Healing....

Healing from my mother's death is coming alone slowly. I'll never be fully healed, but I'm getting better. I've been out of school this week, and honestly that's done a load of good. I haven't been able to really be a couch potato since in a long time - where I can just sit, read, watch tv, exercise, and not really stress about things. I'm working here and there for the summer, but am going to consciously try to keep the stress to a minimum and, frankly, be a bum for as much as I can. That said, I still need to work on my thesis - so how much of a bum can I really be? As I cleaned out a closet the other day (trying to decrease the amount of "stuff" I have), I had an epiphany. My parents dying isn't unfair at all. Unfair means that something inordinately unjustified happened - but death is a fact of life. Everyone dies, everyone experiences the death of a loved on - and that's fair. Life IS fair because everyone experiences tragedies, and frankly others have it worse than I do. Instead, I'm choosing to say that my parents' death is unfortunate. I'm starting to realize what a great support group I have. Billy is wonderful and is so protective of me - I honestly don't know what I'd do without him. He makes me laugh so much, and being with him is so easy - I don't have to worry about saying the wrong thing, or worry that he won't like something that I do, or worry that my intelligence and/or zest intimidates him. I can't handle stress and difficulty right now, and thank heavens there isn't a great deal in our relationship. If we weren't together, I'm sure I would be a hermit right now. And we're going to Poland together in the fall, which will be a wonderful trip to help me survive the first holiday season without my parents. Not only is my boyfriend supportive, but I have my own group of friends as well as my mom's. One of my mother's dear friends is "adopting" us - we'll be spending Father's Day with them, and other upcoming holidays. She also will be the adopted grandmother to our children, which means a lot to us. Another of Mom's dear friends will be taking me on a trip to Budapest or Turkey in December- we both love international travel and she has international tickets that she needs to use this year. So, I'm ok. I have good days and bad days, and sometimes I remember things I don't want to - like how Mom looked in her final days, how she was angry when she found out she had lung cancer, how excited she was to hear I might be going back to Italy (where I was to buy her a rosary from the Vatican). And I remember her weakly telling me, "I'll miss you" when I left her hospital room for a couple of hours one day to run errands, how she asked me to stay with her until she fell asleep, how she told me every day she could talk that she loved me. How she stopped waking up. Life is fair. It's a cycle. It's not always happy and it's not always fortunate, but her death was going to happen sometime. It's very unfortunate that it happened while she was young, but she's with my father and that makes me smile. I still miss her every day, and I'm sure future posts will still be about her. She was a lady, and I cherish the bits of her that she passed down to me. Ciao.