Garden Day

Big day for planting the edible forest at Buzzi USA. I stopped by before work to take a look.

Drainage problems

Some of the plants on the hillside have died.  This explains why.  They are sitting in underground clay bowls.

Stress

Not a good week for internet, tv, or radio. I think I need to put myself into a media blackout until next week is over. Not just because I have no mother for the first time this coming Mother's Day weekend (she blew me off for the last two years of her life to have dinner with friends) but I feel like I am further disconnected from all the Mothers in family and friends this year. Every add is Mother's day. Every commercial website has a huge Mother's Day banner featuring gifts for the woman in honor or photos of fun gatherings of family.

I expect a good general media black-out of a week to improve my overall view of humanity as well. The world is so much better first-hand than it is at a distance. My ever-changing work schedule is causing me a great deal of anxiety this week as well. Social anxiety is hitting me more than usual as well when I have to speak with other humans in formal conversations over the phone. There are job interviews I want to try to get into but my schedule makes it nearly impossible with this dance I am trying so hard to do to stay active and employed at low-paying gigs that do not pay enough to support anyone. It's pocket change for my car and phone and nothing more.

I need new underwear. I need new glasses.

On top of that, I got news yesterday that my condo in Atlanta is now infested with what is probably bed-bugs that came in luggage from a business trip. I have my people (real estate agent & manager) on it. They've tried two exterminator visits from Orkin without success and now are trying diatomaceous earth.

Homesick

Had four days off in a row last week. Probably the last four days off together that I will have in a long time. Took advantage of the time and drove down to Atlanta to visit friends, family, and places I love. Never enough time to do all I want to when I am in town. Working my two part time retail  jobs a few hours every day this week. Four hours here. Six hours there. 

Without my mother living anymore, it occurs to me that I can just leave my cell phone off all night because there is no one who needs to phone me in an emergency or with any important questions anymore. 

I only use the phone as a clock and a navigator now. 

Got home from orientation and my next door neighbor is building a privacy fence between our houses, leaving her place cut off from ours. It seems funny to me that this is happening just a month after we had the street-side fence removed from our back yard, opening our view to the neighborhood and increasing the amount of sunlight coming into the yard. Now we are being boxed in on the other side. People in High Point greatly value their privacy and solitude. Me, not so much. Oh, well... 

Back in Atlanta for a visit

First stop - lunch at Lee's Bakery on Buford Highway.  I had a delicious tofu Bahn Mi and avocado smoothie. 

I am the Ivy Fairy (Ivy Ninja).

Gift from a neighbor for whittling her English ivy down to size.
I enjoy cutting vines off of trees because seeing trees burdened down by the heavy green stuff chafes me. 

Saturday in Greensboro

We started the day at the corner farmer's market, followed by lunch at Sticks & Stones. 

Green Spring

Not doing much this week. Just pulling and digging up green onions/wild garlic in the yard.
The yard and house are MonsterMustDie's domain. My gardening will be entirely in pots that I can move to unseen places so that he can keep his vision of what the curb view should be.

Meanwhile, since things are piling up downstairs and he is not putting anything on sale online, I am trying very hard to persuade him to spend his off-time on the weekends working on the house and yard, rather than going picking/treasure-hunting all weekend and adding more to the horde of unusable things in the basement.

Rainy Day

There are good days and bad days.
I am having a hard day today while I'm off work from my part-time retail job.


Every time I see daytime television show that my mother enjoyed, like the Talk or The Chew, etc. I start to think too much about my mother and the tears come again. The women of my tribe shop for entertainment and anything food and cooking was of great interest to my mother. Fortunately, I am not an avid shopper or QVC fan, but its that classic WASPy suburban culture that I now associate with my mother, especially from my month spent with her in October. She shopped to excess for entertainment. She obsessed over her weight all of her life. She obsessed over and enjoyed fashion trends, jewelry of all kinds, and the latest cosmetics and skincare products. Most of my nice clothes and makeup were given to me by her. This also reinforces my lack of female friends here, in NC, where I live now. I am cut off from anything feminine now without my friends around me. I really need the Womens Night ladies and the Crafty Kitch chicks and the Goth Glamour girls.

My mother was also my main connection to my family and what everyone was up to. No one else ever spoke to me or called. It was my conversations with her that kept me informed. Without her bridging that gap, I fear I will have no family. Maybe that's an irrational fear. I can only hope that all the positive bonding that took place during her passing will stay intact. I do not think my family have any understanding of my situation. It is especially sad that MonsterMustDie has no appreciation of relationships in this way after growing up as an only child in an always-relocating military family.

Maybe it's the last washing away of all of the stress from the last 5 months. Really, the last year has been nothing but stress of one sort or another. I am officially giving up on building any sort of life for myself here in North Carolina. I want to be with my people. I hate it here. It is the people and relationships that I spent a lifetime creating that I need. Some things that are started in one's twenties and thirties can not easily be recreated now because life is different and it seems like most people my age are not looking for new experiences. I don't see much art here. Art is a spiritual part of me - it is a way of living and thinking that is now gone from my life. I still want to do stupid, creative, theatrical, immature, silly things with friends and any joiners I can find. And, at last, I have not been to any live music shows or taken part in any events here. The old rocker in me is sad. I still long for the crunchy music but I have no new haunts or scenes to be a part of.

I still lack a full-time job after a year so I don't even have the ego boost of work and full professional involvement to float on. I am lucky that MonsterMustDie is able to support me, even though he often lets me know that he wants my to find work or create work for myself that would allow me to pay my half of the living expenses here. Believe me, I would gladly do that - I desperately want to be financially enabled. Being essentially a house wife leaves me with no power whatsoever on any household decisions here. I am now offically a sub. I tell everyone this is his house and I am just lucky enough to be allowed to live here.

My mood will lighten up eventually but today everything really sucks.

Sick

Sick. So very sick.

Didn't get out of bed all day Wednesday. Had a slight fever of 100.5. Could this be the flu? I've never had the flu so I don't know. Even when I did think I had the flu once, the lab said it was only a really bad cold but this feels much worse.

Thursday, somewhat better. No fever but my head felt like it is about to explode from sinus pressure and it hurt like being stabbed in the chest every time I coughed. I tried to go in to the closest medical clinic and was turned away because they weren't taking new patients when I came in.

Friday night, MonsterMustDie took me to the Urgent Care doc-in-a-box I'd been to before. I ended up being seen by the same doctor who tried to give me vallium to go with the prednisone that I got for my severe poison ivy last summer. This time, he tried to give me Prednisone again for the sinus headache but ended up prescribing a cough syrup and Z-pack.

This morning, I woke up with a disabling headache, ringing ears, and stiff neck that had me incapacitated until noon. I got out of bed finally at 1PM when the headache finally faded. I am blaming the Z-pack. MonsterMustDie thinks I should continue the antibiotics no matter what but there is no fucking way I can put myself through what I felt this morning again. I've had similar reactions to other antibiotics in the past but this was the worst I've felt in many years.

Even now, I have the head and body aches with ringing ears and light sensitivity but it is at last at a tolerable level.

Anniversaries

Today is the 11th aniversary of the death of my father, James Ray Perry. It is interesting that Mom died so close to the aniversary of his death.

My Mother Is Gone

At 4:00 pm on February 1, 2016, my mother breathed her last breath and her heart stopped shortly thereafter. She was in a hospital bed surrounded by family. It was a very hard end for her and everyone around her. It was her choice to go when she did the way she did it, by discontinuing her dialysis treatments. I still don't agree with her choice but it was her choice to make, not mine. She had been very unhappy for a long time.

Once again, everything in my life has stopped and must be rebooted all over again. But that's life, isn't it?

 Helen Loretta Crowe Perry during our last time together in October 2015

Here's some food for thought from other people:

from my good friend Jae Paul Harrison

A few weeks ago, I had dinner with some friends. The conversation flowed through many subjects — some hilarious, many frivolous, but also some substantive and, though discussed with a certain dark wit, markedly sad. All of us at the table had lost a parent, a couple of us just within the past year or so, and I mused at one point that I know (actually KNOW, not just am acquainted with) a full dozen people who had a parent die in 2015.

I know this is the circle of life (or whatever sugarcoated Disney metaphor one prefers), but I can say now with an authority conferred by personal experience, anectodal evidence, and overwhelming proof than no one is every really ready to be orphaned, even if only partially.

Today, a dear friend's mother passed away, making my friend the 16th person I know to lose a parent since I lost my dad last January. Yes, since that dinner just a few weeks ago, 4 more of my friends have been left to make arrangements and find inner reserves of grace they didn't know they had to weather the kind support and helplessness their friends display at these awful moments of grief. We all stand by, hoping that there is something that we can offer, knowing that there really isn't. Comfort comes only with time, and it takes a lot more of that than you might expect if you haven't been through it.

A friend of mine who lost his father shockingly and unexpectedly when my friend was not yet 30 years old told me that he always checks back with the bereaved after 6 months or so because "by then, everyone else has forgotten and moved on, but that's when it really hits you that you never get to have a conversation with your dad ever again, and that's when you feel most alone." In a book by Christopher Buckley, I read, "You don't remember who shows up, but you definitely remember who doesn't."

I don't know where I'm going with this except that my friend lost her mother today. I want better words than "I'm sorry for your loss." I want something more tangible to offer than yet another question for my friend to answer when I ask, as everyone she knows will ask, "Is there anything I can do for you?" I want somehow to ease what cannot be eased and to shine light I do not have into a darkness that I haven't found my way out of even yet.

But all I have is this concern, this compassion, this empathy, and this wish that we didn't have this thing in common.

For all of you who have walked this year with me, carrying your own sorrow for your own losses, you were in my prayers at your freshest loss, and you are still in my prayers.

Always Go To The Funeral
by DEIRDRE SULLIVAN
August 08, 2005
I believe in always going to the funeral. My father taught me that.
The first time he said it directly to me, I was 16 and trying to get out of going to calling hours for Miss Emerson, my old fifth grade math teacher. I did not want to go. My father was unequivocal. "Dee," he said, “you’re going. Always go to the funeral. Do it for the family.”
So my dad waited outside while I went in. It was worse than I thought it would be: I was the only kid there. When the condolence line deposited me in front of Miss Emerson's shell-shocked parents, I stammered out, "Sorry about all this," and stalked away. But, for that deeply weird expression of sympathy delivered 20 years ago, Miss Emerson's mother still remembers my name and always says hello with tearing eyes.
That was the first time I went un-chaperoned, but my parents had been taking us kids to funerals and calling hours as a matter of course for years. By the time I was 16, I had been to five or six funerals. I remember two things from the funeral circuit: bottomless dishes of free mints and my father saying on the ride home, "You can't come in without going out, kids. Always go to the funeral."
Sounds simple — when someone dies, get in your car and go to calling hours or the funeral. That, I can do. But I think a personal philosophy of going to funerals means more than that.
"Always go to the funeral" means that I have to do the right thing when I really, really don't feel like it. I have to remind myself of it when I could make some small gesture, but I don't really have to and I definitely don't want to. I'm talking about those things that represent only inconvenience to me, but the world to the other guy. You know, the painfully under-attended birthday party. The hospital visit during happy hour. The Shiva call for one of my ex's uncles. In my humdrum life, the daily battle hasn't been good versus evil. It's hardly so epic. Most days, my real battle is doing good versus doing nothing.
In going to funerals, I've come to believe that while I wait to make a grand heroic gesture, I should just stick to the small inconveniences that let me share in life's inevitable, occasional calamity.
On a cold April night three years ago, my father died a quiet death from cancer. His funeral was on a Wednesday, middle of the workweek. I had been numb for days when, for some reason, during the funeral, I turned and looked back at the folks in the church. The memory of it still takes my breath away. The most human, powerful and humbling thing I've ever seen was a church at 3:00 on a Wednesday full of inconvenienced people who believe in going to the funeral.

Mother

This photo was taken last October while she was still recovering from a fall.

 

She was still wearing the arm sling although her doctor told her that she did not need it anymore. It made her arm feel better and made her feel, somehow, more secure. 

It is finished.

My mother died today at 4:00 p.m. After days of struggling, rallying again, then dropping her blood pressure, then recovering, her heart finally stopped.