fall day

Yesterday, Tara, Will and I spent some time together and we talked about a story in the Deseret News about two teenage girls who were hit by a train and killed.  The conversations I had with both of them about this I think are pretty telling about where we all are in relation to dealing with death.

Tara wondered, embarrassed, if the girls' bodies were found and what the families would have had to recognize them. She sympathized with the families of the girls and felt bad for the parents and how hard it would be to lose someone so suddenly. I often wonder about this little sister of mine. She was the one sitting next to me when Mom passed away that night and thus the one I held onto the longest and kept her hair from sticking to her cheeks as she cried. She's only 17, just applying to BYU as of yesterday, and she's just a kid; something I think I've been forgetting as she talks about chauffeuring and dinner schedules and getting Will's homework done.

Will offhandedly commented to me that he was glad Mom died the way she did so that "her body wasn't all messed up-- just her insides." And then we had a little chat about the differences between embalming in Ancient Egypt versus now. He asked if the brain was taken out (why is the fact they pulled brains out of noses always the one things people remember most?!) and if her organs were left in. Will hardly ever talks about Mom and never in the same sentence as any of the forms of "death", so I took this as a sign that he's thinking about it and slowly processing what he knows from reading and with what he experienced. At 13 I think that's the best we can expect from him-- heck, I'm still processing it!

I took the two of them to Black Acre Farm in Syracuse where we got to go on  a hay a ride to a pumpkin patch and pick our own pumpkins! So fun! Tara said she was more excited than all the little kids we were surrounded by. We learned that cows like to eat pumpkin seeds and the middle, fleshy parts of a pumpkin. Who knew?! When we got back to the house, I took Will to lacrosse practice and then we went to Tara's choir concert. At Will's practice I ran into the best friend of one of my aunts, whose husband recognized me from The Funeral (I've realized that I don't like saying "Mom's Funeral", I'd rather just leave it vague), and he told me that when his oldest son left on his mission, the first two months were torture, but then things started getting easier. I'm going with the idea that after two months things start to become a little more normal. It's so odd trying to get used to having a hole in your heart.



Then, last night as I drove home thinking about how Tara and Will are kids without a Mom, I felt that familiar feeling as if someone was standing on my chest. When I've felt that before, I've called the Boyfriend who will either come hug me or talk me through it, but he's out of town this week for work and it was 1:30 am his time and so I resisted waking him up (which, he reminded me today, is not what I'm supposed to do when that happens-- I'm supposed to wake him up).