I try to fill my empty time with activity, distraction...yet I reflect, sadly, that I've lost my time to update this site. I am working on it, on returning to a semblance of normalcy in my life and daily routine. It isn't easy. Being home reminds me of Mom, a reminder too raw to have close in around me just now. I am supposed to go through her closets and belongings...it will be therapeutic, I know...touching her things, smelling her perfume...but I'm still waiting for her to walk in the room and say, "Kidding!—KIDDING! Still alive and kicking!" I can't do it yet. The pain is sharp and shooting, and sometimes, out of nowhere, my throat is clogged with emotion that I have to dissect to name. It's always there, the hurting, waiting for its chance to overcome.

I was at the gym this morning, attacking the treadmill with vengeance. A personal trainer was there with a client. She commented to me, she's seen me many mornings, "Whoa, are you trying to outrun life?" Maybe I am. Life's been hard...I listen to people talk about their "wild days"...and instinctively I know that my chance for a carefree youth has passed. I wouldn't know how to be carefree anyway. Responsibility adds weighty values to your cares, and I know that I don't act my age. I awoke from deep sleep twice last night, feeling as though I could not breathe, the loneliness all-consuming.

And there's the guilt of it all, the guilt that I wasted my mother's last months in deep depression over Miles' desertion. I voiced it to Dad, who replied that Miles' leaving probably kept Mom alive longer than she would have been kept otherwise. My mother took nothing as seriously as she did protecting her children. She was my shelter, and cradling arms...she was my everything. She was the one who was always there...and while I don't necessarily understand why everything happens as it does, I believe there is a sanity to the web that we are too close to see.

I believe that sequencing is done in rationality. I believe that if Miles hadn't left, that I would be destroyed right now—I believe that if I didn't know the pain of somebody leaving me by will, I couldn't find comfort in knowing that Mom fought with everything she had to stay here with me...she never wanted to leave. I believe that every scrap of pain I've encountered this past year served as a dawdling staircase descending to this point...otherwise the drop would have surely killed me. I believe that I love life more than anybody I know...and I believe that I have this love because of this pain.

Why would I want to be care-free when I so cherish my cares?

So here I am, struggling with how I'm expected to feel and too afraid to encounter what I have screaming beneath the calm façade. I'm avoiding reminders...putting off the inevitable encounter with the woman I loved so wholly, whose leaving has left such a void in my life...and I'm trying to live. Pretty tall order, no?