Mind The Gap: With Bridget

Do people at funerals a favor, don’t actively try to bum them out.

It’s difficult to accept myself sometimes.   I find fault more easily in the person that I’ve become and the person that the rest of world sees on the outside.  I hate admitting that.  I wish I could easily just give myself leeway when I screw things up—but that’s never been my way.

I’m legitimately scared about going back to school.  I’m terrified of crashing and burning—of failing—and disappointing my dad.  I’m scared of disappointing my mom.  I don’t want everyone I know to see me spiral downwards like we were all slightly frightened of when I came back from winter break with a single carload of laundry and enough emotional baggage to fit one of those douchy monster trucks that always try to run you off the road on the highway.

I didn’t think that anything could truly change me as a person as much as this has.  I’ve gone through tragedy, and bouts of depression –both of which I handled in unhealthy ways—but those years have no comparison to what life is like right now.  I keep harping on it, over and over again, but I’m not exactly sure how things are all going to shake out in the end.  I never wanted to play the emotional damaged friend in everyone’s lives, and I know that there’s more to me than just the fact that I was the girl who’s mom had cancer—the girl who suddenly became popular with people she barely spoke to on the street just because she’d been touched by something surprising and horrible back in January.

Honestly, I want the one thing that I can never have.  I just want my mom back.  If I could never have anything else except for her, that would be fine.  I would live in mediocrity without complaint just to have her back in my life.  That’s a terrifying thought.

It’s just really difficult to look in the mirror every day and see more and more or Jill in my reflection.  It stings when people tell me how much we look alike, because it’s so true.  I really wanted her to see me grow up.  I never really got to do anything with my life before she was gone.  What was my biggest accolade—Prom Queen? Yeah, sure.  She got to see that my High School experience didn’t end with a bucket of pigs blood and homicidal rage.  But I want to know what kind of a person I would have grown in to if she was just in the other room—on the other side of my bedroom wall right now.

Today is one of the bad days—one of the days that everything catches up with me suddenly, and I’m just crippled.  They happen all the time at work when a co-worker just looks at me with their head tilted slightly to the side, full of sympathy that I’m this lost girl they watched fall apart.  I get worried that one day when I walk through the doors, it will be the day that for some inexplicable reason they’ve taken down the photo of my mom that rests within my eye line at my desk.  When will it be deemed an appropriate amount of time to move on?

I remember less and less about her every day, which didn’t matter as much when she was around, because I could just fill in those gaps with new memories.  There are no new memories.  There’s no quick line to speak to her the way I used to be able to.  I can’t tell her about my day, and whatever shit I’m going through at school.

I look a mothers and their daughters all the time at the library.  I watch the way they push each other’s buttons just to pick a fight.  I see the way that they resemble each other.  I wonder how many of the girls I see every day will have to deal with something like this in the middle of their transition into adulthood.  I wonder if they’ll take it as hard as I have.

And I have taken it really hard—not hard enough to build myself a shelter out of empty prescription bottles, or to cloud my vision with tequila—but hard enough that it’s really difficult to keep smiling sometimes.

The other day I was talking to a friend about my recent insomnia and she told me that I’d probably get some of my best writing out of this period of my life, that something beautiful can only come out of pain.  I rolled my eyes and said, “Yeah, because I’m this tortured artist and everything.”

She stared at me for a long moment and just went, “Yeah, Bridget.  You are.”

I wonder If I ever make something of myself—ever become notable for any reason—if this will become a touchstone for me.  Will people ask me about how difficult it was to lose my mom the way that I did?  How did I get through it?  How did it shape the kind of person that I am?  I don’t have answers for that in the future.  Maybe I’ll be able to help some people who are going through what I’m going through right now.  Maybe I’ll write a book of funeral etiquette that explains how not cool it is to shake a person by the shoulders while you sob into their face.  Like what happened to me at my mother’s funeral.  There’s a need for such a book.  Seriously.  People are strange.

Though I was given the best gift at my mother’s funeral.  It was a Star Trek flask.

However, it was empty.

Damn.

(Source: onelanebridget)

Six Months and One Day

When I was sixteen, I went on a school trip to France, where I visited the utterly stunning and isolated monastery of Mont. Saint Michel.  It’s existed in Normandy since before the 6^th century, out in the ocean—only accessible when the tide allows—as a fortress and a place of worship.

While I was there, I spent far too much time thinking that this place was probably the closest thing to Hogwarts that I would ever see in real life, and not enough time thinking about the way of life for the monks who called this place home.  As of now, I’ve spent a considerable amount of time thinking about Mont. Saint Michel and the symbolism it holds in my life.

We went there as tourists, purchasing key chains and postcards.  The streets are now lined with shops and restaurants.  Tours of the place run every half hour.  No monks live there now, the only people who call this place home are the people who own property here, and they truly can’t call themselves residents of Mont. Saint Michel.

While I was on this vacation, my grandmother back home was in hospice care after a massive stroke, and I spent the entire trip worrying about her.  But my mom told me that my grandma (her mother) would want me to have an adventure—and so I packed my bags and left.  When I returned home, I learned that she had passed away the previous day and our family would be making the pilgrimage to my mother’s hometown for the funeral.  Before we left, we went to visit my father’s stepdad (my only remaining grandparent).  He seemed so happy to see me, and to hear about my trip.  He told us to take his car on the trip (because ours wasn’t nearly as nice as his was) and we did.

The night we got home from the funeral, we received a call from his nursing home that he had killed himself.

I thought I knew grief and anger in those months following the death of my grandparents—these people who had held me as a baby, cared for me, and loved me so unconditionally—I thought I knew what it was to be lost.  I was wrong.

My mother had been sick since I was 10, and I had spent half my life used to the frequent surgery and treatments.  I was one of those children growing up in a war-torn city—sleeping through gunshots and dodging shrapnel became second nature to me.  I still live with the anxiety of growing up in a war-zone, waiting for the other shoe to drop, and now that it has, I’m not quite sure what to do.

My mom died six months and one day ago, on January 5^th, 2011 in a hospice center, while I sat upstairs on a couch—pretending to watch TV and calling myself a coward every other second.  She went quickly, not quickly enough for her liking—or my own, which sounds horrible until you’ve seen your mother look at you like she doesn’t even know you—after a day of harsh, wet breathing and struggle.

A castle monastery doesn’t seem like something that I could ever really relate to the loss of my mother, but it’s become a metaphor for my life.  Mont. Saint Michel has become where I live now, locked away in a tower, guarding relics of a saint that the church doesn’t recognize.  I’ve hoarded memories here, woven them into tapestries and lined the walls with them to keep out the chill of the real world.  Here is the place that I retreat to more often than not.

Sure, there are visitors, tourists to my grief.  But they don’t know what it was like to have her as a mother and then lose her.  I am the only person on the planet who had Jill as a mom.  She had brothers, and a sister, a husband, family, and friends, but she only had one child—one Bridget—me.  So it falls to me to truly keep her memory alive.

I think there are a lot of people who want to help me—my friends and my family—get through this.  The upkeep to this place I live in is too much for me to do alone sometimes.  The walls here are cracking with the strain, the windows breaking as the real world demands entry, and the tapestries are unraveling as every day I remember a little less about my mother.   So together we attempt to patch up the walls and talk about my mom just to verify that she was here once.  She lived a life, but now she’s gone.

Mostly though, I stay here in my tower and think about her.  I worry that this place will undergo the transformation that Mont. Saint Michel went through.  One day people will come and go freely from this place—as the tides are manipulated by locks and dams now, so that Mont. Saint Michel sits unprotected and bare—and wonder about the people who used to call this place home—wonder about me, and what it was like to call this place home.

I don’t think it’s safe for me to live here in this tower for much longer.  The real world beacons in a frightening and intriguing way.  I’m both excited and terrified for what is to come in my life.  And yet, I don’t think I can let this place fall to ruins.

So I think I will do as the tourists do.  I will leave this place, locking the doors behind me, to return when the itch to climb the stairs to my tower and gaze upon the window into what my life used to be grows too strong for me to ignore.  As I grow up, I will meet more and more people who know nothing of my mom, and the three weeks I spent in a state of shock as I watched her die.  It will fall to me to take them in hand and lead them to this place, to look upon the crumbled walls, and the plaques that point out the obvious—I will never truly be “okay” again.  They will ask questions, and I will attempt to explain what it is to live primitively in isolation to a person who has never been without their iPod and Facebook.

They won’t understand it—not even my children when I tell them about how wonderful their grandmother was.

That’s the thing about travel, no matter how much time a person can spend in a place, they will never understand what it’s like to just be from there.  A tourist will always be a tourist, except in the places where they grew and changed.  They can walk the streets, and speak the language—but that doesn’t change their status.

I have become t tourist to the rest of the world, and the sole resident of this crumbling castle in my head.  I don’t understand the world as I used to, I am less ready to experience the unknown.

People keep telling me is how strong I am, how I am broken, but not in a permanent way.   I will find my way out of this, and I agree with them.  Six months used to seem like a long stretch of time to me, but now it seems like January was only last week.  I have officially lived 5% of my life without a mother, which for some reason strikes a chord with my psyche, because one day (On January 6^th, 2031) I will have officially lived more of a life without my mom than with her.

I will probably have kids by then, kids who are older than I was when my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer.  I’ll have a husband, and a home, and hopefully a dog.  I’ll have this whole half of my life without my mom to call whenever I feel like it.

So yes, things do get easier every day, and I’m not ready to lock this place up behind me yet.  But it is getting dangerous here, and I need to leave before it’s condemned and I risk a cave-in that will leave me trapped.

I carry the key to this tower in my heart, along with all the love I have for my mom—who would want me to be happy, even if she couldn’t be here to see it.  I try to live every day because she can no longer do so for herself.  I want to make her proud of me, and losing myself in grief is something she would probably call me a dumbass for if she could.

Jill—What a Fox.  You are missed.