Adjusting

(There would be a picture here but Blogger is having another of its little picture rejecting snits, so I'll have to add that later. Update: I have given up on both Blogger and Photobucket and uploaded the phto I wanted with this post to Flickr. It's hard to get good help.)

On my travels through the blogosphere, I not only find the nonsense of the badgers and mazes and such, but real people facing real life challenges, one of the greatest of these being grief.

Carol's mom passed away a while back and she occasionally posts about the journey she and her father are now taking, through grief and back to whole again, if that can indeed ever happen.

TC got word recently that his dad had passed away. It wasn't quite the jolt for him that it was for Carol, as his dad hadn't been as much of constant presence in his life, but nonetheless, the passing of a parent is never easy.

In one of Carol's recent posts, she said,

"I couldn't call her to tell her I was sick. She was always a great one for sympathy. No matter how insignificant my pain, she honored it and gave me complete support. But yesterday I couldn't get that from her. It seemed inconceivable because I can totally remember her. I can hear her and see her. How can it be that I can't call her? She has not faded from my brain at all, but she is completely gone. It doesn't make sense."

Reading that reminded me of my own struggle to grasp the inconceivability of my mother being gone. It was as drastic as if I woke up one morning and was told that the sky would be orange for the rest of my life, never, ever blue again, so great was the rift in the fabric of my universe. I'm not sure if it was because my mom was the first of my parents to pass away, or if it was because your mother (if you're lucky) is the first human being of whom you become aware and for a time, is your total universe, or a combination of both, but it was quite a mind-blowing experience, adapting to a world without my mother. Don't get me wrong, I had quite tidily untied those apron strings, ripped them firmly in two, in fact, and had lived several thousand kilometres away from my mother for almost 10 years before she died. I was a mother myself by that time. But I always knew she was there if I needed her and like Carol's mom, she was always interested in what I was doing and wanted to see my sore toe or hear about my cold in that way that only your mother does. And the idea that I would never, ever hear her voice again? Completely, totally, mind-bogglingly inconceivable.

But that was 16 years ago, and time passes and grief lessens and you do eventually get used to that orange sky. You never, ever like it, but you become used to it.

I still don't like it.