What Week is It Now?

Truth is, I don't care a bit. 

The last two weeks we have been slowly feeling our way back into school. I decided to keep the kids on track with their math, science reading and history reading. We are continuing with our Wednesday co-op for my younger daughter and her friend. It's just the two of them so it's very low-key and a great thing for her to look forward to each week.

The things that require a whole lot of "Mom" we are putting on hold until I am able to juggle it all. Right now, I am truly appreciating the quiet and time alone or with my husband and kids.

The school work is getting done--no one feels under a tremendous amount of pressure and the kids seem to really be enjoying what they are learning. They are also enjoying my willingness to be with them, to really do things with them like watch a movie, lie and snuggle, sit and color for long stretches of time...I too am enjoying these things. They are soothing and healing.

For nearly two weeks after my mom's memorial service I found myself in a kind of fog or perhaps it was more like a bubble--as though the world was going on and I couldn't participate, but I could watch, and indeed there was part of me that really wanted to be around people and activity, but I didn't want to participate. Thankfully, for the most part, my close friends seemed to understand this.

C. S. Lewis described it like this in A Grief Observed:

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing. 

At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I wan the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me.

Suddenly, it was as though someone turned off a faucet and the inexplicable weeping stopped and I began moving through the days, but still felt a bit numb. Then one day the kids were having their music lessons and I heard them. It's not that I couldn't before, but I really heard each song, each note, the voice of the teacher instructing them, and their voices and notes in response. It was like coming out of a long sleep or a strange illness...and I felt alive again. Since then every fall color pierces my heart, every song, my soul, small activities take on much greater meaning, and the mundane feels perfectly fine with me. It is all coming back to me...what it means to really be alive. To feel again without a constant haze of worry and sadness hanging over me. I didn't realize just how heavy it has been or for how long it has been part of me, but I'm guessing it started about 5 years ago when Mom really started to show signs of Alzheimer's.

I am continually receiving news that Mom's affairs are being settled, accounts being dissolved and final accountings being made. It all seems so final. So strange. That soon there will really be nothing left to show that this woman ever lived, only proving that all of life is truly just a breath.

Day by day we will live and love and carry on, hopefully with renewed purpose and intention, digging deep to plant seeds that grow fruit that will produce far beyond our own usefulness and well into the next generations...It's what she would have wanted...