Sarah's Inscriptions

June 25: After collecting the mail, I randomly thought about in memoriam blurbs in the newspaper.  There wasn't even a newspaper in the stack, but there was a collection of ads and coupons, which reminded me of the newspaper, which is how I got here - googling how to get an in memoriam blurb in the local newspaper. It was surprisingly more difficult to find than I had anticipated.  Bringing me to the newspaper website was absolutely unhelpful.  That ridiculous AI-generated google answer finally helped me in the end, which is how I found a link to apply to get one published.  The difficulty now lies in figuring out what the fuck I'm meant to say.  I haven't asked Heather or Jeremy for advice, since I'm honestly contemplating saving it as a surprise for them (though I'm not sure such a thing can be considered a positive surprise, you know?). I opened my notes app and jotted down some initial thoughts and feelings, but nothing I say ever fully encapsulates how I fe...

I've been considering the concept of death anniversaries lately.  This time of year generally reminds me the most of Mom, just because the holidays were really nothing without her (something I've only come to learn since being forced to live without her). Technically, Mom hasn't been gone for five years yet. We're only (somehow actually *already*) at four and some change years missing her. But none of this is true, thanks to the fickleness of time or perhaps the way we've all been taught to count it. We are already living through our fifth year without her.  The fifth year started the day after her death anniversary - August 15, 2024- was the fifth August 15 that passed by without Mom. This Thanksgiving was already our fifth one without her. Christmas will be our fifth one without her. We will begrudgingly enter the technical fifth year without her.  The fifth New Year celebration where Mom has missed the ball drop.  Where we don't ring in the next chapter toget...

T oday marks 3 years since you died.     T his day comes faster and faster with every year that passes.   I   suppose part of me is grateful that I don’t sit glumly in the darkness that this day represents.    I  suppose it also means I’m just another moment closer to seeing you again. However, the other part of me hates that this day comes so quietly after all this time.   I  have been incredibly aware of this impending date since your birthday, then since the first of the month, and with writing dates that were necessary at work.   B ut feelings surrounding this day have been very quiet.   A nd the realization of that makes me quite sad.  I can’t help but feel some semblance of guilt about such a thing.   I t strikes me as non-caring, non-loving, as if I  have completely made it out of the vice grips of this grief.     I  absolutely haven’t, but the longer I have spent in here, the...

This morning, as I rolled out of bed, I intentionally hit the right hand on my Build-A-Bear.  I genuinely wanted to hear my mom's voice, for reasons that I can't even explain, but sometimes explanations offer no real solace anyway. The entire message played straight through - a silly voicemail about tiny gnats surrounding my car.  Mom found this incredibly peculiar I guess, because she thought it warranted a phone call.  Lord only knows where I was or what I was doing that day that left me not answering, ultimately sending her to voicemail.  Sometimes it is difficult for me to accept that I have any voicemails from her at all, because that just implies that I was too busy to speak to her.  My own mother!  I could laugh at loud with how ridiculous a sentence that is.  Now truly, some people are genuinely busy and unable to answer phone calls, but still.  However, I'm also glad that I have something concrete to hang onto.  If I had picked up th...

January 29, 2023  I was in the shower, rinsing myself off underneath the nearly too-warm water, when I suddenly got a writing idea.  This has not happened to me in quite some time, but when it does, it never fails to arrive at the most inconvenient time - when I'm half asleep, driving, taking a shower, at work, etc.  Nine times out of ten I will not be able to jot down the idea that floods my brain in full.  If I'm lucky, I will remember it long enough to where I'm awake, parked, my hands are dry, all the kids are asleep, etc., and then I can make it permanent somewhere. The rather lucky and unlucky scenario that happened to me in that shower, was that I didn't forget the prompt.  But I'm certain that's because the initial prompt only prompted even more thoughts, which flashed my brain with traumatic images, which made the remainder of that shower feel simultaneously like two seconds and two days had passed. When thoughts like this intrude so suddenly, it can al...

October 24, 2022 I cannot bear the approaching sound of an aero-med flying overheard without thinking of my mom.  It seems, since she died, they have almost flown over weekly.  While she was still here I could not recall a time I ever heard one. Mom became very acquainted with their sound during her many countless hospital stays.  I remember one time in particular, I believe it was in the heart hospital in GR, mom heard one either flying off or landing on top of the hospital.  She mentioned it nonchalantly, passing seamlessly in the conversation already being had.  As if expecting the rest of us to notice it so easily as well. I notice them constantly now.  When mom first died, I imagined they would land right in our backyard and whisk her down to us.  Her hair would be blowing in the wind of the helicopter blades whirring, and she would stand before us whole.  They never landed though.  Just proceeded on to their destination.  I can onl...

August 14, 2022 (Two Years) Today is the dreaded day.  Your death day.  The second anniversary of it, no less.  Though somehow, today, I am not particularly overwhelmed by it, yet anyway.  Probably because I have been thinking about it coming up since your birthday.  These two days are so close, it's unfair.  One is meant to celebrate your being brought into this world, and the other, this one, symbolizes you leaving it.  I'm not yet sure how to spin it into a positive day.  I don't know that it needs to be, or ever will be.  If I have learned anything through losing you, and Aunt Diane and Grandma, it's that some things are just sad.  Shitty things exist, and it's okay to call them what they are.  Not everything needs to be spun in a positive light.   Two whole years though... How can that be?  24 months.  730 days.  All three ways to describe it sound so unbearably long, and yet it feels like you have been...

 Monday, July 18, 2022 9:48 p.m. Sometimes, if I think about her too abruptly, I almost believe she was just a figment of my imagination.  Like this whole time she was never real.  I never touched her.  I never heard her speak or laugh.  I never felt her love.  Because sometimes, in this immense grief, it can feel like she's been gone forever.  It can feel like she never existed at all.  And other times, I feel as though we last hugged just yesterday.  I just heard her laugh this morning.  I just saw her smile.  I could still tell you what she looked like.  I could pick her out of a crowd even now.  I think I would run to any woman who even slightly resembled her, just out of habit.  They would simply vanish once I got too close, just like she did.  She just disappeared, if you think about it.  One day, she just vanished.  That's what her death feels like to me I suppose, like she just went missing....

 May 30, 2022 - Memorial Day Memorial Day used to be such an occasion for us.  Me, Heather, Mom, Aunt Diane, and Grandma would all go flower shopping beforehand, picking out the best geranium basket we could find, to deliver to Grandpa Harvey's grave on Memorial Day.  We would also travel to Clyde Park Ave to visit Grandma's parents, brother, and sister-in-law.  We sometimes even ventured into Jenison to visit Grandpa Larry.  It was a day of remembering everyone we had lost, while subconsciously celebrating those we still do with them. But now it's Memorial Day 2022, and only Heather and I remain from that long list of women.  Grandma Donna passed in September.  It hasn't even been a year yet, but I somehow feel like she's been gone for much longer than that.  Maybe it's just because, after someone does pass, you never see them again.  They're no longer physically with us, which can be hard to process.  No matter how many losses I have e...

 May 17, 2022 (Tuesday) This entire week of my life so far (which has literally just been Monday and Tuesday, but damn it feels so much longer already), has been consumed with thoughts of guilt. Sunday night, my sleep was held off by the thought that I could have saved my mom. I don’t know if you’ve ever lost your mom, or anyone you love dearly, and if you’ve had similar thoughts, but they’re pretty brutal. The thing is, as I’m sure most of you all know, my mom died unexpectedly. She didn’t feel good the day before, and was gone by 6 the next morning.  But the other thing is, we had noticed her swollen ankles. A few weeks or months before she passed, because what is time, we noticed that her ankles were swollen for some reason. When we brought it to her attention, she said “thanks, now I’m going to worry about them.” In that sarcastic tone that only a woman plagued by a bunch of medical things can have. It wasn’t until her death certificates arrived that we learned her heart f...

April 30, 2022 I've been thinking a lot about the notion of birthdays, given that today is mine (and Heather's <3).  We grow up celebrating the persons day of birth, their life, their aging.  I wonder why that is though.  We as the birthee have done nothing remarkable by simply being born on a random day.  The remarkability lies solely on the shoulders of a mother. Today for my birthday, I would like to celebrate the life that was my mother's, my grandmother's, and her mother before her.  Every mother that ever existed in my lineage, so that I may have been born beside my best friend early in the morning on the last day in April, in the late 90s, to a pair of parents that I certainly did not deserve. A mother uses her body to carry, grow, nurture, deliver, and carry their children some more.  They nurture them more post birth.  Every positive attribute I have today is because of my mother.  Every stubborn one too.  I recognize now, sadly e...

 April 20, 2022 - A sad night, out of the blue. Very suddenly just fully considered what it may mean to someday grow old.  To be 90, and probably have some genetic vision and hearing loss.  So at 90, my children and grandchildren, God willing, will have to do the chaperoning thing.  I will be picked up, driven to my own mothers grave, and reminisce.  Reminisce, as a 90 year old that spent 78 years without her mother, but holding dearly the memories from the 22 that we were gifted.  I will reminisce, as a 90 year old whose own mother probably didn't even think she would live to see that age, only to see 52.  And I will wonder how I got there, to be 90 at the head of my moms grave, chatting with her or with my children and grandchildren, the same way my grandma used to.  My hand being guided along the old headstone, though after all the years of visiting I need no help.  A soul-deep sadness that grips me at every drive out of the cemetery, simi...

 April 8, 2022 It's been a week for me - both physically and emotionally.   Last weekend I battled a 2-day bout with the stomach bug.  That ill-weekend had me missing taking my anti-depressants too.  Not only did I initially forget about them, but then I also wondered whether or not I should take them on an empty stomach, similar to tylenol.  Then it sort of just spiraled, if I'm honest.  I began to notice no difference at all in my mental health, so I started believing that the medicine wasn't working (as I have often thought, if I'm honest).  But then I started feeling better, and I finally returned back to work, and I was just sad.  Not to be there with the children or my lovely coworkers, not even for any reason in particular, I just was.  Because my body on its own does not produce enough of that happy stuff, whatever my doctor called it.  So it turns out that my medicine has been working, go figure.  I have resumed taking...

February 14, 2022 - One and a Half Years H ow has it been so long since you died? I’m sure in no time it will be the 5 year anniversary, and in the blink of an eye the 10 year will be upon us, and I’ll really be asking that question in disbelief. But we’re not there yet, we’re only to 1 1/2 years, and that’s still incredibly difficult to grasp. You were JUST here, I swear. I could’ve last hugged you yesterday, but somehow it’s been far far longer than that. And tomorrow it’ll be another day longer. I’m not quite sure how to deal with the concept of time surrounding your death. Or in general, but especially this.   Some days I think I’m actually doing pretty okay. Other days, both anniversary days and mundane days, I am not. I have found in my grief journey that too very juxtaposing things can exist simultaneously. I didn’t always used to believe that, but experience has proven it true. I am both happy and sad. I feel both peace and anger. I am neither healed nor shattered. I don’t ...

December 26, 2021 Approximately 10:30 p.m. Part of me is mad at her for dying, and that thought alone makes me hate myself.  It wasn’t her choice to die.  It wasn’t her fault her heart was weak from a cancer she didn’t ask for and treatment she needed to survive, but that definitely just ended up slowly killing her anyway. But I’m mad because she’s not here.  And she’s supposed to be here, because she’s my mother, and how is a child supposed to exist on earth without their mother?  That’s not even a situation.  There would be no children without mother’s, no people on earth at all to speak of.  No me, laying here crying in bed missing my dead mother, who should not be dead.  And I’m so mad about it.  I’m angry, and I have no one to yell at. No one to blame or to hate or to direct all my sadness at.  There’s nothing.  My sadness just festers in my heart, which grows bigger every day, and today it feels heavy.  I haven’t cried like th...