Since I have 4 readers, I can just write this here without any background explanations. I need to back up first though, to explain where all this might have come from. Let me preface all of this with this - it was a year ago on Thursday and/or Friday (depending on which day you count) that my world as I know it changed forever. It was the anniversary of my mom going into the hospital and not coming out. It was in that day (or the next day, depending) that life changed and I'll never be the same. I've been dreading this for ages. I am just going through the motions right now, waiting for August 15th to come around to mark the year anniversary of her death. It's all a little too much. I am just going with the flow. I'm cracking up a little. I guess it's supposedly normal. Whatever.
So there's that.
And then there is my uncle Andy, who died almost 2 weeks ago. I am still processing that. I knew Andy wasn't doing well, but my aunt told me, in late May, that they were giving him 6 months. Then I got an email from her 2 weeks ago tonight saying he was in hospice care, and he died two days later. Weirdly enough, I had just been thinking of her right before I got her email saying Andy was on his last days. It was Saturday night, and I don't know if I posted this before, but this one radio station I can pick up on my cable broadcasts old Casey Kasem Top 40 shows from the 80s. A few weeks ago, it was the top 40 from that week back in 1980. I tuned in late, not until it was the top 10. At number 5 was Bob Seger's "Against the Wind." I love me some Bob Seger, except Old Time Rock and Roll, which makes me want to hurt someone. But my sisters were all into him, so I grew up knowing the Stranger in Town and Night Moves and Against the Wind albums intimately. And whenever we'd go to Calgary to visit my aunt J and uncle Andy, which was 3 or 4 times a year, I'd hear some Bob Seger because my aunty J loved him. Any time I hear him, I think of her and those days, with the grown ups drinking in the basement, with the music playing. You see, J and Andy were the cool relatives. Andy was a car salesman, and when times were good, they were really, REALLY good. So good that in like 1980, in the duplex across from Margo's old one, which J owned and which Andy moved into after they got married, he put in 10 grand into doing the basement with a state of the art bar, and an 8000 dollar stereo and yada yada. They had pop on tap, with those hand mixer things like the bars have, and anyway, when the grown ups were down there drinking, Bob would be playing.
So when I heard Bob Seger that night, I was filled with so much.... I don't know... sadness and... LONGING, I guess is the word. Longing because it reminds me of a happy time, of a safe time, of a time with everyone there and alive and whatever. And now my mom is gone, Andy is gone, we will never go back there, and those are two less people who have those memories. My dad has no memory, so I guess that's three. So I was choking up really bad that night. I do every time I hear those songs now.
So after that experience of hearing the song, and of Andy dying and the anniversary of mom's illness, well, I'm a little fragile.
But even with all of that baggage, I still want to tell someone something - don't wait for conditions to be right or how you want them to be before you tackle something. Don't rationalize things in your head to make them right to you. Don't wait until September.
Just go now. Seriously, do it for an afternoon, when nobody else needs to be there. Whenever I hear Mike and the Mechanics' "The Living Years", I want to vomit in my mouth, but there is something to the lines of that song that are true.
She ain't ever going to be who you want her to be. She ain't going to say sorry I didn't live up to motherhood. But she's all there is, and you'll sleep better after the fact in seeing her sooner rather than never. Even if you don't even really want to see her, you'll be haunted, so do it. PLEASE.
And I have no idea what she was like to grow up with, but there is something I think about - she was a baby when all y'all were born, and it sounds like she married the same kind of man her mother married, and she did try to get out at one time - props for that. So, she may have failed miserably, but whatever - she is who she is and there is but one life we live, and think of Elton's words from "The Last Song" - "I can't believe you love me/I never thought you'd come....." Because if you think she doesn't want to see you, you're crazy. And it's all about her right now, no matter what the readers say. And I want to say that to you and I want to throw my arms around you and hug you because I don't wish that anyone join this club, and there is so much I would do differently, and so if I could encourage you at all, well. I'm here for you no matter what, you know that. But you have bigger balls than you know, so that's why I tell you this stuff.
Fuck all this rusted tangled dented goddamn misery in-fucking-deed, Jann!
Anyway, I've said my peace, and I dread hitting publish, but I'll dread it more if I don't.
Peace.