Your new home is made your parents’ RV in their backyard. Finally. A place for you and your belongings. A place that you can freely be without being in the way. A feeling that you haven’t had in a while. Because you had a roommate for the last five months.
When a couple of attempts to correct her resulted in angry shouts of “No, you are not right! I am right!” I surrendered to her certainty.
Her illness and mortality have bitch-slapped me into understanding and appreciation. My mother’s killer screams Wake up! Don’t you realize the gift you’ve been given? I do.
Over-strategizing becomes a roadblock to living life fully. At times it’s best to live life with blanks, uncertainties if you will, so that some miracle can come and fill them in.
Now I mourn my mother through breath. Each morning I lie on a mat in a hot room and squeeze my eyes shut and breathe her in. Or breathe her out. Yes, breath is supposed to anchor me in my body but I use it to exit my body, just as my mother taught me. I rise to the celling of the yoga room, alone and untethered.
I didn’t sit there because I loved her. I sat there because I didn’t want to watch her die alone in a room full of people who should have been there holding her hand.
What I wanted to say was, It took him years to die overnight. He was an alcoholic. Drank himself to death at 47.
“Tim’s bothering me,” Luke’s message said. “If he doesn’t stop, I’m going to blow his fucking head off.”
I called Luke back. “I know about Tim bothering you. He bothers me too. But I thought I should point out that Tim is dead.”
The anxiety of not knowing the extent of her injuries numbed my limbs and tightened my chest, and I could not concentrate on the tasks I needed to accomplish. Neither could I overcome the fear of actually finding out what had happened.
There is nothing wrong with self-improvement. Not one damn thing. But are all these books, podcasts, and blogs really aimed at self-improvement, or do they sell the idea that the way someone is doing something is the way we should all do it?
How did my body tell me about its own grief after my fiance was killed? The breeze on my cheek – just a few weeks after he died – stopped me in my tracks.
I’m convinced that climate change is going to boil us all alive, and this record-setting July heat wave had done nothing to assuage my fear.
My teeth were yellow after a friend committed suicide and I started smoking a pack a day for almost two months. I quit shortly afterward.
…a pleasure so good and liberating I often had to remind myself that it wasn’t wrong. It was just pleasure. Personal. Satisfying. Essential.
