#my aunt and my mom bought it for me when i had my tonsils removed

[of-another-broken-heart]

Jumble summary.

Today was supposed to be my final day in Eorzea using the free log in campaign. But something went screwy and I couldn’t log in. I tried to reach out a few places to get it fixed... but all I got was one off-the-cuff response from someone who insisted I didn’t qualify for the event at all (I did... and logged in for 3 days, and was specifically presenting the issue as being locked out of the 4th day I should have been able to play)

Mom finally got the tree up today. She had to chew the kids’ father out and get him to finally move his dresser somewhere out of the *literal middle* of the living room and help clear out the table/cage that was used for the bird (which has been empty for... many many months now). The dresser is now behind his recliner. Which is... whatever. Not my business, I don’t care. It’s out of the way finally, and the tree is up, and that was a nice mood booster all around. 

lil sis threw a small fit when she got back from a friend’s house because apparently she doesn’t have as many electrical outlets to monopolize now? Because she had “claimed” a small extension cable that was never hers to begin with, and mom used it to set up the tree I think. 

My brother is taking me to Saaz tomorrow. He kept asking me for gift ideas, and I showed him I had an amazon list set up, but I wasn’t really seriously wanting anything this year (most things I need are unreasonable to ask for). So tomorrow’s lunch is an early present, basically. I’m happy with that. 

I just hope my throat behaves. It’s been really sore for a while now. It’s possible I did it to myself while trying to chase some tonsil stones out kinda recently. Regardless of the reason, it’s just ever so mildly painful to swallow, and there’s a bit of an ambient discomfort around my tonsils even when I’m not taking a swallow. 

I should really look into getting my tonsils removed actually. Ugh, but that would open me up to dental criticism, and... no. I’m basically not going to subject myself to more dental work unless I get put under with the guarantee that when I wake up, my teeth will be all set for the rest of my life - and I won’t have to make half of every meal into painkillers just so I can chew food without sobbing in pain. 

I’ve started getting my shit together for staying over at my aunt’s place. First order of business is food things, so that’s what I started with. She’s bought me some things already, but I will be bringing stuff I know we have plenty of - rice, instant oatmeal, a box of cereal, for example - because it needs to be used, and what better time than when I have a kitchen at my disposal, and minimal clutter, and nobody floating around making it a Heavy Social space! 

Speaking of Heavy Social... I spent like an entire 60-90 minutes talking with my brother about video game stuff. I was cool with most of it, but about halfway through I wanted to tap out, but couldn’t bring myself to say anything. Especially since we’re doing lunch tomorrow, I didn’t want to be rude. 

I guess I’m going to get to bed soon and hope I get enough sleep. It’s been... almost okay these past few nights. Still non-stop tossing and turning, but I think I hit REM and managed to have a dream at some point in the past week. 

#personal #food mention

[queerly-belov3d]

Things I don’t want to forget

I visited my grandmas house for the final time on March 25th, 2017.  I felt a lot of emotions, but most of all, an overwhelming wave of grief and finality.

This was it.  She doesn’t live here anymore.  She will never live here again.

After I walked out the door, I texted myself every detail I could remember about what I had just experienced - just so I could hold onto it a little longer.  Two days later, I received a blank text in the same conversation I had created with myself for that very purpose.  I’m not sure what I believe in, but I think that was my reminder to move such a memorable experience to a better location.

So here it is.

It smells like church in the living room, and in a most fitting fashion, a picture of Jesus is the only thing still hanging on the walls.  The living room is empty, bar the piano and the headboard my mom wants me to take.  The random assortment of carpets are still down, the frayed edges still duck taped to the floor to prevent her from finding a way to trip over them.  However, everything else is gone.  The couches, the entertainment set, the TV, the Christmas decorations... all gone.

The room with the red carpet that I spent hours playing in has been purged of all my toys.  At some point after I moved to college it had been re-purposed into a laundry room, but all of my toys had remained packed on the shelving to the side of the room - along with the copious amounts of chips she would get on sale and pack away to give to me during my next visit.  But now the bookshelves full of papers, antique toys, board games, and snacks were gone.  

The other guest room, that used to be my great aunts bedroom, holds only a lamp now.  This is where I had slept when I last visited her.  Where I packed up my things and left thinking I’d still get to see her again, only a week before she would pass away. 

Her room is what gets to me the most.  What was once a chaotic array of various items that were fond to her is now an empty shell.  The TV whose remote I had to reprogram so many times I cannot count is gone.  The computer we sat at for hours together while I frustratingly tried to teach her how to use it has since moved on - the only sign of it’s existence being the modem plug still hanging from the wall.  In fact, it’s the only thing still on the wall.  The pictures she had once printed out (a few of which had been on normal printer paper, but most from disposable cameras - as she loved those the most) are now gone.  The photo from “The Secret of the Watermelon” youth group event, the picture that had post it notes of prayers she needed to make, and the various other elements that had hung on her wall that had made her room full of her love and joy are now all gone.

And of course, most importantly, her bed is gone.  The small set of stairs she had pushed up next to her bed so her little dog could easily join her at night has vanished.  The headboard that used to hold her alarm clock that seemed to be set to go off at all sorts of random hours of the day has been thrown out.  The white comforter with a patterned arrangement of colorful flowers has moved on.  She doesn’t sleep her anymore, and that’s finally set in.

I peek into the bathroom and notice that this room still holds multiple possessions of hers.  Her pink comb for her thin hair sits in the green cup she had used to hold her various bathroom belongings.  There are a few sticky notes with reminds still floating  around near the sink and the mirror.  But these things don’t allow me to live in the illusion she’s still here.  There’s still too much missing from this room, too.

As I’m leaving the bathroom, I notice the hallway closet I always overlooked.  This is where she had hung my arts and crafts project from my very first day of Sunday school in 1996... or maybe it was ‘95... regardless, she had been so happy for me to be going to church.  Even though I don’t go now, and I’m not sure what I believe in anymore, if there was a God, she’s been the only person in my life to radiate that kind of love.

When I trek to the kitchen my heart drops.  All of her appliances are gone.  I’ve never seen this room so exposed.  What saddens me the most is the absence of the fridge that had always held photos of Rodger, newspaper clippings (including the picture of herself planting tomatoes when she made it onto the front page), or other notes and miscellaneous fun artifacts, pinned up by magnets of all varieties.  One of them used to be a magnet from the Sears tower, which had been a gift from me after my trip to Chicago in 2015. 

Also missing is the gas stove - a reminder of how much she loved to provide for others via her cooking, even when asked not to.  Sometimes I’d eat a second dinner to appease her, because I knew how much it meant to her (and she was going to make it regardless of my level of hunger).  This makes me reflect back to middle school, when I’d bring friends back with me after school and she’d bring out all the food she could muster for all of us.  Those days are over now.

I take a look out of her kitchen window to her back yard and am not surprised to see that the black swing is gone - although I’m not sure why this is important to me.  Other than one mysterious black Croc shoe, her back porch is completely empty.  The flowers, decorations, and wind chimes have all been migrated to my parents house.  My heart aches as I remember how she had wished to go out on her back porch one more time.  She had been doing so much better that she had even been getting up from bed and making her own meals.  I had been home the day her hospice worker discussed how next week, they’d both go out and sit on the back porch together.  But that day never came.  That same night, she had a mini-stroke.  It was too hard on her body, and she didn’t recover.  She passed two weeks later.  Pushing that memory out of my mind, I focus instead on the few ornaments that still scatter the back yard.  My eye catches on the garden hose - bright green with a yellow stripe - and I can almost see her holding it, sporting sun hat and gardening gloves, waving to me, but it’s only a memory.

As I pull away I notice she has labeled the screens inside her windows with indications of which area they belong to.  South K, this one says.  I’m not sure what this means, but I know she did.  She knew her systems.  I remember there was a brown block puzzle she had owned that she had given to me to solve.  When I finally did figure it out she wanted to make sure we could always solve it again, so she wrote letters in black marker on the sides of the pieces, where if the letters matched on two different pieces those sides must go together in that spot.  She might not have ever fully understood how to use the Internet to Google something, but she sure was clever.  Years of taking care of others made her that way.  She was a problem solver, and she’d always try to help find a solution - even if that solution was duck tape, which it usually was (dubbing her the title Duct Tape Queen, even prior to my mom finding a book buried in the basement called The Duct Tape Book a few months back).

My mom beckons to me to see the basement, and I follow her.  As early in my life as I can remember, the basement was always filled with canned goods at the bottom of the stairs, and everywhere else filled with archived memorabilia.  I know it will be empty now, but in my gut I feel as though the basement couldn’t possibly be empty.

As we descend the stairs, I do not see the shelves that used to hold the canned goods.  When we reach the bottom of the stairs, I turn on the light and am awestruck.  There’s nothing left.  My mom has gotten through it all, which shouldn’t be surprising now that 10 months have passed.  I smile a little, thinking of how my grandma had always claimed she had my moms tonsils saved somewhere down here, and how my mom had never found them.  Had she gotten rid of them a long time ago and forgotten?  Were they in some other secret space, a surprise for the next inhabitant of the house?  Who knows.

I take a look at the space of floor and wall I never knew existed and imagine everything else she had kept here.  My mom had shared a few of these items with me.  Stuffed animals from my moms and uncles childhoods, my uncles boy scout uniform, the newspaper from the JFK assassination... what else had she kept here?  Whatever it all had been, I knew she had kept it for a reason.

When we get back up from the basement, I take a peek into the garage - now the holding place of many various items my mom has yet to remove.  I see a small wooden chair with a patch of brown duct tape on the top of it.  I remember this chair.  Everything else in here, not so much.  As I am about to turn off the light, I notice there is a mark on the garage wall that looks lighter than the rest.  It’s the letter ‘R’.  I had never noticed this before, likely because the walls used to be covered with lawn tools or other items.  I wonder if it was for ‘Ridgway’, but I don’t ask.  I’ll let the house keep this mystery.

As I stand in the living room one more time, I stand by the piano.  My grandma had bought this for my mom so she could learn to play as a child, but now it was going to auction as we had no place for it to go and we knew someone else could take better care of it.  I remember when I was a child, pushing back the wooden cover from the keys and aimlessly pounding away at the keys, thinking I was a master pianist.  My grandma would just smile, not annoyed or perturbed by me.  The cover is pushed back now, exposing the keys to the room.  I wonder if my mom has been playing it.  Something inside me urges me to play a note, but I feel that the noise alone might break my heart.  Instead, I turn around and look at where the TV used to be.  This is where we would always watch Wheel of Fortune together.  When I visited in college, I’d try to always make sure to be here at 5:30 so I wouldn’t miss it.  Even the last few times when she couldn’t stay awake through the whole thing, I’d turn it on and play along.  It was our game show.

I look out the large window in the living room, taking a deep breath as I try to muster a goodbye for the house.  I recall how she would stand here, watching people walk by with their dogs.  I remember one time during the last few months when she sat on the couch next to her dog, sitting on her knees and leaning up on the back of the couch, just looking outside.  The yard that spanned in front of the window used to be covered in a chaotic array of flowers, because she loved all of them too much to just pick any particular flower.  Now, at the end of winter, the yard looks sad.  My mom has removed the yard ornaments, and the flowers are obviously not in bloom.  I take a step back and run my hand along the old, yellowing curtains that would cover the window at nighttime - never during the day.  They smell like her.

As my mom and I leave the house, I remember that my initials are carved into the driveway.  I bend down and take a picture that encompasses both the house and the initials, and let myself cry one more time.  As we get into the car, I begin to write down these final memories, because I don’t want to forget them.  As we leave, I take one last look.  It was a ritual that any time we left Grandma’s house, we would wave at her while she waved back from her living room window, and we would beep the horn twice.  I remember even making my SO’s or friends perform this ritual if they had drove me here.  But this time when I look, there’s no one waving, and we don’t beep goodbye.

I know someone else will be moving in soon.  I know she will likely want a shower instead of just the pale green bathtub.  I know she might not value the soft, white, cloth curtains that hang in the master bedroom.  She might also not understand the mysterious codes written on the window screens.  I know she will change it, but I know she will also bring life to it, and I know this house deserves life.  After years upon years of life, love, and pure joy, it’d be unfair to not let it manifest once again.

So I write down my final day inside my grandma’s house, knowing I won’t see it again, and if I do it won’t be like this anymore.

#personal #grandma #grief #memories