merrimekko patterns, potato chip clips, charles rennie mackintosh, wallpaper, ladders, 26¢ +*, milano cookies, coffee, bandaids, wet naps, cables for cable t.v. on cup hooks, tole trays, ugly dolls, whiskey sours, eloise, london, shrimp with cocktail sauce, smocked dresses, lady bugs, measuring tapes, coppertone suntan lotion, bethany beach, leftover meat in cream of mushroom soup, chanel no. 5, keds, tool boxes, dogs drinking from the toilet, chevy chase circle, the prayer of saint francis, honey mustard pretzels, guacamole, manhattan, turtles and velatis candies, my unfinished red sweater, salmon, felt tipped pens, running bathwater, hurricanes, horses, creamed spinach, ice chewing, rockford files re-runs, tea at fortnum and mason, calder's circus, the color blue, the feeling of safety, rainy days, sunny days, the mirror.

*she gave us each a tiny envelope once. each contained a quarter and a penny. and on the outside she wrote "26¢ +"

i asked her why she gave us 26¢.

she said a quarter for a phone call and a penny for your thoughts. and when i asked her what the plus was for, she said "all your momma's love."

she was really good at loving.

yesterday, maura sent an e-mail telling us that she went to the cemetery and made a snow angel on mummy's grave.

work was exhausting.

when i came home from work last night, fang wasn't waiting for me in his usual spot. i looked for him and found that he couldn't walk on his right front leg.

we spent a few hours at the pet emergency center, last night. i wanted mummy. the thought of losing fang right now floored me.

i called magee at about 9:30, i didn't tell her how frightened i was. but she drove over and sat with me in the waiting room anyway.

mummy made women who make snow angels at cemeteries and who come running to each other without having to be asked.

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.

What the *%@^?

Today was okay. I distracted myself with things that are meaningless.

My life continues to be a roller coaster.

Only one thing has changed. The fog has lifted.

And it is shocking. I feel exposed.

Because, from the moment we got the call in October until she was gone and then buried, it was surreal. I don't know how to describe it except to say that I felt like I was walking through Jello.

And, what never occurred to me then is alarmingly clear now. I had only scratched the surface when I pictured the consequences of her illness.

My mind was clear until we got that call and then it was mush. It was mush for three months. And now that it is clear again I find myself walking in circles. And i keep asking myself the same thing, "What the f**k just happened?!"

She is gone.

Because as clear as it might have seemed when were going through it...it just wasn't clear. We were in the moment. And every moment was spent trying to make her feel better in some way.

And as much as I thought I knew what was coming, I had no idea.

So I never wrapped my head around "forever." And now it is in my face. Every moment of every day.

It is shocking to me.

Because in early September I went back and saw her and we went to Cheeseburger Cheeseburger and ate burgers and shared a basket with half fries and half onion rings. And we quizzed each other with the Trivial Pursuit cards in the middle of the table.

And then in mid September, when i called her from Cocoa Beach, she couldn't talk because she had laryngitis.

And the at the end of September she found out that her vocal chords were paralyzed by lung cancer.

And then the next three months were mush. And now she is dead.

This grief is stretching my brain and I am beginning to catch glimpses of the magnitude of this. And it is bigger than anything I have ever imagined.

It is so big, it only comes to me in tiny, scary flashes. I can't wrap my head around this.

I need to take baby steps.

So I am just trying to remember how it felt those times I climbed into the bed with her and curled up behind her and felt her hand on mine. And I am trying to etch them in my brain.

Because I will never look into her eyes again. I am only beginning to really understand how huge this is.

Seriously. What the f**k just happened?

I need more time.