I’ve never really dealt with loss. I mean, I’ve had the loss of houses and marriages, but never real loss. Of course, I didn’t know that at the time. At the time, I thought I was losing a lot with those things, but they’re just things. Turns out nothing compares to the loss you feel when someone dies. Or, in my case, is about to die. How awful is that? Looking at someone and knowing they are about to die? It’s pretty fucking awful. I’ve posted before, about my mom. Well, we thought she was better but she’s not. I’ve been sitting with this for about a month now.

Your mom’s going to die. Any day now. Any day now. Any day now.

My boyfriend’s dad passed away last year in a sudden and horrific way. It was bad. He wasn’t right for a month or two after, did all sorts of crazy things that he regretted so much he lied to everyone about it, but that’s what you do when you’re ashamed. Grief is a strange thing and affects people differently. I’m starting to do crazy things and not care about things and let the weight of ‘any day now, any day now’ push me down flat on the ground. But life has to go on and people don’t have a reason to act crazy when someone is still alive. It’s only after that you’re given an allowance to freak out. I think it would be better for it to be sudden. Better than waking up every day to ‘any day now, any day now.’

Tammy Babich

Tears creep up on me at weird times. My mind works in an odd, non-linear way to begin with so thoughts randomly find their way into the forefront of my mind and bring me to my knees. Like, just now when I thought back to a moment before things got really bad with my mom’s mind – a few months after my husband and I separated. She was in and out even then, sort of with us, then not with us. I was telling her about the amazing guy I’d just met, and her eyes caught mine and focused, you know, really focused like when someone is listening to every word you say. She started to cry and asked me if I was happy and I said yes and she shook her head and turned back to the TV, then sort of went away again. That was probably the last conversation I had with her that made any kind of sense. Then last Christmas she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and things have gone downhill from there. Now the home hospice nurse comes to help my dad and he says things like ‘we’re just taking it one day at a time right now, we can’t make any plans’ and ‘I think your mom is worse than we think.’

My mom’s favorite Christmas movie is White Christmas and she always said she wanted one. If she makes it, we’re going to have Christmas at my house and my son and I are going to decorate like a winter wonderland – fake snow and all. My dad doesn’t know if she’ll last that long, so it will probably be more of a blue Christmas than a white one. The home hospice chaplain convinced him to tell some of the rest of the family, which he did today and now comes the outpouring of love – that will probably just be kind of a burden right now because people will want to come see her and neither of them are in any kind of shape for that. He made me promise to keep everything off Facebook, but a writer gotta write and no one reads this blog anyway. Like I said, maybe sudden is better? But either way it sucks. It just plain sucks. So, I guess, if you love someone – maybe tell them. Like, right now. Pick up the phone and send a text, make a call, make a post, send an email – whatever. Life’s too short not to.

~In memory: Tamera Louise Babich | 1/31/56 – 11/28/18