There’s something about being outside sipping your tea in a breeze. The breeze rushes by and somehow makes the tea taste even more refreshing and warm. I’ve often wondered if other people enjoy the same, but it’s not exactly a question that promotes camaraderie – it would probably promote more eye rolling than anything. Drinking tea is relaxing, it makes you stop and sit for an extra minute. Even if it’s in a “to-go” cup, you still have to stand still for a few seconds in order to take a sip.

Even the process of making a cup of tea can be a comforting routine. Filling up the teakettle, finding just the right mug. A lot of tea is drank out of tea cups but I prefer mine in a mug. My daughter-in-law’s keen eye pegged me for my mug choices. She noticed how I hesitate before I pass out mugs to others in the family, thinking about which one best represents the tea drinker or the mood of the day. I was surprised that she noticed, but one day as she was watching me she commented – You are thinking about which mug to give out to each person, aren’t you?

I also think a lot about which mug I would like each time I have a cup of tea. Maybe I think too much. I try to have a mug that has been given to me by each one of my kids most often. I think about each one of them while I’m choosing the mug and then I say a quick prayer for them as I prepare my cup of tea. It’s one of the reasons I have so much trouble letting go of mugs that are cracked or chipped because each mug usually reminds of a certain time or person, and I can’t always part with it. And I am a borderline hoarder at heart!

My grandmother was the one who introduced me to tea. And actually it’s a little funny that I have never had a cup of tea from one of her tea cups. My sister has them in her china cabinet and I’ve never really considered that I’ve never used them. When my grandmother made me tea, she would pour lots of milk in it, with very little tea. It felt like a very grown-up thing to be doing, sitting at the table chatting and having a cup of tea. Wonderful memories.

I’m a big believer in enjoying life. Enjoying the little things in life as well as the big things. I get excited about hearing a train whistle and even more excited when I can actually see the train. I love hearing church bells ring, and seeing bright red cardinals in my yard, and hummingbirds and butterflies in the bushes, and going to parades and being at the beach at night.  I’ve had many people say to me over the years – doesn’t take much to make you happy – and it’s true.   I am happy living a simple life and sharing that happiness with people I love. I love sharing these things with my granddaughters and seeing them smile and get excited. I think it’s important for them to learn to enjoy life – to be happy in the moment. There is something to be said for quality of life- living within your means so that you can slow down and enjoy life on a daily basis.

I just watched a documentary called Race to Nowhere about how the quality of kids’ lives today is lacking because of the educational system and the breakdown of family time. Teachers spoke about how so much taught in school is geared towards test scores and the future.  About how kids are spending 4 and 5 hours a day just doing homework after they get home from school. They were showing kids who were stressed out and just miserable, not enjoying their life at all. This should not be happening. Even if this is an over-generalization – it seems that it is still a trend.

I think this is one reason why it is so important for kids to live in a multi-generational climate. Back in the day, especially after the Great Depression, there was more of a tendency for generations of families to live together. I think there is a big advantage to this for children and older people. Having my grandmother living with us when I was growing up gave me an added dimension to my life. She shared her joy of everyday life with me and I’m so thankful for that now. We spent time together doing crafts and playing games. We planted flowers in the backyard and walked down to the mailbox to mail a letter and maybe chat with a neighbor along the way.  Interacting in different scenarios with either grandparents or elderly people in the community or your neighborhood definitely adds an additional dimension to a child’s life. It’s a chance to be with someone who isn’t quite as caught up in the whirlwind of life.

**I originally wrote this post in July of last year.

So last year when my mother was transitioning into the final stages of dying, I played the Celtic Women Amazing Grace recording for her and sang along – it was one of her favorite hymns and it seemed to calm some of the agitation she was expressing. This past Easter Sunday was the first anniversary of my mother’s death – and my sister and I had the privilege of attending the Easter service at The Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. My oldest daughter was playing in the brass section and she had invited us to the service and managed to get us some passes so we had good seats. It was such a majestic service – the choir sounded like angels singing – the horns celebrated the Risen Christ with their music, and Judy Collins (a folk singer from the 60’s just in case you’re not sure) was right next to us in one of the side pulpits and sang – wait for it – Amazing Grace and the congregation was invited to sing along with her. Isn’t God great? He knows the landslide of emotion I have been dealing with in the past year. Even though it’s not debilitating or life-altering, it sometimes is exhausting and there’s really no solution to it except to keep on going through it. And for some reason, for me, when I started to sing Amazing Grace, I was finally able to let go of some of the anguish and celebrate the fact that my mother was with the Lord and was no longer in pain or living in the deluge of dementia here on earth. I felt a peace that I wasn’t able to previously enjoy because I had ten years of stored away emotions that I had kept in check so that I would be able to interact with my mother and not be a complete basket case. What a fitting tribute to the day. And I got to sing with Judy Collins – how amazing is that!!

I don’t agree with people having the right to choose when they end their life. My mother went through the slow, degenerative disease of dementia, spending the last ten years of her life at two different facilities. A few times I had someone ask me – didn’t I wish that the right to die idea was legal, especially since she had no idea where or who she was. And my answer was always no, that’s not a choice that we should even have. Who am I to decide to short-circuit my mother’s affect or blessing on someone else’s life. Was it easy to watch her slowly disappear before my eyes, and turn into someone that was hardly recognizable as my mother, no it wasn’t. Did I learn a lot of things from going through ten years (or more) of dementia with my mother? Yes I did. I learned how to be compassionate and loving to someone even though there is going to be nothing for you in return. I learned that things don’t always work out the way you expected them to, but you learn to deal with it and carry on. I had to let go of a lot of childhood grudges and just show my mother unconditional love for the moment she was in. She loved to play solitaire and do word search puzzle books. When she was no longer capable of doing either of these things, I did them for her. I would sit across the table from her and play solitaire over and over, while she watched. Sometimes she would reach her hand out and point at a card that I forgot to move and we would laugh. I would sit right next to her with a word search book and she would be content just watching me circling the words.  I learned to count my blessings for sure, and one thing I was especially thankful for in regards to her disease was that she was mellow and easygoing for the most part. She would automatically say No! when anyone asked her a question, but she did that before the disease started attacking her brain!! I was extremely thankful that there were competent people who helped to take care of her. It made things much easier for me and made a better quality of life for my mother.

We are all in this world for a reason. Sometimes it’s easy to see someone suffering and think they should be put out of their misery. But many times, that person ends up teaching someone in their world something that they needed to learn. Maybe my mother taught someone at her nursing home to have more compassion, maybe she was the one who was there just to brighten someone’s day because she smiled and said thank you for something they did for her. There is no way to know why she was allowed to suffer for so many years with this horrible disease, but it happened, and we dealt with it, and made the best of it, because really that’s all you can do.

It’s so easy to see disabled children or handicapped adults and think what’s the point of their life. . . but their life does have a point, and part of that point might be to show us, while we are sitting there thinking they don’t matter, that there is something wrong with the way we are thinking – and that we should value their life, as limited as it might be, and we should be willing to learn from them and be compassionate towards them. We might be surprised what we find out, about them and about ourselves.

So there I was, right smack in the middle of Stop & Shop, trying to find tea bags, because of course they have to redo the store every few years just to make sure you spend more time in there wandering around because you can’t find anything – and it hit me like a ton of bricks. The realization that I was never going to see my mom or my dad here in this life again. It slammed me. I don’t know why exactly, but it came like a tsunami and stopped me in my tracks. I told myself I must be eating too much soy, because sometimes that can make me more susceptible to bouts of sadness. But I really don’t think that’s what it was. I think it was just everything catching up with me and realization setting in. And it really doesn’t surprise me that this moment would take place at Stop & Shop. My mom and dad met me and the kids at the grocery store quite often. My dad would always take the youngest one in his cart, and my mom would make herself in charge of harassing the older ones whenever they would try to cut loose and go off on their own. It was actually very helpful, whether I had one child with me or all four. It definitely broke up the monotony.  So when these memories started flooding in, I did what any menopausal grown woman would do, I started snuffling and getting all teary-eyed in the middle of the grocery store. I walked up and down the paper towel aisle a few extra times, trying to pull myself together. (have you ever noticed there’s hardly ever anyone in the paper towel aisle?) It’s kind of funny, because the same thing used to happen to me after my grandmother died. When I was in the grocery store, I would suddenly envision how my grandmother would be in the store, in her green raincoat with the green knitted hat that was stuck on her head with a hairpin. I could picture her coming down the aisle to show me something. I guess maybe that’s when you notice a loss the most, when you are just doing the mundane things of life, and then all of a sudden someone who is usually around while you are doing these mundane things is gone. And it can be heart-wrenching. So many people will talk about how they will miss so-and-so at the next big event, like a wedding or a graduation. And I’m sure that’s very true. But sometimes you miss them even more when you are doing something as simple as going to the store. So I guess now I have a choice – I can either go to a different store that’s not such a trigger for me, or I can try to smile while I remember how excited the kids would get when they spotted my mom and dad in the store. Especially in my dad’s later years, when he would be driving  the handicapped cart and backing it up so it would beep.  Like everyone says, I will always have the memories, even if I don’t have the people.

Well, it finally happened. My mother passed away last Friday. So I have been in the world for less than a week without my mother being here. It’s a strange feeling. If you think about it,  there is never a time in your life when your mother isn’t on the planet with you, until (obviously) she dies. And when I think about my mother and her role in our lives, I realize that one of the characteristic things about her was that she was always there. When I was younger, she was sitting in a chair on the sidelines at my dance class, she was there at every show, she was always in the kitchen when I got home from school. When I married and moved out of state, I called her every Saturday morning and she always answered the phone (back when the phone was attached to the wall and the receiver was attached to a cord so you had to be close by in order to hear it ring.) When we started our family, she was there to babysit the dog when we went to the hospital, she was there again when we left the house in the middle of the night to have another child, and she was there again keeping those two children at bay when the third one decided to arrive before we were able to get to the hospital, and she was there helping out when the grand finale made her appearance. She was always there when we got back home with each new arrival, to welcome them into the family. There wasn’t a lot of fanfare, she didn’t come bearing gifts and food and extravagant things to bring attention to herself, she was just there. Happy to give an opinion, willing to stay so you could run out  for something.  Just there. She wasn’t perfect by any means, in fact, sometimes she could be downright annoying, especially when this dratted disease began its consumption of her brain and we didn’t realize it yet. But there she was – waiting, just in case one of us needed something. The kids would run down to her house for maple syrup, or paper towels, or we would all go down for a respite from our house that usually included a game of Sorry and some Oreos and milk. Nothing fancy, but always a comfort. She was there. And it was a good thing.

Now she’s gone.

I’ve had ten years to get used to the idea of her being gone. She’s been slipping away from me bit by bit.  At first, she  was at a point where she couldn’t take care of herself, but she still knew who I was. She would ask about the kids, and when I told her a story she mostly knew who I was talking about. That didn’t last long. After awhile, I was someone that she was extremely happy to see, but she wasn’t sure why. If I pressed the point long enough, she would look at me and say,  you remind me of my daughter. Close enough. But then we finally got to the painful part. She started being happy and smiling at my daughter who looks the most like me. But then she would look at me and there would be no smile, just a vague stare like she had no clue who I was or why I was there. Being with your own mother and having her not know who you are is very disconcerting and I have to admit, painful, to say the least. So the grief and mourning actually started way before the actual day that my mother died. Every time I went and saw my mother I would go through a mourning period afterwards. After awhile I just had to put up a “wall” to guard myself. And what I am figuring out this week is that the wall is starting to crumble and fall. I didn’t realize how disconnected I forced myself to be,  just for the sake of my sanity. I visited with my mother and I played cards with her, and showed her pictures and played her music on my phone, and even though I always waited for that two seconds of possible recognition, I still tried to not dwell on the fact that she was my mother. I reminiesced about how she used to be once in awhile, but I tried not to dwell on it, because then the contrast was too much for me to deal with and just made the pain that much greater.

So now I’m starting to remember . . . sometimes it comes in a wave of emotion that washes over me and sometimes it’s just a small picture in my head. It’s harder than I thought it was going to be but in a way it’s almost easier. It was hard to have my mother in front of me physically but have her not really “be there”.  I’m realizing how lonely I’ve been for the last decade. Of how much I wanted my mother to be there and even though she was physically there, she wasn’t there and how that made it even harder. This is almost easier. She’s legit not here. So now I can dwell on the memories I have of her when she was my mother and she knew me and she was really there.

We have had so much transition in the last couple of years, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that it would take awhile to find a “new normal”. Change is never easy, and so many times change is not a choice, it’s just something you have to deal with. One of our family mottos is “adapt and overcome”, and so far, albeit with a few bumps along the way, I think we’ve been doing a pretty good job. Looking for the blessings in each day sounds easy, but sometimes it takes some extra effort.  Today is a beautiful August summer day, with sunshine, and a perfect breeze coming through my favorite window, and there are butterflies flying by because my husband planted butterfly bushes under my window a few years ago.  I love it. I’ve had hummingbirds at my feeder, and the other birds have been singing happy songs. When I look at my life right now, it  reminds me of growing up with my grandmother. She loved life, and she loved showing me how to appreciate the life that you have. She lived in the moment – she would talk about the past if you really insisted on it but mostly she was living for the day, each day. So that is my next struggle in this transition period of life. How to keep a balance of enjoying all the memories with my kids but also making new memories and enjoying the stages of life that they are at right now. I feel like I’m getting better at it, but I’m still not quite sure how to interact in their life without being too involved or too “mom-ish”.

Because I have a dialogue in my head that goes on and on and on, all during the day and sometimes into the night, I have decided that I should start a blog. I don’t necessarily want anyone reading it, at least not right this minute anyways, but I still think it’s important for me to write it. What is the point of this blog? The point is that I’m at a stage in life that is different than any other one I’ve had so far. I’ve been through the young 20’s stage, the Oh My God I’m So In Love stage, the married stage (still in this one, thankfully), the wow – look we have four kids stage – and I am now in the empty nest, where the hell did everyone go, stage. I’m not necessarily going to write only about the empty nest part. I’m just going to write all these thoughts and life lessons that go through my mind on a daily basis.  Of course now that I’m actually typing in my blog, I can’t remember any of them – but I will. And this will be good. For me, as an outlet. And someday for whoever figures out it exists and reads it. Maybe it will help somebody else. If nothing else, it will get me in the habit of writing so that I can eventually write all the books that are in my head also.

I heard an interesting interview of a writer on NPR the other day. I will probably make alot of references to things I hear on NPR, because I figured out there is a 24/7 streaming of This American Life which is my favorite NPR program. I have it on constantly. Now I have started to fall asleep with it on. I love it. I’m obsessed. But anyways, the writer was talking about how when he was starting to make the decision to be a writer, that one of the things that attracted him to that profession was that he would be able to write anywhere. He could take his laptop to the beach, to a park, a coffee shop, anywhere he wanted to. But the reality of it for him, as he found out when he started seriously starting to write, was that he couldn’t concentrate anywhere except in this little tiny room above his garage, which was away from all the commotion and noise. So that’s where he writes, in isolation and solitude. Not exactly what he had pictured. And that’s the thing about life. It doesn’t always come out the way you imagined. And sometimes it’s easy to forget that even if it doesn’t, it’s still okay because life is still good anyways. And if you want to get really technical, I’m sure if most of us were honest, what we pictured was just not very realistic in the first place. Life isn’t like the movies, it doesn’t start snowing when you put on the Christmas music while you are trimming the tree. But it’s still fun to trim the tree – and I guess that’s my point. Finding the positive and staying with it when reality takes over.