If not, I really am sorry. Just click away. I would understand completely.
My mom fell ill a few days after Halloween. November was a blur caring for her here at home for a week, two weeks in the hospital and then her death and funeral. In fact, I still have fall decorations on the porch and in the living room. We have pumpkins instead of Christmas right now. I am trying to transition seasons between trips back and forth to clean out her apartment. Thus far, there are no Christmas cookies baked, not a present bought nor an ornament hung. It will be a very different sort of Christmas. I did manage to put up the advent log two and a half weeks late but we have forgotten to light the candles and do the devotions except for one day. We are hoping to get a Christmas tree this weekend. The house, until yesterday, was still filled with large flower arrangements left over from the service. Many were wilting and so I threw them all away. I just couldn't bear to look at them anymore.
I don't mean to be depressing. I've read over and over how our blogs are supposed to bless others. I will fall short today and I'm so sorry. I take consolation that Jesus himself wept at the death of his dear friend Lazarus even though He knew He was about to raise him from the dead.
I have had very little time to grieve. I went straight from the hospital to the funeral home, spent the days after buying cemetery plots, clothing for the children to wear, planning the funeral, filing paperwork and trying to continue to breathe in and out. Within a day of the funeral, we were cleaning out mom's apartment and have been working on it nonstop ever since. I have no siblings and my father died ten years ago. So that leaves me and my immediate family to do the packing and sorting and moving. I have hit a wall and can't bear to go any longer, can't figure out how to organize that which is still there. I would like to pay someone to box up the rest and be done with it. Then there is estate work, thank you notes and all the rest. Completely exhausting to me to think about.
I want to sit in my home (a clean home, not the one that has been through a whirlwind of sadness and rushing about for the last few weeks) and knit. I want to drink tea and read Christmas books with my children next to a decorated tree, listening to Christmas carols. I want to spend my days thinking about what kind of cookie to make and which picture book to read aloud next. But that is not my lot this year. Do I sound like I am feeling sorry for myself? I probably am. It is what it is.
I miss my mother. This time last year we were baking dozens and dozens of cookies: apricot and prune kolachy, cinnamon sugared pecans and gingersnaps. The world continues to rotate and I want to ask everyone, "How can you go about your business as usual when my mother just died? Why isn't everyone stopping to pause and remember this lovely woman? Where is the moment of silence, the holiday off work where everyone hugs their family a little tighter?"
I know mothers die every day. But she sure was a very special mother.
