(no subject)
It was almost exactly 1 year ago that Mom was admitted to the hospital for what turned out to be unsuccessful chemotherapy. Everyone hoped for a cure, but in fact she lived for only another four months. There was less than six months between when the first symptoms showed up and her passing.
Looking back on it, things seem to have happened so quickly. Strangely enough, though, my father, my brothers, and myself seem to have gotten on with our lives reasonably well over the past 8 months. There has been some mourning and sadness, but not as much as I had expected. I suspect, though, that there will be a lot of "delayed mourning" for all of us. When we visit the cemetary, my father almost always says something about how it was too fast and too soon. My father and I both express guilt sometimes because we do not keep things around the house quite as clean as Mom would have - my mother was a very neat person, whereas my father and I both tend to store books and papers in large stacks and adopt a "live and let live" policy toward dust on furniture.
It's probably selfish for me to think this way, but I cannot help but wonder what Mom thinks or would think of me now. I still don't have a full time job six months after finishing school, and I still have serious weight issues. On the other hand, I am exercising regularly for the first time since I was 12 years old. I am trying to keep the gardens that Mom created in reasonably good shape, and I think that I have been at least partly successful. Hopefully some of my job applications will pay off soon. I think one of my stumbling blocks is that I have great difficulty coming across as self-confident when I do interviews.
Mom and I shared a lot of the same strong and weak points, but one area where she was much better than me was that she realized that the only good way to handle a difficult task or an unpleasant situation was to just go and do it, rather than wasting one's time endlessly worrying and speculating and procrastinating like I tend to do.
Looking back on it, things seem to have happened so quickly. Strangely enough, though, my father, my brothers, and myself seem to have gotten on with our lives reasonably well over the past 8 months. There has been some mourning and sadness, but not as much as I had expected. I suspect, though, that there will be a lot of "delayed mourning" for all of us. When we visit the cemetary, my father almost always says something about how it was too fast and too soon. My father and I both express guilt sometimes because we do not keep things around the house quite as clean as Mom would have - my mother was a very neat person, whereas my father and I both tend to store books and papers in large stacks and adopt a "live and let live" policy toward dust on furniture.
It's probably selfish for me to think this way, but I cannot help but wonder what Mom thinks or would think of me now. I still don't have a full time job six months after finishing school, and I still have serious weight issues. On the other hand, I am exercising regularly for the first time since I was 12 years old. I am trying to keep the gardens that Mom created in reasonably good shape, and I think that I have been at least partly successful. Hopefully some of my job applications will pay off soon. I think one of my stumbling blocks is that I have great difficulty coming across as self-confident when I do interviews.
Mom and I shared a lot of the same strong and weak points, but one area where she was much better than me was that she realized that the only good way to handle a difficult task or an unpleasant situation was to just go and do it, rather than wasting one's time endlessly worrying and speculating and procrastinating like I tend to do.