4:42 a.m. I was laying in my bed listening to the quite outside and trying to relax enough to fall back asleep. A few minutes earlier my dog had decided she needed to go outside. When I opened the back door to let her out, I discovered it was snowing. Beautiful. So quiet. So peaceful. The sound of silence.

I wanted to hold onto the quiet, to internalize it and make it mine but it was not to be. As I lay there trying to doze off memories of my mom and daughter flooded in. Just a day earlier my son had shared with me some of the Christmas presents he got from his mother’s side of the family. One of the presents was a homemade calendar with a collage of family photos on each page and birthdays and other events highlighted on their dates.

Flipping through it I came to the month of October and there it was. Saturday the 11th. The day my daughter is getting married. I will not be invited, nor anyone on my side of the family. Honestly, I have no idea why, I really don’t. It must have been something I did in a past life and my karma is catching up with me. In this life I did everything I could do to be a good father and yet it wasn’t good enough.

When mom was still living in her home, shortly before we moved her to a nursing facility, I stopped by to visit and found my dad sitting in a chair in the living room staring into space. We talked for a while and he told me mom was in bed. It was around 2 in the afternoon but mom had gotten into the habit of being unable to sleep at night and then staying in bed all day trying to make up for it.

She was curled up in a fetal position and was hardly more than a small bump under the covers. When she saw me, she turned over to face me. She asked about the kids and we reminisced about how wonderful it was to come home when the kids were little and they were still so excited to see you that they screamed “daddy!” or “mommy!” and ran and hugged you.

Thinking of my kids, I told mom that I really missed that. Mom looked at me and I could tell she was thinking of me when I was little. “I miss that too.” she said.

How many heartaches must a person endure in a lifetime? If a person can die from a broken heart I should only be a memory by now. Yet despite the cracks, the holes and missing pieces; my heart keeps beating, keeps plugging away. It knows its job and it just does it.

Sometimes that’s all we can do. Just keep on keeping on. Feel the pain and keep doing what we need to do. The trouble I’ve found was when I tried to avoid the uncomfortable situations, the pain. This ‘aversion’ therapy just doesn’t work. It’s like trying to run from your shadow. Wherever you go, there it is and the discomfort is greater, the pain more intense. But when I purposely slow down and pay attention without judgment they loose their sting.

The estrangement from my daughter will probably always hurt but it doesn’t need to keep me stuck in the past, in regret . . . unable to look or move forward. Pain and discomfort are a part of everyone’s life, but to dwell on them only makes them more powerful than they really are.

In an effort to deal positively with all these emotions over Christmas I went through some old photos and slides I got from mom and dad’s house. I wanted to make some sentimental presents for my kids. I found some negatives that revealed a great shot of my mom and daughter blowing bubbles. I blew it up and framed it for her. As luck would have it I also found a sweet little hand made Christmas card that she’d made for my mom, or granny as she was called by all her grandkids. I mounted the card on the back of the frame.

My son gave it to his sister Christmas morning and reported that she started crying when she saw it and really liked it. For now that’s all I can hope for. I know I touched her heart & she knows I still love her.

My son is in barber school and for him I scanned and blew up two photos of him when he was little and had his first haircut. I’ve always liked to put some effort into the presents I give and make them more personable and hopefully memorable. He liked those and said he would display them by his barber chair at school.

Not to be outdone, my mom made sure she had a gift for me too. It’s funny but I don’t ever recall seeing any photos of me as a baby. My first birthday is the earliest photo I have. There were some slides tucked away in a box & when I flipped through them I came across these photos of my mom and me as a baby. What a wonderful present.

When mom died we found a very worn clipping that she’d kept in her billfold.

“How many people in a lifetime are there for whom we deeply care? Not so very many. Here is one of mine. We don’t choose them; they simply arrive in our love, and perhaps depart. Yet they bring with them, however briefly, all we know of happiness.”

When my mother died a part of me died too, but she’s shown me that although she’s gone from this life, she’s still very much present.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 28th, 2007 at 10:31 am and is filed under family, sleep.