Polar Bear: Sry for your loss btw. I’m not sure who you lost but I think you loved that person.
RL: How do you know I lost someone? How could you tell? Yes, my mother died a while back, maybe five months ago. I haven’t written about it. I didn’t know what to say.
Polar Bear: You hinted at it in your writing. That’s the biggest loss I can imagine. Sry again.
Oh I did. Amazing! It happened almost five months ago, but I haven’t been able to write about it until now.
Yeah it is the biggest loss you can possibly imagine, correct. It was really hard to take for 2-3 weeks, but somehow I also got a lot more extroverted. My blood pressure was elevated for all that time, and that’s the only I really noticed other than, yeah, it was really affecting me. It was like she dropped off the face of the world is how I put it.
I tried to talk about it intellectually in that manner to a few people, but they all just shut me down. Now people shut me down as soon as I mention it, including my own physician! People are just not ok about talking about death in a serious way. They just can’t. I guess it’s too terrifying and most people deal with it by just blocking out the idea of it and never thinking about it, which is really the only way to think about death – never think about it.
You are intellectually ready for your parents to die, and you talk about it casually, etc., but I don’t think you are emotionally ready for it at all. Emotionally, somehow you think they will be there as long as you are alive.
Also, I only know a world with my mother in it. She’s always been in the world. That’s the only way I understand life. Without her in the world, the world seems completely different and somehow not real.
For a while in the first couple of weeks there, I kept thinking
I’m going to have to call my Mom and tell her about this and see what she thinks.
Then I would think,
Oh, yeah.
For a while there, I also felt “free.” It’s not like she held me back from stuff I wanted to do. But I was finally a true, pure adult. I remember when my Jewish gf lost her mother, she was crying,
Bob! I’m all alone! I’m all alone!
Well that’s how it feels when you lose your parents. You’re really on your own now. Of course you are on your own when your parents are around, but you truly are when they are gone. You are also truly alone in a sense too, I guess.
Also for about a month after she died, lots of people were really, really nice to me, including lots of women. Even young women, even a teenage girl! I’m still not sure why everyone was so nice to me for a while there. Was I acting different? My brother said people can tell that you went through something terrible, and they are very nice as a result.
Now I’m back to the same old mood. People aren’t really very nice to me. They’re pretty lousy to me most of the time, just sort of “cold.” Teenage girls look at me with a look that resembles undisguised, actual, literal disgust. That’s a bit hard to take: being disgusting. But perhaps there is something about my behavior that is making them act cold like this.
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Women have a sense about some things. Don’t think they even control it. Most women are essentially Rain Women. They seem irrational with odd obsessions like only getting underwear from Kmart but can count all the toothpicks that drop. They’re full of little surprises.
Mother and son often seem to have very deep connection. Perhaps the only woman you can truly trust.
About it. That’s the only woman who never left me, and now she’s left me too.
I’m really sorry for your loss. I wonder what her age was? I’ve read that she was a child during WW2.
She was 89 years old! She made it all the way to 89! She was in great health just three days before her death too. Hit her all of a sudden, just like that.