Margm

I feel all of you, I know most all of you had it worse than I did, and I sure was lucky to have him so long, but we all feel the same loss. I feel like I should sit vigil with my mom, but honestly, I feel someone would be sitting vigil with me soon. I am settled now, or at least semi-settled, and I will probably seek a therapist. But, know what I am going through is "normal" grief, and feel I will be told that. My sister quotes things to me, I know she does it in hopes that my feelings will be helped, and I hope that what she quotes to me is helping her too. She has never been married or had a long relationship, but she has had relationships and I remember one passed away. He was a friend though, not a companion. Mama is her mother, and now I am sure she is also her child. I have to try to be there for her and I am not sure I even know how.

One of the hospice workers who bathes Mama came while I was sitting with Mama today.. Sitting with Mama is just that, sitting. She had already had a pain med so she slept. She looked up at me a few times and I kissed her forehead. It does not matter if she knows me or not. This is dedicated to you on here who had the opportunity to take care of your loved ones for a long time. Billy the Kid was only sick for five weeks. He went down so fast from start to finish that there was no time spent in any one thing that was wrong with him. He did have fast failing. He went from cane to walker to wheelchair in those five weeks. I was so strong I felt I could and would carry him if necessary. Billy would not have liked that though. I kissed my mama goodbye when I left, as she was being bathed. Her little body was a bag of bones. I think that those of us who watch our loved ones die, I think we seem to have some form of PTSD. Watching my mama brought back scenes of Billy in bed. I will not go into it anymore than that, but each time I am with her I relive it all over again. How can she hang on like she does? She is not wanting to stay but her malfunctioning brain is her enemy. My mama is not there anymore. Billy the Kid was still there, and then he wasn't. There are people out there that have a job, their job is not really a job, it is a calling, just like pastor's have a calling sometimes. They are helping ease the terminally ill into a better place. Myself, I cannot do it. My daughter can do it. Hospice workers can do it. My sister does it, but I know this is not something she would choose. She enjoys teaching. She used to work for social service that took kids out of bad homes. She took to drinking at night to forget some of those situations. It took awhile, but with AA she conquered the habit. I am afraid I am so weak I would just drink myself to death. I am not strong folks, I am such a weak person. There are real Angel's of Mercy though. We have seen them. The woman who bathes Mama, her name is Precious, that is her real name, and I know she does not get paid enough. Sometimes I feel destroyed, but someone else had it so much worse than I have had it, so much worse than my Billy had it. Mama is not hurting. She is not there.

Thanks Joyce. We all need just a few moments of peace.

I have wrestled with my faith for a long time. Even though I wrestle with it, the old saying "as the twig is bent" still holds true for me. If it did not hold true, I would already be "somewhere else." I have to believe because, for me, there is no other choice. I wonder sometimes if this had hit at an earlier age would I have been able to handle it better. Then, in reality, I know there is no "better age." It is what it is.

Gwen and Kay:

Two of my high school friends, three of Scott's and two of Kelli's came and we released a lot of balloons. Kelli jumped off the big bridge with a bunch of young boys. I kept telling her not to dive because she always belly flops and that would be disastrous. She went feet first. It was very hot, but not sad at all. Lots of memories around that part of the bayou but was not unhappy. All-in-all, a good birthday party for Billy the Kid.

Well, I am blessed and cursed with run-on fingers.

I did smile, and I cried a little bit too Maryann. Have not really done that in awhile. Thank you. Kelli called the woman in the office at the apartments and asked could she put a bird feeder up at my window. I did not expect that. The woman (Bonnie) said yes. Surprised me.

He loved attention, but he was also a loner. Hope he enjoys it. This is from his kids who loved to buy him presents (with my Visa this time.) And thank you.

Well Gin, this one is gonna be big. Gotta say I am feeling some better. Sitting with Mama drags me down, but it is my duty and the topic above (grief brain) is the mean (as in bad, not main) reason I am such a coward. This is your day though and tonight we are gonna "celebrate" Billy's day. I'm worried about Kelli jumping off the RR trestle though, lots of underwater bad things. I will talk her out of it. I will tell her partner and DT will wring her hands and cry if she tries to do it I know you cannot celebrate, but know you are thought of by all of us.

I just sat with Mama, which is all I did. The nurse came to bathe her and I shelled purple hull peas. My sister came back and I thought about this memorial we are having tonight. My sister thinks I should get excited, seeing my friends. I want to see my friends but then again, I don't. Am I supposed to have a good time? My daughter insisted on reading me the poem she wrote about her dad. She asked "did I mind?" I said "does it matter, I cannot swim but I guess I need to jump right in the deep end." So she read it, and I tuned it out but told her it was nice. We all take this differently. I am not a connoisseur of death, but I think I am getting to be one. I heard Mama's chest rattling, but it settled down and she just breathed normally, but shallow. I kept watching the rise and fall of her chest. She woke up, looked at me, then she just closed her eyes. She had someone with her. She went back to sleep. I went to wash clothes and probably about 14 washers were being used. We are a clean bunch around here, except #110. I washed at my daughters.. Coming home I was thinking about this post and who I was. Honestly, I think I could make money on "The Walking Dead." I cannot remember who I was without Billy, I was 18 years old. Now-I-am-not-18-anymore. My family wants me to go out and have fun. I have fun watching "The Gossip Girl" thank you very much. I moved. I live out of boxes. I wait for Suddenlink to hook up my other TV's and I sent Kelli off with my Visa card. I'm having fun. Gotta sit with mama again Friday. Not feeling sorry for myself this time, but I sat and watched my dad die, Billy's dad die, Billy's sister wind down like a clock, no pain, and poor Billy letting me know he had to give up and me not accepting it. Fooled the hell out of me, yes I did have to accept it. When he died something else died. His part of the marriage died. I will give myself permission to live when I get ready to live. I'm going places, I'm doing things, but I feel like that old donkey you have to pull with a rope. "Please Mr. Custer, I don't want to go." And I ramble on.

I don't remember the person Billy fell in love with, or at what time this happened. It was just like the melting of a metal, it eventually all ran together into one puddle of "us." I liked the liquid metal rather than this hardened mass of humanity.

I do not have any of my mystical-magical imagination yet. I wonder if that is what I call faith also. I look out my window here in the apartment and across the street is the very nice swimming pool and community park with tables, trees. I look up at the sky and I think about my dad saying to Scott "sometimes I look at it and I see blue, but at other times all I see is gray." My sky is really blue, but it is also gray. The crape myrtles are blooming. They are pink. In front of my former residence is a crape myrtle that Kelli planted three years ago. Only tree in that yard. It is a rare deep red. Across the street was a forest, a deep valley. I am putting this on my "going through hell" posting because sometimes I feel I am infringing on someone else's if they start out with a different subject and I answer another post with a veering off of the main subject. As we all feel we are "going through hell" then anything fits here. I have to go sit with my mom. Brianna needs to go to doc with her earache. Suddenlink is coming to hook up the other two TV's. (Did not have the equipment Monday.) I need to wash clothes terribly bad, but have to go to the washers at the office. That is one thing I miss. That is all I miss, other than the deep red crape myrtle. Brianna needs her clothes washed. I still have many boxes to empty. I remember lifting the tops of boxes and seeing stuff I need, but I cannot remember which room those boxes were in and I somehow do not have time to put things up, hang the wall hangings.. I have to have my crosses hung up. I still put much stock and a little comfort in having them around me. We are supposed to have a releasing of balloons at Billy's favorite place on Dorcheat Bayou this afternoon. It is all planned, all but the buying of the balloons. People are coming to it. The two grown children planned this. Why do I feel responsible? One thing I wrote this for. The one thing I could have just put two lines and it would have sufficed. Nope, I have to bleed all over the place. At my former house seeing animals and birds were everyday, all the time occurrences. This morning I pulled back my living room curtains and on the railing of the porch was a cardinal. I had to say "Happy Birthday Billy." I saw it, I said it, but somehow it did not really reach my heart and mind. It was just there and then it flew. If I am him and he is me, why did he take my faith, my mystical-magical thinking and leave me with his unbelief in anything supernatural? I want mine back. He took it when he left, it was supposed to stay part of both of us. Oh, and Happy Birthday Gin. Good people born in this July month.

My daughter is pasting pictures of Billy all on Facebook. Pictures of me and Billy smiling, even grinning, happy pictures. She gets comfort from this. It rips my mind and heart asunder. Yet, how can I stop her from getting the attention this brings to my sorrow? We all respond to this catastrophe differently. This is not where we wanted to be in our life. All of us on this forum are struggling in different ways, but we are trying to adjust to our loss. Like you, I wanted to follow him. I did not want to be stuck with all these responsibilities. The moving to another state, my home state, nearly did me in, but it was my choice. I really thought I had no choice. My daughter craves the attention and adoration that sorrow brings. I want to crawl in a hole. Human nature in this sense makes that old saying of the apple did not fall far from the tree a lie. Yet, I am on here, I post pictures, so maybe I am wrong. We don't want to be here and some have left, maybe they leave because it hurts to read all of this, maybe misery does not always love company. One thing about it, we all hurt, we all hurt in different ways, yet the pain is the same pain. Please keep posting and reading. I don't know if we can find help, but maybe we can. There was a cardinal sitting on the railing outside my window. I am in the city, in an apartment building, I guess cardinals come here too. I wish I had my magical, mystical imagination back. Stay awhile, maybe you can get some relief. I hope so.. I hope we all find some semblance of peace.

Billy had a new tractor and Brianna always wanted to drive it too. This is just how close those two were. Billy always used to say that she was his baby until she found Walmart, then she was Mamol's. Nope, she was always his. I think that is why she stays with me.

Proud of you Amy.

In one of the books I am perusing, (I don't read, I skim over), there is a visit for two weeks with country people back from where Dolly Parton comes from. No electricity, of course no TV, only work from daylight till dark. Two people in their 80's, him keeping the wood cut for warmth and cooking. Milking cows, making own butter, and living off nothing just fine. The visitor wondered what would happen if one of them were to get sick and possibly die. I am sure by now they have done this. But people still live this way. Billy did not have an inside bathroom when I met him and they did not have one until they moved into their daughter's house when she got married. This was downtown "little town." So, I know a small bit about country people and how they lived from my own mother and father and a lot of you do too. One of the happiest places Billy and I lived in was a tiny RV in a trailer park. We did not have much money, but we were happy. My Christmas tree, that first Christmas was made with Styrofoam balls stuck with toothpicks to form a tree with a Styrofoam holder. You could sit on the commode and take a shower at the same time. In fact, you had to. It was so cozy and we did not realize we could have died from carbon monoxide poisoning by using the two burners on the stove to heat the little place. We had a couch and we had a stove and bed. Little blue balls on the Christmas tree that was sprayed with fake snow. It was beautiful. We were so close. Had to be. I was also pregnant. My city (small town) grandmother, two aunts came to see me and I later learned that my grandmother cried because I was living in a hovel. I was still happy and we moved out to a bigger place before the baby came. Not much better, just bigger. So, moving to an apartment from a big nice house did not bother me at all. But moving without Billy did bother me. The places we lived have all been torn down now, except the first apartment and the lake house and the house the kids grew up in. Scott wants to buy that house one of these days. I wish he could. I guess their growing up years were okay. We were in Arkansas to get him away from the drug dealers. We succeeded so it was worth it.

Gin, Happy Birthday tomorrow. I have to sit with Mama in the evening. I think I mentioned that we are going to set off balloons from the Dorcheat Bayou ramp at Sibley, the little town Billy grew up in. The kids have it set for 7:30 p.m. I don't know how that is going to go. We never celebrated too much for anything. I did not know that the Easter Bunny was supposed to come on Easter morning, he didn't come to my house or anyone I knew. I don't think he knew where our little border town was. But, Kelli always felt she was left out of something (we later learned) because we did not do it up big like at Christmas. Hey, my kids were exceptional, they were the only ones with dyed eggs that still had runny yellows. I never learned how to boil an egg right. But we always decorated them. They had parties up until a certain age. We always bought Kelli a rainbow ice cream cake from some ice cream shop. I think I marked her with that cake. I am not too happy about the "celebration" tomorrow night either, but this is for them, not for me, and it is their plans.

No, I cannot think of anyone. When I am with her she dismisses me and wants Kelli. She never mentions Daddy, at least not often and he is an afterthought. Billy is mentioned more. There is no one else. She has outlived all her relatives except nephews and nieces and some of them are gone, they are not close and never have been. It was hard for anyone to get close to her.. After Daddy died she struck up an old high school romance with Thomas Dean, her old high school sweetheart. I thought that might be going somewhere but she broke it off because he put her "up on a pretzel" My mom has always had a way with words, sometimes terribly wrong words. He passed away a number of years ago. She has outlived everyone. She loves Marcy and Kelli being around her. My son and myself, we are afterthoughts. Those are the only two, except for Nawlin's, Kelli's poodle. She sits with Mama very patiently. Can only think she is stubborn. She actually wants to go and has mentioned that she is ready in so many sane moments, but for some reason is dragging her heels.

I did this Maryann. I wonder how long this lasts. I know it is getting in the way of my helping my mom and sister, helping my mom usher out of this world to the one where she can "join the family circle up above." She wants to do this but won't let go. Most of us don't understand this because letting go is what a lot of us would like to do. I think of Doug Flutie's parents going within minutes of each other. This "grief brain" plays with me and I can see Billy, sometimes I talk to him and I think he listens. My dad used to work for the railroad and in early days he would work at distant locations on the line. I think this was to get away from Mama, but I would ride my tricycle on the porch and call to him. I would tell Mama "I think he hears me." Now I am in my 70's calling to Billy. Maybe I need a tricycle to make him hear me. Believe it or not, even my daughter understands me and makes excuses for my weirdness. So does my son. I hated coming into that empty house I had shared with Billy. My fear and anxiety would get the best of me and I was so frightened being alone. I am not alone now. I have hundreds of people living in these apartments. I did not qualify for government assisted apartments, so most of these people are working people or widows. The first article I read when I googled "Widow's Brain" explained a lot. I know that I used to google everything. We would watch a TV movie and I would google the cast. Billy would have me google so many things. After he left, my "Widow's Brain" had no use for googling. I used my Amazon Prime more often than anything else. I would order books and then delete them. I think Gin was the one who said that reading those books confused her (about the afterlife, etc.) and had quit reading. I approach these books with a feeling of dread, that I might open a page and something might go against what I believe. But, what do I believe? I want to believe there is a Heaven, I want to believe that Billy and I will be united again. But, somehow I don't think he is going to tell me if he was disappointed in me or not. Maybe by that time I will be in a place that him telling me anything will just be shared by the joy of being close to him again. After all, Heaven could not be Heaven without Billy, or our other mates. And this belief might be simplistic to some people but it is as necessary for me to believe this as it is to believe the sun will come up tomorrow, a tomorrow we are not promised. But, like Marty Short talking to his deceased wife Nan and finally saying "where did you go." He only got silence. He said when it is time, we will know, and we will know in a moment's notice. Tomorrow is Billy's birthday. We are going to release balloons from his hometown landing on Dorcheat Bayou, his favorite place. It drifts into Bistineau, but going into the big lake is not what we liked to do. We would have bought a home on the bayou, but the flooding was too much, so we bought a home where the bayou went into the lake. I wish we had "do-overs" and wish we had stayed. "If wishes were horses, beggars would ride." Or Billy's mom's more realistic "S__t in one hand and wish in the other and see which one fills up the fastest." We had to leave though, we had to get our son off drugs and away from the drug people he knew. He was willing and there was no question about what we would do.

Brief update. (I will try to be brief, that is hard for me to be.). This is the note my sister left this morning. I have to take Bri to doc this afternoon and will go sit with Mama then, if she hangs on. Last night Kelli (my nurse daughter) said that Maw's eyes were fixed and not following her. Her breathing was very shallow but she was not choking on secretions as she was the day before. She did smile when Kelli kissed her and was leaving. I think God has met his match in my mom. She had to win every argument she was involved in. She and her dad both had to win at playing domino's, Rook or even putting puzzles together. Everything to both of them was to win. They would get angry if they did not. Her kidneys are shutting down, but she is just not ready to go. If you are a praying person, pray for me to have the courage to face this. So many of you have faced worse. Most of you have never met such a formidable person like my mom. Like her mom before her, her mom was on the debate team and argued that the world was flat. She won her debate. I can picture God doing what my dad always did, putting his hands in his pocket and walking away whistling. The only way you could argue with my mom. She had to win. The note this morning: Kelli, Margaret and friends--she woke up this morning talking and singing and smiling, and she has been doing that now for over an hour. She ate her coke float with gusto, and now she is talking about watermelons. Her eyes are bright, and she is asking where her 'honey baby' went. I don't think she means Nawlin, because she asked, "Did she have to go to work?" I am amazed! Syble Wise Haynes is a stubborn, head butting, strong willed woman.just not ready to go yet. I don't think you win arguments with God, but she is not arguing, she is just stating facts.

Me too.

My mom is fading fast. Kelli went out there. I am such a coward. I act like that is what I want my life to be, living with regrets. I know how senseless this is, but I'm scared.

I think it is something I cannot help. I don't talk that much, but I do run-on typing. One of my friends was my supervisor, she would answer two lines to my whole page query's about some new program we were using. I would think "now, why can't I do that?" Just cannot help myself.