I just walked in the door from a meeting in Utrecht. I figured I would play it safe today and take public transit instead of driving, which was probably a wise choice. The next appointment on my calendar is marking the time that Mom passed into the sunlight. Looking at it is terribly difficult, I don’t want to delete it because that feels terrible all on it’s own. I can’t fast forward past it since it is set for moment that we feel it happened, while I was on the phone to hospice that day. Since this is the digital age, it appears across every screen.

I really don’t know what to do with myself. Normally, I take this day off because I know I am relatively useless but this year it wasn’t possible. I know that yesterday, things were so bad that I couldn’t turn off my shower and flooded a good portion of the bathroom. I couldn’t make the knobs work in the right order to turn off the water. It’s not like I needed to solve a Rubik’s cube, I needed to combine the right 2 of the 4 dials, which I couldn’t seem to do. Eventually, I remembered the right combination and George came running in to start drinking up the excess water before it could splash out to the wood floors.

So, you can see why I made the choice to trust public transit today instead of myself.

Last night, I srarted wandering back down the path of all of the things that I thought up to the point that we knew Mom was sick and then second guessing every single choice I made, combined with a hearty dose of “what if you had done this earlier/instead? Maybe she would still be alive.” It’s a fucked up thing to do to yourself and to anyone near you, in this case GG and the pets. Sometimes, I expect that I will be surpised by some official looking people at my front door, presenting me with a bill for all the secondary stress and therapy needed for GG and the pets. It wouldn’t be an unearned bill…

I remember talking with my Mom once about how she got through those days when all of us kids were blowing up and out, her divorce and the day to day struggle to make it all work. She told me that Ninja helped keep her sane, he needed her to have it together. He was her great rock. Also the primary reason that if she had to do it all again, she would have four Akitas and not four children. I completely understand that, even if I have the smaller model and all three of my pets don’t equal 20% of Ninja’s size.

I want to remember my Mom in her full glory today. I want to remember her like this, laughing at how much stuff you had to put on the Yukon to go out to the bathroom and to think that she might still come in the door one winter’s day full of stories about where she has been since I last saw her.

I love you, Mom.