How It's Going Without Mom

Just posted this on my mom's blog:


April 24th, 2012, we learned that Mom didn't have diabetes, she had pancreatic cancer. I was near the John C. Fremont tree in Henry Cowell State Park, at a picnic table with kids and friends and snacks, when...

This has been a remarkably hard start to a blog post to write. This is my fifth try. I'm trying to avoid writing: "When I got the phone call that changed my life." Because a cliche that big is just reallllly a big cliche. Too big. Like in the top five cliches the world over. Now I understand why people use it, because that is what happened, but I can't in good conscience write it down. Unless I just did?

April 24th we got the news, everything about everything changed, and we are today still muddling along. In some ways things seem to be better, getting easier without her, we are more accustomed to her absence. On other levels, though, it is so deeply, wrenchingly sad sad sad. In the beginning it was hard to get through the day/hour/minute without being sad. Now I feel sad less often but what I have lost is so much clearer to me after time has passed. And that is acutely sad.

Last weekend we put her gravestone on her grave, in the Felton Cemetery if anyone happens by. Dad made it, in true Dad-fashion. Dad and the boys (big boys, not little ones) hefted it into place. We cried and stood around sad together, which was somehow reassuring.

One of my responses to Mom's sickness is to try to be healthier. My success at being healthier varies from day to day, but I have read some helpful books, which I feel confident about recommending: Anticancer, by David Servan-Schreiber and Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease by Robert H. Lustig. Eat more veggies, people, seriously. Recalibrate your sweet tooth. Amen.

April has a slew of birthdays in the Beck family, so many people I love are having their "first" without Mom. Sad. Tomorrow is Dad's. Sad.

There have been several things that have made me want to overuse the saying: "She would be rolling in her grave." Sad. That she can't be spitting mad with me and the living is sad.

Jayden is getting signed up for kindergarten. Elijah needs braces. Mom would have been all over that stuff. Sad.

Orthodox Easter (Pascha) is coming, and Mom will be greatly missed. Wielding only a small (but piercing!!) whistle, she commanded the Easter Egg Hunt. For years. There are so many different reasons to miss her.

That's how it is, today, April 24th.