Sanity is Just a State of Mind…

It’s been an awful 10 days.  First of all, I have only come close to being that violently ill one other time in college – with my brave roommate Maria by my side every step of the way.  I don’t know if I could have done it.  Bless her soul, she became one of my dearest friends, my maid of honor, and someone who still holds a very special place in my heart.

Still having some symptoms, so haven’t been able to visit mom in the hospice, and I miss her incredibly.  She is extrememly depressed and can’t wait to come home.  I’m worried that her friend Linda has filled her with all of these ideas of things she may be able to do if she “just eats right”.  Um, Linda, that’s the problem with pancreatic cancer – you can barely eat and what’s eaten doesn’t stay in.  Just once I would like to look at Linda and very calmy say “Linda, shut the $%&* up.”

I haven’t gotten anything done in the apartment.  It literally looks like someone drove a steam shovel through it.  The last straw was the day we got the hospital bed.  They deliver and set up the hospital bed, but you need to remove the other bed.  So between my mother’s CNA Thelma (who could pass for an Amazon woman), a volunteer, and myself we got the box spring wedged in the bedroom against a wall, and I had to – literally – just through heaps of stuff onto a table I have in my extra room so we could fit the mattress in there.  There is stuff everywhere.  There’s boxes of my stuff from the bedroom sitting in the kitchen.  I can’t tell you the last time I vacuumed.  It’s just so overwhelming.  I pick up a box determined to go through it, and gee, item #1 goes in the cabinet now blocked by the table moved for the mattress to fit in.  And from there it just goes down hill. I had thought of storing stuff in a storage rental unit, but got talked out of it by a semi-friend.  Next time, I go with my gut.  There’s no where to fold clothes, no where to put clothes away once I get them back from the laundromat, no where to start sorting things for junk, donation, etc.  I get anxiety attacks just looking at the mess.

There’s just too much on my plate (like, when isn’t there?)  And each item is just another way to avoid another item.

A friend wrote how odd it seems that life just seems to keep on going when you’re in the middle of a crisis and how surreal it seems.  I watch the news, I look outside, and I talk to people and it does seems surreal.  I come back into my world and realize once again that I’m falling apart, that I’m losing my mother.  My bed seems so much more appealing.  It’s not that I’m not thankful for all I do have, I look around at the pictures from Iraq, from the remnants of Katrina, from Darfur…damn it! …from those doing without in this country, the richest country in the world and I want to cry.  But it doesn’t change the grief I’m going through.  I just feel guiltier.

And the hole in my heart just gets bigger.