Anger could never be the first stage of grief!

Anger could never be the first stage of grief. 

First, you're busy making arrangements, then you're just numb.  I figure it takes a good couple of weeks before you get good and pissed off.
 
If you've never juggled before, but always wanted to, you will now have an opportunity to experience the "thrill" of trying to navigate your own grief, while donning the socially-expected (nay - demanded) stiff upper lip, while simultaneously restraining yourself from slugging someone.  It's quite a feat.  Nowhere will you get more practice than when you return to work (more about that in another post).

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, in her book On Grief and Grieving, found that "anger is usually at the front of the line as feelings of sadness, panic, hurt and loneliness also appear, stronger than ever.  Loved ones and friends are often taken aback by these feelings . . . . "

If all of the other things haven't lunked you on the head, you can now add something else to juggle:  being "likeable."  The inherent unfairness of this has been noted by Kubler-Ross, the late Gilda Radner, and happiness expert Gretchen Rubin in her Happiness Project blog: "Being gregarious and upbeat wins you more attention and care. It doesn’t seem fair that your likeability should matter at a time when you’re in pain and afraid. But it does."  Mustering likeability does prevent isolation and can actually pull you out of your own quagmire, but it takes an effort that you sometimes feel you just don't have.

Everyone in my bereavement group has expressed some degree of anger.  Interestingly, very little of it is directed toward the person who died or God.  It's the result of what is sometimes experienced as an astonishing lack of compassion, disappointment in various people or family members we thought would "be there", and simply that the world keeps turning and expects us to do the same as if nothing ever happened.

Yep, we're angry.  Some of us are even sleep deprived, which probably makes us even crankier.

Like the lion with the thorn in its paw, we just want a little gentle compassion.  We promise not to bite. 

And so it is that for the many kindnesses shown to me, my gratitude is unbounded.

Firsts and Lasts

Today is my birthday.

I've been scheduling posts here to publish Mondays at 12:35 pm because my Mom died on a Monday at 12:35 pm. 

This Monday is my first birthday since she died.  I was born at 2:17 pm.

I thought about the "appropriateness" of writing a post today, but that seemed like avoiding the proverbial elephant in the room.  Right behind that thought, was "I wouldn't even be here if it weren't for her."  I am so grateful for this wonderful life she gave me.  I am her creation.  I am her legacy.  She lives through me. 

I remember all the lasts I shared with her:  the last time I held her hand, the last time we gazed into each other's eyes, the last time I said "I love you," the last time I said "goodbye."  I think of all the firsts she must have been so delighted about . . . my first tooth, word, step, boyfriend.

My firsts.  Her lasts.  We shared them all together.

And so it is my first birthday without her . .  . though I'd not shared one with her by phone or in person for a couple of years due to the Alzheimer's.  I remember missing getting that call from her every year at 2:17 pm to mark the moment of my birth and her wonderful cards (we always sent each other several).

Because I saved them, this year I have birthday cards from Mom.

It is indeed a wonderful life.  Thanks, Mom.

SUCK IT UP and other condolences

"Try Google". There's another good one.

You'd think it'd be obvious . . . in the handbook somewhere:  SUCK IT UP is not an expression of sympathy.

Monday of Week Four, I was overcome with grief in the middle of my work day; sobbing behind my office door. For the past week, I was increasingly overcome by grief, uncontrollable crying "out of nowhere, and felt as if I couldn’t function, debilitated.

All I knew to do was something that's very uncomfortable for me - especially when my mood is dark - ask for help.  It was about to become a feral survival cry.

I turned to a few trusted friends who I thought might know of some bereavement groups. I called my former shrink (referred me to someone for $200/hour). A therapist acquaintance didn't know of any groups but asked if I tried Google (what's the best search string for that? "so sad I can't function" or maybe just "HELP ME!"). Nothing I was looking for.

When I got home from work one night, I received a mailing from the hospice service telling me about their "bereavement team," outlining the services it provided: bereavement support telephone calls and visits by professional staff and volunteers, support groups, community resource referrals to grief therapists and support groups. It was exactly the lifeline for which I'd been desperately praying. I could get help at last. There was a place for me that actually invited me to turn to them.

I called and left a message. No one returned my call. Truly concerned about my own wellbeing, I called the social worker from the hospice service that took such beautiful care of my Mom and I in those last two weeks. Surely, she would understand and put me in touch with bereveament team.

Sobbing and barely able to breathe, I told her I was at work and the grief that was increasingly overcoming me. "You're just going to have to SUCK IT UP." "It dishonors your Mother's legacy to be falling apart this way." "I have to go," I said; "thank you." 

Perhaps she thought a verbal slap across the face would snap me out of my hysteria. It did not. I was not simply looking for puerile indulgence. After only three weeks since my Mom died, I needed a tether to sanity - not Fellini's Satyricon.

It's now Week Six. No one from the "bereavement team" has called. 

I have, however, formed my own team.  Apparently, I'm the charter member and team captain.  Other members of the team?  My treasured friends, the Center for Loss and Renewal and Center for Bereavement (support groups I found through GOOGLE!), and this space.

Miscellaneous (the first trip to the house since . . . )

It's had to happen sooner or later, right?  That first mecca up to Mom's after she died.  Seems I'll never stop underestimating the ninja qualities of this entire experience.  I did not, however, make this trip without reinforcements; my friend Denys and her fiance bravely volunteered to drive me up this weekend.  I can never thank them enough for that.

That's my first tip:  DO NOT ATTEMPT THIS ALONE!  If people volunteer to go with you, take them up on it.  If you can squeak out a request that someone accompany you, do it.  This is particularly so for only children.

The grief ninjas struck the moment I cracked the door open.  My entire body remembered what it's done reflexively for the lsat 27 years:  door opens, "HI, MOMMY!"  I instinctively expected her to come out of the kitchen or down the hall and waited the usual moment for her to appear.  I waited a microsecond.  All is well, the house smells like her.  She must be in the bathroom.  Silence.  Emptiness.  The miliseconds of happy expectation into stunned comprehension.  Denys caught me and I sobbed.  I didn't expect to get walloped by it so immediately.  I'd foolishly girded myself for something . . . as if I could prepare.  HA!

Well, at least I got that over with first thing!

I steeled myself and we started looking through the file cabinets.  We were on a mission to find Mom's life insurance policy, policy number, information so that I could run (fund) things while waiting for Letters of Adminisration to be issued.  OK, I'll tell the truth . . . I've not done a thing about the will and was hoping finding the life insurance would buy me a little more avoidance time before having to deal with that and probate court.  Yes, I realize I have a law degree, but when it comes to this stuff, I'm a functional 3 year old whose Mommy died.

Thank God my Mom can always be counted on for funny and thank God we always teased each other about our idiosyncracies.  Heck, thank God I can always be counted on for funny!

Mom's filing "system" . . . wasn't.  The woman who began her career as a secretary for New York Telephone Company had many mislabeled files.  Most of the really important stuff was in a folder labeled "MISC" . . . about 25 folders labeled "MISC".  ARE YOU KIDDING ME???!!!

TIP TWO:  Make sure your "important papers" are all together, in one place, accurately marked.  If you put them in one folder or envelope, make an accurate table of contents on the outside.

I guess she figured I'd figure it out . . . just as soon as I stopped shaking my head and laughing.

Denys and I were in the kitchen and Dave in the adjoining den when I said, "You know, she always told me she left me a letter, with instructions about what to do, where everything is . . . "  I looked up at Mom (the ceiling has become Heaven) and said, "COME ON, WORK WITH ME HERE!!"  The next moment Dave padded into the kitchen looking like he'd seen a ghost, holding some yellow sheets of paper: "Is this that letter?"  He'd just picked it up the moment I'd "yelled at" my Mom.  It was the letter.

I guess her miscellaneous system worked.

Lost My Mom & Lost My Voice - The Update

My Mother died on Monday, August 17, 2009, at 12:35 p.m.

For the preceding week, I sang almost every Rodgers & Hammerstein show tune to her in her hospice room at the Lutheran Home in Southbury, CT accompanied by my iPod played through a little iHome speaker. In fact, when the priest came to "administer the benediction" (euphemism for last rites or, as we Catholic school kids of-a-certain-age may recall Extreme Unction), I was in the middle of singing "Shall We Dance" from the King & I.

After she died, I was driven by making arrangements and notifying everyone . . . call after call after call. I'm an only child, so there was no one to whom I could "delegate" this task. "Keep it together," I kept telling myself to get through another call or another interaction without falling apart. I'm good at that . . . the soldiering on thing. My Mom was, too.

I was amazed at how little I actually sobbed. I'm still not sure whether I consciously suppressed it because I couldn't bear to hear the sound of my own grief or that it somehow made my Mom's death all the more real or whether the automatic coping skill of numbness was kicking in. I do know that whenever I've held back crying throughout my life, I get a terrible sore throat.

By the day of my Mom's second funeral mass on Saturday, I was getting hoarse and starting to lose my voice. By Sunday, only little wisps of sound came out. I was completely "choked up."

In her book You Can Heal Your Life, Louise Hay says that "[t]he energy center in the throat . . . is the place in the body where change takes place. When we are resisting change or are in the middle of change or are trying to change, we often have a lot of activity in our throats." When one has a sore throat, it may reflect "[f]eeling unable to express the self." We even say that flower beds get choked by weeds.

I'd used my voice to soothe and comfort my Mom that last week and to sing the soundtrack of our life together, which had been so much about music. A particular song always triggers a very specific memory. Then I used my voice to carry out the funeral arrangements as she'd taught me (despite my persistent refusal to listen), to tell friends and family.

This voicelessness persisted for nearly a week until it became so annoying, physically painful and such a continual reminder of the cause, that I felt I had to do something. Unfortunately, the only thing to do was to "let it out" and cry. That scared the bejesus out of me. I could get on with it and bawl or continue sounding like a pathetic Brenda Vaccaro (there's got to be someone else for that analogy already!).

I was going to have to deal with it one way or the other. Thus, I "sounded my barbaric yawp" and have begun to speak. Like this whole process, my voice these days is sometimes fine (like when I recount something about my Mom or am loving the life she gave me) and sometimes wobbly.

There's nothing else to say.

UPDATE: I had my singing lesson last night with the brilliant Jane Kennedy I told her about my experiences lately with my quavering, unreliable voice. She lovingly explained the cause and effect upon the vocal chords. She reminded me of the expression, "having a lump in your throat."

What I most wanted to share with regard to the discussion in this original posting about change and the effect on the throat/voice is that, after we began our warm up last night, my vocal range has expanded since my last lesson (taken before my Mom died) . . . My three octave range is now an octave and a third! I suppose with change also comes expansion if we allow it and a whole new voice begins to emerge.

Psssst . . . your pajamas are open!

Nobody could possibly have prepared me for what it would be like when my Mom died. I'm barely sure even I can describe it, seeing as how I've lost my mind and all.

What I can tell you is what it feels like. It seems to boil down to, "I've completely lost my mind and that's perfectly normal." Typically said to me by someone with a piteous tone and a pat on the head; and I'm grateful as I can be for the tone and the pat!

The word that keeps running through my head is torpor ("a state of motor and mental inactivity with a partial suspension of sensibility") with a feeling of being completely lost. Definitely shaken AND stirred.

In the 70's there was an expression for when you smoked pot and were a little high . . . "maintain" . . . as in to maintain the appearance of being perfectly "normal" when you walked past your parents in the living room when you were stoned off your rocker, red-eyed and giggling.

In the aftermath of my Mom's death (today in fact is 2 weeks to the day), I occasionally catch myself thinking I'm just fine and then go and do something completely "off" . . . I think I'm "maintaining" but instead, it's really like wearing those feetie pajamas with the back door hanging open and everybody can see it but me.

For instance, it took me 5 separate trips from her house to the car the day she died . . . the new locks didn't work or worked too well and I was locked inside the house. Then I remembered I could simply go out the sliding glass door. I'M A GENIUS! Got to the car. No purse. Tromp back up the little walkway and around back, grab purse and head back out to car. Nope, no car keys . . . and so it went. It wasn't until the third trip I realize that it might - just maybe - have something remotely to do with my state of mind.

Or just today when I thought I left my apartment perfectly groomed and caught sight of myself in just a couple of hours later in the ladies' room mirror at my office. My Mom used to describe this particular look as "ready to haunt houses."

Here I will share what I learned and am continuing to learn as my Mom's Alzheimer's finally progressed, her week in hospice, making funeral arrangements as an only child. I will also share the joy, the humor (it's essential to avoid the booby hatch!) - all of it.