we're all together now...missy and bill's four children. we spent the day together doing our last minute shopping and running errands.

we ended the evening with a dance party with missy. she hasn't completely mastered walking yet...but she loves to dance. she heard music on the credits of a special we were watching and she just started dancing. so we all started dancing. (the beast even tried to get in on it.) then missy started clapping, so we all started clapping. then she started giving us all high fives. she was squealing with delight.

(it is particularly delightful when she squeals because she smiles a huge smile and you can see that she only has four teeth...two on the top and two on the bottom.)

i thought to myself, "i wonder if they knew that even after they were gone, we would all make sure we were together."

tonight, i am thinking about mummy's sisters and her brother. i know they are missing her, too.

tonight i am feeling very lucky that my sisters and my brother are under this roof with me.

a year ago, today, we were all in a house full of love taking care of mummy. at the time, it was the saddest and sweetest time of my life. since then, things have become much more sad and life has continued to be sweet. it's a strange holiday season without mummy. one thing remains...there is still a house full of love on hornbeam drive. i will go there on sunday and we will celebrate together and miss her every single minute.

i'm a quitter.

i quit my job today. i work at a wonderful place that has consumed me for the past two years. it was a very difficult decision because i truly adore the people i work with. they are bright and funny and they are destined to do great things. i will continue to be their biggest fan.

i'll be there for a little bit of the new year and then i am leaving them, spending a few weeks prepping my house for sale and moving to los angeles.

in los angeles, i will work for the headquarters of the agency from which we seceded in march.

i started my advertising career there a million years ago.

i was still in college, living with mom and dad when i told mom that i was moving to l.a.. (you have to understand that — with the exception of going on a few vacations — i had never lived away from my parents.) i was afraid to tell mom that i had decided to move 3000 miles away. when i finally did, she said "we'll need to get you some dishes."

she paid for my one way ticket.

through the years, when i would come home for holidays, she would take me to dulles when it was time for me to return to california. in those pre-9/11 days, she would come into the main terminal and part with me at the shuttle that takes the passengers to the midfield terminal.

the last time she did that, i had a particularly hard time leaving her, but i did not want to show it. so i would look at her through the open doorway of the shuttle and smile. she would be standing there smiling back at me. i'd turn away and barely be able to stifle my sobs. then i'd pull myself together and turn back towards her smiling face. i'd repeat this until they closed the door and drove us away.

on my next trip home, she was getting ready to take me to the airport and i confessed to her that i had come completely undone the last time and asked her if i could have someone else take me. she said "oh thank god" because in between the times i turned to look at her...she was doing the same thing i was.

for the rest of her life, if she took me to the airport, she dropped me at the curb. the photo at the very beginning of this blog is one maura took of mummy at the airport curb on one of their trips to the airport. she set all of her kids free...encouraged us to follow our hearts and then hid the fact that it hurt her so much every time we left.

when she was sick and i was on the red-eye filling up that notebook with things that i needed to tell her...one of the things that i wrote was this:

"so you are going to die soon...and it does not look to me like you are walking towards a white light.

to me, it looks like you are getting on a shuttle to the midfield terminal at dulles and this time i am standing in the terminal watching you leave.

and we are both crying our eyes out then turning to each other and smiling so each will think the other hasn't noticed her fall apart.

and then you will go.

and then you will come back to me again and again and again."

i have felt her with me so much lately. i have never made a decision as big as the one i just made without her counsel. i'm like an amputee who still feels her missing toes.

mummy is in my "muscle memory." i know she is not here...but the whole of me still feels like calling her and asking her questions and sharing things with her. there is something oddly comforting about still having the profound need to talk to her.

when i finally made the decision to make the move to los angeles, things fell so easily in their place that it was eerie. and i know that if she were still here she would tell me that it was all gogo's doing. i feel mummy's hands all over this and i am at peace.

greg wojahn died a little over a week ago.
on friday, i went to his memorial service.

he was much too young to die, and by all accounts he had come into the best time of his life before he got sick.

having been down a parallel path with mummy, i truly understand the intimacy of fighting cancer with someone you love. so in an odd way i understand that while he was sick, he got to experience love on a level that was truly more intimate than the love we feel when all is well. and he was already a joyful, loving person.

i went to see a shrink after mummy was diagnosed. he was trying to prepare me for what was to come and he explained to me that people often become an exaggerated version of their very core when they face such incredible adversity. for example, jerks become bigger jerks. the recurring theme on friday was the grace and sweetness that greg exhibited throughout everything...the chemo,the spinal taps, everything. his very core was lovely.

as in mummy's case, he took care of everyone around him throughout the whole battle. he was their strength.

i've been away from l.a. for many years now, and i hadn't seen greg or his brothers for quite some time. all three of them have been very kind to me, and to my best friend gab, and to my little sister. they're all lovely, and so funny. but i have one more adjective that seemed to always stick with greg in particular and that was "faithful." he was a man of faith. that brought me a great deal of comfort on friday.

while i often catch myself living my life as if i were a hamster on a wheel, he was mindful of things and people and ideas and his underlying calm, his faith, allowed him to be "in the moment" in a way that i aspire to be.

another thing that was a gentle reminder on friday, was the clear picture that was painted by his memorial service. the message was clear, if we just do a good job loving the people around us we will be able to say our lives were well lived.

but i still think his life was way too short.

i've been working on waking up in the morning and choosing to be happy.

i took the train up to new york early yesterday morning and had the best day. i dropped my bag off at the hotel and went to the whitney where i saw calder's circus. it just makes me so happy. they had the film of calder in paris running in the background. the circus is beautiful just as it is..but when calder makes his creations perform, you can truly see his genius. it took me a few years of hunting, but i found the video and gave it to mummy for christmas a few years ago. i'll have to see if i can figure out where she put it and ask maura to burn it to a dvd for me.

after i left the whitney, it was a short walk to the met. i ran in and peeked at the things that i wanted to see and then went off to barney's to look at the christmas windows. it isn't their best year...but they still do the best christmas windows in new york.

from barney's i walked down to grand central station where i found a spot against the wall in the grand hall and stared at the beautiful ceiling. when i first moved to new york, the ceiling was almost black. i had no idea at the time that it was dirty. jacqueline kennedy was an incredible advocate for the preservation and restoration of grand central and sometime in the mid 90's it was painstakingly restored. the ceiling was cleaned and the night sky is actually much closer to a tiffany blue than to the black that greeted me when i moved to the city in 1990. i like to just stand quietly and look at the ceiling while new yorkers rush by me.

from there, i took the subway to union square and then walked over to the west village. i had a (very) late lunch at benny's burritos and did a little shopping at mxyplyzyk down the street.

after that, i was off to kate's paperie, my favorite stationery store.

from there, i wandered around and ultimately ended up back in midtown and turned in for the night. this morning i woke up and went to my favorite camera store, b&h photo, and treated myself to a new lens and an external power pack for my battery hungry flashes.

i treated myself to a ride home on the high speed train and now i am packed, tucked into mummy's bed and ready to turn in so i can get up for an early flight tomorrow.

aside from the very difficult thanksgiving day, i have been happy this week. i have had a very restful vacation and i have been surrounded by people i love or alone with things that mummy and i loved to share. it was a really good visit.

i thought, before i turned in, that i would upload some pictures from my very happy saturday with magee, buzzy, maura, liam, seamus and missy at the zoo.





how could you not be happy when you get to wake up to those faces?

i am thankful. but i must admit that i am most thankful that thanksgiving is over. it was much harder than i thought it would be.

i've had a good week. i didn't get to see as much as i had hoped in new york...but for good reason. we were having such a good time that we didn't bend over backwards to keep any kind of schedule. but we didn't manage to get to all of the things that i really wanted to do, so i'll go back up on sunday morning.

i had a great d.c. day on wednesday. i set off to see the annie leibovitz show at the corcoran and to wander around downtown. on the way down, i was missing mummy so much. before her hip started giving her trouble, she and i used to run downtown often. our last museum trip was to see the calder/miro exhibit at the phillips collection. we have a particular fondness for calder, an artist/engineer and master of whimsy. we used to go see his circus at the whitney whenever we were in new york at the same time. (i'll see it again this sunday)

i was remembering so much about those times while i was driving to the corcoran. so i decided to pretend that she was with me. (strange, yes. but that's what i decided.) and with the exception of the faster pace i was able to keep, i tried to look at everything as if she were there. she and i liked the same things, but had very different perspectives. i tried to look at things both ways.

i was doing pretty well, until i came to the part where annie leibovitz was documenting susan sontag's battle with cancer. and that is where i came undone. wandering from picture to picture with tears streaming down my face.

i am a photographer. that is how i see myself. after daughter, sister, aunt, niece, cousin and friend, that is my next descriptor.

and, when mom was dying, i remember watching everything and not taking pictures. if it were me dying, i'd have had a camera in my hand the whole time. but she is very private. so i only took a few photos. and most did not show her face. they were just visual clues. the bicycle bell from her wheelchair (i loved that when she was pushed into an elevator, looking gaunt, on her way up to chemo, the sad worried look of strangers would change when she rang her bell. that bell helped them see that there was a whimsical woman in that chair.) there's the x-ray sign that takes me back to the day we had her x-rayed to make sure she didn't have a bowel obstruction. (i like that one because it reminds me that, while i was sitting in the hallway waiting, magee was in there holding her up. that picture is very sweet to me.) the hand on her dog was taken with my phone when i though that mom was just about to die. i just wanted something. some kind of picture. and watching mummy on the monitor is how i spent my nights after we brought her home. the pictures are not spectacular in and of themselves...but they bring me right back to those moments.


there are pictures that i will take this week. pictures of "evidence." evidence that she was here. there's legal pad that says "evidence" at the top. on it, there is her handwriting. something cryptic. she was always doing puzzles. and we haven't moved it. we have left so much of the evidence alone. eventually we will have to move on...but not yet.

but i digress. i wandered around d.c. pretending that she was with me. after the leibovitz show, i ended up at the edward hopper retrospective at the east wing. afterwards, i went down to the subterranean museum café where we used to grab a snack and then i went through the gift shop in search of stocking stuffers. when i saw a scarf with a william morris pattern that she loved, i cried. when i came across an umbrella that i thought she would love for christmas, i bought it for myself.

i am so tired of being so sad. and i am getting a little bit sick of listening to myself when i talk about it or reading my words when i write about it. i fugure getting through christmas is going to be even harder than yesterday. but i am not going to put off fighting to be happy until that has passed.

this morning i was watching this week's episode of "pushing daisies." it's a lovely show with beautiful cinematography, delightful characters and wonderful storylines. among the characters are two sisters, vivian and lily, who are mourning the death of their niece, charlotte. they have stopped doing the thing that they love: synchronized swimming. in this episode, vivian is trying to convince lily that they need to work on being happy again. she says "i think it's brave to try to be happy. you've gotten so comfortable being unhappy. wouldn't it be wonderful to wake up in the morning and choose to be happy?" later in the show, the housebound vivian and lily are sitting in the parlor on a rainy afternoon and vivian begins to sing. she sings "morning has broken." (when we were little, magee and i used to lie in our beds at the beach house and listen to the teenage girl in the house next door play her acoustic guitar and sing "morning has broken" on warm summer nights.)

vivian sings the song, and as we listen, we watch the sisters choose to be happy again.



today, i am going to eat chocolate and stay in my pajamas. tomorrow, i am going downtown again with my sisters, my niece and all of my favorite boys.

it is hard to be here without her.

that makes me think of the phrase "there is no i in team."

because there is no "here" without "her." for that matter...there is no "there" without "her."

and "nothing" is the same without "her."

i think i have been playing too much scrabble with my siblings because these kinds of things keep running through my head.

i am so happy to be here with my brother and sisters. it's just so wrong that she is not with us, enjoying this. she was taken from us way too soon. i am trying to stay happy. i don't want to waste this time being unhappy. i need to really pay attention to the good things since she is not here to enjoy them. i cannot let these sweet minutes go to waste.

i'm in her bed right now. in her room. surrounded by her things. comforting and devastating at the same time.

here it comes.

more "firsts." our first thanksgiving without mummy. our first thanksgiving with missy.

followed by our first christmas without mummy. and our first christmas with missy.

thank god for missy. and seamus. and liam. they help us to balance looking forward with looking back.

last thanksgiving was at aunt jane's. it was supposed to be at our house...but mummy was dying. at that point she was still getting out of the house, but she decided to pass on thanksgiving since she didn't want to be wheeled around and cause anyone any trouble. she was no trouble...but we couldn't convince her of that.

i honestly can't remember what i did on thanksgiving. i can't remember if i went to aunt jane's for a little while or if i just stayed home. i think i went to aunt jane's...but whatever i did, i was so preoccupied that i wasn't in the moment...and as a result i have no memory of the day.

i just have memories of mummy. in the sunroom. with one of her many tea-carts by her side. in a hospital bed with flannel cowboy sheets. getting up in the mornings and making an effort to get to the kitchen sink. brushing her teeth and giving herself a little spongebath before she got back in bed and asked for a hairbrush.

i remember trying to get her to eat.

and with the memories of medication and radiation and the scheduling of her chemotherapy are the memories of her laughing and the times she sat and smiled while she spent time with her friends and with aunt jane & uncle john. i also have clear memories of the times that aunt mary-anne came to sit with her and we all deliberately disappeared, closing the french doors so she could have alone time with her sister/best friend so she could feel free to express all of her hopes and fears without children within earshot.

i have never had a christmas without mummy. i have never woken up on christmas morning without being under the same roof as mummy. i tried once. one year i decided to skip christmas in d.c. and have a christmas holiday to myself in san francisco. i told her of my plan that thanksgiving. so instead of magee flying to d.c. without me, mummy and maura flew out here.

we had the best time.

this is going to be weird. we all know we want to be together. we're not really sure we want to be home - at mummy's house in the place where she died. we do know that we need to be in d.c. because seamus and liam won't be able to travel. so we'll be there. motherless on christmas for the very first time.

with the exception of last year, mummy did the santa thing. a few years ago, we were finally able to convince her to tone it down a little bit. instead of a pile of gifts for each of us, for the past few years just stuffed a stocking and (if we told her there was something we wanted) added an extra gift or two. the stockings always had a clementine in the toe, some candy (like mini reese's peanut butter cups), some little gifts and a sterling silver christmas tree ornament. (every year, gogo had given each of her grandchildren a sterling silver ornament and mummy continued the tradition with us after gogo died.)

last year, she was dying. i don't even remember if i said "merry christmas" to anyone that day. that night, when i lay down on the floor with magee next to the hospital bed, i remember praying for her to die. and before the sun came up, she did.

sometime, later that day, i remember telling magee or maura that i didn't think i had even said "merry christmas" and that we had not even celebrated it in any way. and i don't remember if it was magee or maura, but i remember someone handed me a little red box with a sterling silver christmas ornament.

our sweet sick mummy had wireless and a credit card.

earlier this month, i was having dinner with two of my most excellent friends. it was an unseasonably warm october night in chicago and we were sitting on a moonlit deck, talking about everything from men to motherhood to shoes. i found it funny when one friend said that my mom had made everything about her children. she was talking about mom's innate vocation of motherhood.

it actually made me laugh. and i couldn't put my finger on it at the time...but weeks later, when i was talking to magee about it, she seemed to say it best when she said, "it wasn't until i was well into adulthood that i realized that motherhood was not mom's thing."

she was definitely not june cleaver. as a child, i can clearly remember that she was overwhelmed with the whole situation. she was drowning in chauffeuring duties. in a fit of frustration, she washed my yellow uniform skirt with maura's green bookbag and i wore a green skirt for four years. she tried to discourage the last major move i made because it would have been more convenient for her if i had stayed in l.a. at the time so she could visit buzzy and i in the same city. our house was a breeding ground for dust bunnies. she made mashed potatoes with powder from a box. at the end of one visit to buzzy and i in los angeles, while she was at l.a.x. waiting to board a flight to d.c., she got a call from buzzy saying julie had gone into labor with the twins. she got on the plane anyway. when i asked her about it, she said that babies "scared" her.

like magee, when i reached adulthood, i came to fully understand that she had her own, very distinct, non-mother identity.

this is not to say that she wasn't a brilliant mother, because she definitely was. but it definitely wasn't effortless for her.

i'm missing her so much now as i wrestle with some big decisions. but when i ask myself what she would do if she were here, it would be easy to romanticize things and picture her saying just the right thing at the right time. sometimes she did. and sometimes she didn't.

but here's the thing...the last time i made a big decision...it wasn't what she had suggested. but once i told her what i had decided, she went from "i don't think that's the best idea" to "how can i help you do that" in less than 60 seconds.

i can't write about the specifics my current struggles until i have all of my ducks in a row. but i can say that i've figured things out and i've made a decision and that when i finally flipped the switch, i started to sleep much better.

then, earlier this week, i had my first vivid dream about her. it was so real. and in my dream i kept challenging her...asking her if she were really there. because it wasn't like a regular dream. it was as if she had come back to me to assure me that everything was going to be okay. she was her 68 year old self..but without the cancer. with a raspberry colored sweatshirt on. and i saw her beautiful smile and the love in her eyes and i felt her hug in my dream as clearly as if she were physically in my presence. she kept assuring me that it was real. she was real. and it felt so incredibly real. she came back to me. just to assure me that she is still here with me and that i will be okay.

it was glorious.



the mechanics of motherhood were never her forté...but the unconditional love and her constant, unwavering advocacy for the the people she loved..those things were in her bones.

she was perfect in her imperfections.

my work situation is a conundrum. i have a love/hate relationship with it right now. (okay, "hate" is too strong of a word...perhaps love/dislike is more accurate.)

i love the people and the work. our latest Jeep spots make me smile every time i see them.





on the flipside, i really dislike being pulled in 17 directions at one time and owning all of the problems without the benefits of ownership. i dislike being so worn down by my work that when i get time for myself and my family, i have nothing left to give.

i need to figure out what's best for me.

mummy was so good at riddles. i miss her so much.

you expect those "i should call mummy" moments to dissipate as time goes on, and then you learn that things just aren't that linear.