Straight Edge Life

I went through my mom’s old iMac today. It was really hard because it brought back a lot of memories. I’ve been sad a lot lately. Living in this house. There’s so much of her still here. I thought that my memory of her would fade after time. That as the time between the present and her death increased my pain and my sadness would decrease. But with every day it seems only to increase. The clarity and the emotion is stronger each day. I was numb for months after she died. Totally shocked. I think that it’s only now, as I’m coming out of that numbness, that I’m beginning to really feel what it’s like not to have her around anymore. I guess it makes sense that it’s happening during the summer time. We used to spend a lot of time together in the summers. She was an excellent cook and taught me how to make zuchini bread from the monster zuchinis in our yard. Blackberry pies, banana bread, all sorts of breads. It’s so lonely without her in this house. I don’t know… I never know what’s going to get me feeling all sad. We’re rearranging the house now that my dad has moved out and into his own place, I’m finding a ton of old photos, and all sorts of stuff just lying around that reminds me of her. The iMac had a bunch of her old files. I hadn’t seen any of them before but I looked at their creation dates and thought about where they were created in relation to her getting sick and dying. Because they were all made around that time. Her resignation from work (not stating her sickness or cancer at all). A job application for another job from a few months earlier before she got sick, when she just simply wanted out of her job at OUS. She wanted out of that job for a long time. A small website she and I began making for the denison family. A database of recipies with only one entry. Hot Cocoa. A Christmas letter from my dad mentioning my wedding to Nichole in Eugene and Naomi’s wedding to Kevin in Durban, not mentioning my mom being sick at all, or why they couldn’t make it to Naomi’s wedding. This was before I even knew how sick she was. I don’t know why they kept us in the dark as long as they did. Naomi and I had to put all the pieces together and come to peace with the inevitable on our own. I think my dad couldn’t handle more than the responsibility of taking care of her. I don’t blame him. I don’t blame her either. I just wish they would have had a chance to be more than parents, to retire together, or at least take a good vacation somewhere and enjoy life a bit. As it happened, my dad took a trip to South Africa a year after Naomi’s wedding, a couple months after she died. And is only now starting to write the book that we had all been encouraging him to write for years and years.

She told Naomi and my dad to make me stick with photography, because that was where she saw me the happiest. She said she was proud of me. I miss her so much. This is just such a sad night.