10:40 a.m.

So many of you have been sending words of care and concern that I can’t keep up, though I’ve managed to dash off a few replies. Thanks for being there, you guys, and please understand that I appreciate it even if I happen not to get back to you. It doesn’t really help, but then again it does, you know? I’ve been collecting your letters in a folder so I can go back to them again if I need to. It never hurts to be reminded how kind and good the people I know are, how lucky I am in my friends, family, and acquaintances. It’s just that I’m a bit more absentminded and disorganized than usual. Still, I thank you and hug you back.

At the moment my face is so swollen up that when I look out my eyes I can see the shadows of the skin around them. It is quite the sight and in a way humorous, as every time I see my face in the bathroom mirror I laugh out loud. I look 100 years old and hideous as hell. We don’t know if the face thing is just from crying, or if it’s hives like I have on my forearms. Curious. Scott just went in to the drugstore and brought back some over-the-counter medication for allergies; maybe that will help.

Here I figure I’m doing well by letting my emotions roll in, out, around, and through me, and letting them go, and yet my body is reacting wholly on its own to what I guess is stress. It’s releasing something too, perhaps.

Right now my biggest concern is getting rid of it before I see Mom next Wednesday. The burden of guilt and worry over what she is apologizing for “putting all of you through” is more than I want for her right now or ever.

It does help to be reminded, as some of you have done (thanks Peter), that most kids have to bury their parents sometime and it is never easy. It would hurt as much to have her go at 103 as it would now when she’s 63. It is not the kind of experience that can be escaped. This thought encourages me to accept the inevitability of the basic fact that none of us live forever, at least not in physical form.

Another thought that helps me deal with it is that so many other people have gone and are going through this kind of anguish. As much as we feel alone in it right now, we are not. Thanks to those of you who have written to tell me about your own experiences with pain and loss and change. It helps me see it as more of a natural challenge than an obscene tragedy; to “normalize” my fear and sorrow, somehow.

Ah well, so many words. Writing some of them down does seem to help me get my shit together, for short periods at a time anyway. I do feel a bit foolish sometimes as Mom is still feeling great and I think maybe I am overreacting a bit early and for all the world to see. She could yet live many years in good health. We certainly hope so... that all this crying and carrying on will be for naught, because we’ll just be doing it again in 40 years and meanwhile we'll have lots of good times with her.

I shake my head at my melodramatic self. Scott tells me it’s not melodrama, that I’m beating myself up, that these feelings are okay to have. I know they are; it’s just that I analyse my feelings as I have them. It’s the nature of my mind, always working. I figure if there’s a chance that emotional pain can at all be affected by a way of thinking, then by cracky let me get a handle on my thinking! Why suffer needlessly and before I have to?

I couldn’t have a sweeter or more compassionate partner, I can sure see that, that he comes through when I need him. I am very much loved and supported.

Last night we had a family barbecue for his mom, who turned 65. Scott’s sister Tanya brought me this little angel painted on wood, which I love already and have not only set it on my computer desktop but right here by my keyboard as well. What a thoughtful thing for her to do. So you see, not only am I fortunate to have the family I was born into, but also to have this one that has accepted me into its fold.

So it’s like Everett says, after he bellylaughs about how I am exactly like the memory-challenged fish Dori in Finding Nemo:

“Just keep on swimming, just keep on swimming!”