Hodsthorn's Offline Life, Update 3 of 5: Mom
This will probably be a short update.
It's been a year since my mom died.
A lot has happened in a year. Carl's gone from being a sweet little lump of a guy who slept a lot and could be entertained with a mobile or a musical panda to being an endlessly-racing dynamo of activity and (occasionally) destruction. My brothers and I have worked toward a mutual accommodation regarding Boomtown and his kids living in the house we all grew up in and which is now ours. Hez and I learned that we're having a second kid. My tenure review came up (this will be a separate entry later), travels happened, house repairs were made, days passed. Life, in short, continued.
Getting used to life without Mom has been a constant part of all this. I'm past the shock of actually losing her--no matter how sick she was toward the end (and pancreatic cancer in its final stages is pretty horrific), Mom was still the kind of person it's hard to imagine losing, so the shock took a long time to pass. I'm mostly past being caught off-guard by the impulse to call her to talk about my students or see how she's doing (though her home and cell numbers are still listed in my cell phone, and I haven't had the fortitude to erase them yet). I'm still angry about the rottenness of the world for the way she died--too early, and painfully, and slowly, and sadly.
And my god, oh my god, it's hard sometimes to stifle the ache of wanting to talk to her about Carl. Her joy at his birth, and her insistence on being driven up here to see him days after he was born (despite her pain and declining health), told me all I needed about how much my son meant to her. But there are so many stories to tell, so many questions to ask, that never occurred to me until I was shepherding my own kid into the world.
I say frequently that I have no regrets about my mother dying except that I wish she hadn't, and that's true. But sometimes that's still a huge one, all by itself.
It's been a year since my mom died.
A lot has happened in a year. Carl's gone from being a sweet little lump of a guy who slept a lot and could be entertained with a mobile or a musical panda to being an endlessly-racing dynamo of activity and (occasionally) destruction. My brothers and I have worked toward a mutual accommodation regarding Boomtown and his kids living in the house we all grew up in and which is now ours. Hez and I learned that we're having a second kid. My tenure review came up (this will be a separate entry later), travels happened, house repairs were made, days passed. Life, in short, continued.
Getting used to life without Mom has been a constant part of all this. I'm past the shock of actually losing her--no matter how sick she was toward the end (and pancreatic cancer in its final stages is pretty horrific), Mom was still the kind of person it's hard to imagine losing, so the shock took a long time to pass. I'm mostly past being caught off-guard by the impulse to call her to talk about my students or see how she's doing (though her home and cell numbers are still listed in my cell phone, and I haven't had the fortitude to erase them yet). I'm still angry about the rottenness of the world for the way she died--too early, and painfully, and slowly, and sadly.
And my god, oh my god, it's hard sometimes to stifle the ache of wanting to talk to her about Carl. Her joy at his birth, and her insistence on being driven up here to see him days after he was born (despite her pain and declining health), told me all I needed about how much my son meant to her. But there are so many stories to tell, so many questions to ask, that never occurred to me until I was shepherding my own kid into the world.
I say frequently that I have no regrets about my mother dying except that I wish she hadn't, and that's true. But sometimes that's still a huge one, all by itself.