You know, when you lose someone, they never quite go away.

Lately, I've been having this experience: When I'm wearing my hair up in a bun, as I walk past a mirror, I'll see my mother out of the corner of my eye.

It doesn't quite hurt, but it aches.

I'm still not sure if I'm starting to look like her, or if I'm just forgetting what she used to look like.

My brother N did not win this fall's election, but he was made president of his town's town council today. I went to the swearing in and held baby K during the ceremony, where she fell asleep on me.

My magic touch was, well, less magic at the Vermuele house reception later, when she was a little overwhelmed by all the people. The caretaker asked me when Distant Mirror would be back. Seems they like us or something.

We stopped by N's place after so I could get my belated Christmas present from my father. He sent me one of the books I gave him last year (that I had not read myself, it was just recommended to me) and a recipe book. You see, my mother had a ratty old brown binder with recipes in it that we misplaces for a while (Actually, I have it now). Dad found a little green binder I made were I typed (and handwrote) some of them for myself. He sent it to me with the gift. Boy I have bad handwriting.

I called my other brother, A, who apparently had my phone number wrong. My new nephew was born 5:30 pm on Dec 30. His name is Shea Everett Donham Rudy (any Mets reference purely accidental, A tells me). It would have been interesting if he's waited a day. Dec 31 could have used a new omen for out family (it's the anniversary of my mother's death.)

Still, it's good to welcome a new life into the family, and I shall have to find my way to Michigan in time to see him.

I don't want to lj-cut this, but you may not all want to read this. Your choice.

This morning, nine years ago, I woke up to my father knocking on my bedroom door. He told me, "You should get up. Your mother died." I came downstairs, and looked into the study where she'd been sleeping (she hadn't been able to climb the stairs to the bedrooms for a long time." Someone, I don't remember who, mentioned she might have dislodged the oxygen tube in her sleep. I went into the living room.

I tidied, I think, and got dressed, and puttered around for nearly an hour before I just stopped where I was and started crying. My aunt (mom's sister) was there and held me for a while. Not long after, the people from the funeral home came and took her away. We'd always planned on cremation, but we had the embalming done as well because one of my brothers was at home and needed to drive back and we needed to give him a chance to have a last viewing.

Sometime that evening, I could nor bear to be in the house any longer and went out. I didn't know where I was going, and finally wound up in a coffee shop a few towns away. It was owned by a friend of my brother's and somehow he knew and they would not charge me for my coffee. I sat there until almost eleven-thirty, when I decided I could not bear to not be home for the New Year and drove home rather too fast. Fortunately, I suppose, the police watch for crazy driver's just after midnight and not before. I got home just before midnight, and we (I presume) watched the new year come in as a family.

That's nearly all I remember - just random moments with nothing connecting them. I don't know what I did after I got home.

A tore himself up a bit over not having been home. He'd been there for Christmas but had wanted to drop back home for a bit. He got the call while he was still on the road. We went with him to the viewing, a few days later. Mom was in clothes we'd picked for her and rather more makeup than she normally wore in colors she would never have worn. I was struck by the shell-pink lipstick. I suppose they have to do that for viewings.

The memorial service was not for over a month, because so many of her students wanted to come, and we had to wait for the holidays to be over to be able to notify them. I had to stifle near-hysterical laughter at one point at an odd hymn. When you are family, you sit in the very front and everyone stares at you, and I think helpless giggles would not have gone over well. I think of that every time they play that BNL song lyric "I'm the type of man who laughs at a funeral" because you can do that. N got all of one sentence into his memorial speech and had to hand it over to a friend to read (set up in advance, since we knew it would happen). I don't think I even tried.

That summer, we buried Mom's ashes at the house in New Hampshire, with very little ceremony. There's still a marker there. Some day, future generations will find the marker and wonder about it the way children wonder about things that do not touch them.

It was years before I stopped seeing things and thinking "I have to show that to Mom!" (followed by a shock of realization) and slipped more naturally to "Mom would've liked that." It was also years before I could attend a New Year's Party. I'm going to one tonight.

I think that's enough.

I might post more on this later in the month, since this is the time of year for it.

On the morning of December 31, 1994, we woke up to discover that my mother had died during the night. She may have rolled over and dislodged the oxygen tube, but it was approaching her time in any case. The night before, she had finished correcting the last of her student's papers -- she'd had to stop teaching around the end of November, but she wanted to do that much before she died. She was in a great deal of pain, and, those last two days, taking enough morphine that she didn't always seem to know where she was.

This was brought to my mind this time by a discussion of some listee family member's diagnosis of breast cancer and all of the very supportive messages telling her that people recover, that there is so much that can be done these days, that they knew a survivor. I never respond to those posts. Nobody wants to hear that my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, and they gave her a mastectomy, and tried chemo therapy twice, and we did everything we could and she died anyway. Everyone in such a situation has my unspoken support, but it will always stay unspoken, because I do not think I can express it without adding my pain to theirs, and they don't need any more pain. It's very hard to reassure someone that everything will be ok when you know all too well that it might not be.