It’s been one year.
Every morning as I get dressed and ready for whatever my schedule has in store I look at this picture, which is hanging on the wall in my closet. On some days it’s just a quick and meaningful glance as I walk out to my bedroom: I do the mental equivalent of football players jumping up and smacking a motivational sign on their way out of the locker room.
On other days I stand under the picture, which hangs just above my eye level, and think about a conversation she and I once had or silently let her know that she’d love what I’m doing that day. Sometimes I tell her that I’m generally doing just fine but I simultaneously miss her so deeply that it still makes me angry, all the stuff out of which she was cheated, including having more shenanigans with me and also being Mimis together. Sometimes my eyes well up with tears when I look at her picture and sometimes they don’t. I always have a little undercurrent of sadness anytime I think about her passing, but I am one hundred percent certain that the best way to honor her is to live my life fully and so I don’t often dwell on that sadness. She wouldn’t want it any other way.
It’s something I remind all four of her (grown) kids every now and then.
When I visited her in the hospital in January of last year I held her hand and promised her with maximum intention and seriousness that I would absolutely be there for her kids forever. It was not a selfless promise: I’m doing it for both of us, for all of us. I look at my promise to her as a responsibility, but more so a privilege and an honor. Besides the fact that her kids are and have been incredibly special to me as separate entities from their mother since I met them nearly thirteen years ago, they are also her greatest legacy. Each of them has distinct qualities, traits, and values they inherited from her, and I like to remind them of those things as often as possible.
For example, something she used to say countless times in every conversation is “whatchamacallit.” To be completely honest, the frequency drove me nuts. I’m not sure why: maybe I’m a horrible person? (Probably not: just a quirk.) But now, hearing her daughters say it makes me laugh so hard. Give me a whole sentence of “whatchamacallit,” girls; I’m fine with that. It keeps her in the room with us.
She used to say that every time one of her daughters (the one who was traditionally sweet-as-pie) cursed, a butterfly died. The other day I was talking to that daughter, who is much more sailor-like these days in her language choices (her mom would be SO proud!), and I exclaimed, “You know what I’m thinking about right now is just how many butterflies you have killed in this conversation alone!” We laughed like crazy together, and the deep connection in that moment recharged me.
Once, when texting with another daughter, I said, “You know, whenever you miss your mom I suggest that you listen–TRULY listen–to your sisters speak. You’ll hear her.”
She would be so incredibly proud of all of them in this past year for how they came even closer together than they were before, something I also tell them as often as I can. What parent wouldn’t want their kids to band together in hard times? She was unknowingly, in her years of parenting them, preparing them for this year. Family comes first, always. We stick together. We can get through anything if we are united. I know that even before her ALS diagnosis she was very worried about whether she was going to make a mark on the world and leave something of value behind at the end. Although “the end” came far too soon and don’t get me started on the unfairness of it all, she definitely did make a mark on this world, with these kids and more. I wish I could tell her that but I have a feeling that somehow, she knows.
Something I’ve been slowly working on for the past few months is an archive of her blog, which was a victim of the Typepad platform closure in September. The idea of Typepad making her two decades of writing disappear into thin air made me nauseous for many reasons, including that her kids often referred to her blog for recipes and to settle arguments, and simply that her blog was the history of her family. I got her words backed up in time (after only one months’ notice: THANK YOU, TYPEPAD, *eye roll*) and, because Typepad wasn’t offering an export of photo files (*insert cursing for DAYS here*), I went through her blog and manually saved more than two thousand photos, labeling each of them with a file name that included the date of the blog post in which they appeared along with their position if there was more than one photo per post. Some posts had ten to twelve photos, and each time I came across one of those I would shake my fist at the sky while exclaiming “MOTHERF—ER! Come ON!!!” Then I’d instantly hear her snort-laugh at me and my dramatic display of disgust.
I finished just in time. On the first of October I clicked my bookmark of her old blog site and, instead of her homepage, the Typepad closure screen popped up (basically a version of “Sorry folks, park’s closed: the moose out front should’ve told you”). Even though I knew that her blog would be gone I still cried with sadness at the end of an era but also with relief that I rescued all of it, and thus her husband and kids will have it indefinitely.
Now I’m uploading the photos one by one to a WordPress archive site and making sure each of them ends up in the right position in the correct blog post, and once I’m finished, her kids will take it over. (I’m also making a spreadsheet that indexes post URLs along with which family members were mentioned in each one so if any of them want to create a book to put on their shelf, they will know which posts to grab.) Saving her words truly feels like one of the most important things I’ve done in my life, and reading through all of her stories, especially the ones I also heard straight from her mouth countless times, has been a comfort and another way to keep her close to my heart.
This past year has been something/a lot of things without you, Liz. Even though I know you’re still here with us in so many ways, it’s not good enough. You are terribly missed every single day, Sissy.
