Reawakening

Hello, all! This is my attempt at a brand new blog. To put it mildly, I had grown tired of posting solely through MySpace. I need a place reserved for my thoughts. I will gently place them here, and if you are so inclined to read them, then welcome!

One thing I have noticed about myself... I never complete a journal. I thought it wasteful at first; just a material example of never being satisfied. But then I realized I always begin a new journal when I am embarking on a new direction. Whenever my life was defined by the closing of one chapter, and the opening of another, then there was a book to symbolize that era of my life thus far. And I began to think, perhaps writing is actually that therapeutic for me. So here I am, beginning a new journal, of sorts. And it is certainly an adequate assumption to believe that I am once again discovering, healing, and finding a bit of a personal renaissance of my own.

The ordeal of losing my mother has been the most difficult event of my life, as one would imagine. The spectrum of emotions that I have been carried through over the past year and three months would have been quite unbelievable to me only two years ago. The memories are so sweet, and yet sometimes numbingly painful. I've gone between appreciating the transplant staff at UPMC, and loathing them without reason. I found that I was very capable of loathing quite a few things, in fact. Even now, I wonder at times how the world can keep turning; how the sun has the nerve to keep rising. I wonder why no one bothered to tell our family the REAL statistics of transplant success, or how miserable mom would have been even if it had worked.

I have included an excerpt from a blog I wrote last year, on July 18, 2008:

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"'The first time someone said to me, "Sorry about your mom", was in a Pittsburgh convenient store. My dad and I were there getting a few small necessities for our very last overnight stay in that dreadful city. Among those products being thrown into our shopping basket was a box of Unisom sleeping pills. We knew it would be a night from hell; and I didn't want to feel any of it. We had each said our last goodbyes to the shell of a body that lay convulsing in the Transplant ICU. It wasn't my mother. She was already gone. I was convinced of that.

Rewind one week. Mom was on the road to recovery after her transplant, feeling better than she had since she got the new liver. Her sister came to visit. To prepare for her homecoming, she painted mom's fingernails. A bright red. Her favorite. I had an airline ticket to Pittsburgh for the following weekend. Mom called me at 1:30 in the morning on a Monday. The trach tube was still in place, to help with her breathing. Through raspy, broken syllables, I managed to filter out what she was saying. She wanted to know when the best weekend was to have her Welcome Home Party. That was her; always thinking. That was the last time I talked to my mother.

Looking back, I suppose I should have taken heed to the fact she called so late. I know she lost track of time a lot in the hospital. But she hadn't been able to talk on the phone much... she was always short of breath. She called and talked for about 3 minutes, then she hung up. They say people know when they're dying; maybe she did.

This year is going by in a blur... quite the opposite of what I expected. Someone said to me, "That's a good thing, right"? And maybe it is. I think it's going fast because I'm dreading the holidays. I vividly remember last Thanksgiving watching her stoop over the kitchen counter at my aunt's house. She sat in a chair because she was too weak to stand. She was determined to make at least one contribution to the meal... a pecan pie. That was also the last thing mom ever baked. Strange how I'll never see a pecan pie the same way again. I think of the hundreds of thousands of little things she did during those end months, never knowing it was the last time. I sit here and reminisce... and I can still remember her face. Every little line and every little freckle. And I'm afraid of the day those details will fade. All I have now are handfuls of pictures and a vial of her ashes hanging around my neck.'"
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As I read that, I am somehow comforted. Comforted because of one vast, unchangeable truth. And that truth comes from Joshua 1:5... "I will never leave you nor forsake you". I can remember God's hand on me, even in Room #18 of the Pittsburgh TICU. As I spoke to my mother, I knew that it was not her physical ears hearing me. She was already with Jesus. She wasn't breathing... the machines were doing it for her. Yet somehow I knew she was listening with her spirit. It was a strange thing... knowing she was there, but yet knowing that she was no longer embodied. And I think at that point I realized the rest she must have felt. The freedom. The worship. The homecoming for which she had waited.

Now, over a year later, I still have the urge to pick up the phone and call her. And then, I remember...

But I know there is a day in the not so distant future when that long-awaited reunion will take place. I can't wait!

To love, life, healing, and rebirth!