Praying for the woman I’ll be in 5+yrs I hope she’s happy, and loved, living life unapologetically, doing what she loves.
I did it Lyss. For you.
you change people. your name makes others smile. your work moves people. someone might compliment you somewhere, right now. someone’s heart will beat faster just thinking about you. your friends remember your experiences fondly. someone might see a book in the store and think of you, too. you inspire others to keep going, or you will someday. your presence matters and changes the world every day.
Watching Love Actually without my mom never gets easier. Every Christmas, we would drink tea and bake with Christmas tunes in the background. I don’t remember worrying about a single thing. I don’t remember Christmas being stressful. We wrapped presents and always watched Love Actually. I remember the scene where the little boy didn’t know how to enjoy Christmas without his mom. I remember mom and I feeling so sad for him. Here I am, feeling similar things to that little boy, and I know my mom’s heart would just break. I am still carrying out our traditions, mom. I am still finding joy despite you not being here with me. Don’t worry.
kindness and anger are not mutually exclusive. a kindhearted person must by definition be angered by injustice. if you are not angry when people suffer you are not truly kind
Hey guys. I know it’s been a while. I live in a dream world now. From my front door, to my downtown, to even the place I work, it’s all beautiful and radiant and I feel blessed beyond compare. I am using tumblr again because I love it for the community, inspiration, photography, readings that resonate and love. I want a place to store my life in sequence again. I want to read the person that I’ve been and see the memories I’ve made and remember how I felt during the stages of my life. Thanks for joining me, some of you for a long time now and many left as I was inactive.
This is will be a place of true and raw expression so please, if that isn’t for you, unfollow
Thank you!!!! ❤️
My mom’s eyes were blue, my dad’s brown. The first time I realized that my brother and I shared the same eyes, I was looking into his and said “Ben, we are going to lose our mommy”. He couldn’t meet my eyes as he said he knew. Our eyes both green. Half of our mom, half of our dad. Soon to feel oceans away from both. In different ways. Our childhood it made so much sense. We were all half of eachother. My mom and I had a great feminine bond, grocery shopping and cooking, dog shows, Joni Mitchell, chick flicks. My dad and Ben were seeing sports games or sharing music, watching sports, playing army guys. My dad and I shared a classic father daughter relationship. We did not have too much in common except our temperament. My brother and my mom did not have too much in common except a deep fire that burned within them.
I knew my mom was going to die the same way I knew Cody was going to die. I had played both their deaths over. I had never done this with anyone else. I knew what song made me think of my mother’s death, and then the same song I played at the funeral. This was not a self fulfilling prophecy. This was hearing sunshine on my shoulders with the windows down in my mom’s Toyota and picturing playing it at the funeral because I knew. I knew Cody would die and I knew it would be by accident which is why I could never let go. With or without him I couldn’t let him go. I couldn’t let him be free and the moment I did is the moment he left. I set him free.
The first time I realized my brother and I shared the same eyes is the day I told him we were going to lose our mom. The next morning , my brother arrived in the doors and there was no one else in the world. This was the day I realized my brother and I shared the same world. Our mom was dead. It is a loneliness we share that no one else feels with us. We know. When we see eachother, hear eachother, we know…
When my mom passed, my brother and my compass of home was spiraling in circles. We didn’t care. He went east to be with the ocean, I went west to be with the mountains. It was the closest we had ever been. It was clear how much we belonged on the outskirts of “society”, how much we needed nature. Furthest in distance from one another but never have I felt closer to him. We needed to know the world was beautiful. More than ever. We needed to see it every single day. Maybe its soul searching or maybe it’s just that we had new eyes. Tainted. And we couldn’t live in that any longer; and we didn’t see the point anyway. What we knew is that death was a shadow that walks around with you every day. I can’t say there are many days I don’t think of him, I don’t see him. There aren’t any days I forget he’s there. His presence is known to me, even in the most amazing moments of my life. And he has stolen from me…. I resent him for that. But he reminds me every day to live, too. I can’t hate him for that. I just wish he didn’t have to show up for me to know this indefinitely. Either way, I guess we are friends.
In this full landscape mountain view that I can only describe as something I’ve seen in my dreams; I see a place I imagine everyone I love to exist. So that makes this my sort of heaven. And I don’t have to die to be here. It exists. Heaven is not the place you go when you die, it’s the time in your life when you most feel alive. I hope you know it’s really never too late to live the life you’d describe as something you only dreamt of. “Wild” was a book I read that was one of those books, you know, where you feel like the words must be written for you and for you alone. Cheryl Strayed writes that her mom once told her you can put yourself in the way of beauty. And that’s sort of my goal now… You choose to put yourself there. Where beauty is. Where love is. What you feel you deserve and what you feel you don’t. And I feel I deserve it all.
{Sometimes you have to look at yourself and compliment yourself. Sometimes you have to say , “wow I’m a goddess”. And maybe you’ll start feeling like one.
Many of us are amputees, struggling to go on living with half a heart, half a soul, and no more dreams for the future with certain people with whom we wrapped all of these dreams around. If you know someone in this position, take them under your wing. I, like many, had people say they would communicate daily, ensure I was okay, visit, help me through. They said they’d do whatever they can so that I didn’t feel alone. This is often an empty promise, as I came to learn. Death sweeps in, and then at the same time so do people who love you. However, your grief and aching heart can’t possibly dissipate at the same rate those people do. Those people are gone in days, if that, and stop the contact in months, if that. And there you are, left in it, and those people with those promises, back to life, work, their reality. Now you are left with yours. This is my story.
I do not resent people who have been unable to be who they wanted to be for me. But I have new promises that I make to myself, and those all involve spreading this understanding around and always being what I want to the people I love. This is a new world for me, I own a new pair of eyes. If I love you now, I’ll love you always and I will walk the path with you. This is a phrase I am taking from a friend who expressed to me, as my mom was dying, that she couldn’t walk my path with me. I thought at the time this was another loss for me. Another person to grieve. It wasn’t. It was a loss for her and a loss of a friendship that won’t ever let her down. I will walk whatever path I need to walk for people I love. And it doesn’t mean destroying yourself to help others. That doesn’t happen simultaneously unless you let it or are incapable of helping others because of your own pain. I am in a lot of pain but I know I am capable of so much love. I didn’t expect anyone my age to be able to support me in any other way than emotionally and even then, most people my age don’t really know what to do or say. Their life just looks very different than mine. That’s okay. I do understand.
For 23 years on this planet, I’ve learned a lot. I’ve seen a lot. I’ve been so many different people - a caregiver and nurse being one of those people. Full time. My mom wouldn’t let people see her. That was her wish and I respected that. But what that took from me was the possibility of support as well since I was there at all times. I am horrible with nurse-like things. It would be one of the last paths I would choose as a career. I had no choice. In fact, any nurses we had come in almost always expected me to carry out their job.
When my mom was diagnosed , I immediately got someone to take over my apartment lease and moved home from Ottawa. I bought a juicer. I took her to every appointment, a notebook in hand. I got her cannabis oil. I tried everything everyone told me, I thought I could save her life with food, supplements, love, a God I didn’t believe in. We had so much hope. When my mom was admitted to hospice, I stayed every night until she passed. I quit my job. I refused to believe it was over. When all was said and done, and my mom slipped on by mid morning on February 8th,I finally had the famous “burn out”. But i didn’t have time for that. I had decisions to make, a box to pick out, a celebration of life to do. I had people to call and inform. I had her bills rolling in. The work really doesn’t stop. It still hasn’t.
I can’t thank Tammy & Rob enough. For showing me compassion every single day. For giving me a place that feels like home after I lost mine the same day I lost my mom. I, like them, never gave up or forgot the pain they faced after losing their son and my friend. We had that understanding, that bond, we weren’t going to let each other do this alone. I honestly don’t know how I’d even be able to go on without their help. I am cleaning out an entire condo filled with my mom’s stuff, my stuff, our family memories and treasures. Some of these memories aren’t even my own and yet I don’t have the heart to throw them away. I don’t have a place. I have to store all these things in my dad’s garage. I am making phone calls and sorting through things and possibly understanding 60% of what I’m doing and saying, if that. Being an executor of a will….they don’t teach you this stuff in school. They don’t set you up for this at 23 in any way, shape or form. My life can’t just go back to “normal”. I define my new normal.
I don’t feel sorry for myself although I’m sure that’s how it comes across. I am disappointed that people aren’t better educated on something that we ALL experience. Every single person in your life you’re going to lose. And if you don’t, it’s because you’re dead. This is the only truth that is 100% accurate. So why has our society stopped that conversation? We’re scared to think about it and that causes so many issues. We aren’t open to it. We aren’t ever prepared. And then we don’t know how to deal with it. I want to help people like me. And I want to inform people like my family and friends who simply just didn’t know what to do or say. There is so much information out there to educate you on ways you can be involved. Things you can say. Things you can offer. I found this article to post so that no one has to feel the way I felt in the last four months. Like I was expected to take care of this on my own or that someone would step up so you wouldn’t have to. I felt like I was just a burden that no one had the energy for when really, I’ve been handling this overwhelming emotion with grace and soaking in everything I still love in this world. I am not a fucking burden. I have had burdens passed to me. And it makes me stronger and makes me a better friend and family member and someone anyone would want by their side when they have to face what I did.
My mom would’ve been so disappointed. In the hospice people and how they treated me. In the lawyer she had and how impersonal and ageist he and his assistant have been towards me. At insurance companies. At the condo corporation. At basically most people I’ve had to deal with. But mostly, at her own family. At my family. At friends. This isn’t me being hateful. This is me speaking to what I experienced and trying to spread awareness so that people at any age never have to go through this alone!
I want to open the conversation up. If anyone wants to talk to me about how to be supportive to a friend or family member that has lost someone, I would be more than happy to help. I have many suggestions on things to do and say to show your love and commitment to someone in such a horrible place.