Today

Today with the assistance of my friend K I am going to the Bereavement Center to see about, well, grieving and how to do it. Part of me feels like omg, the last thing I need is another f-ing therapist. But they also have support groups which may be helpful. I've had positive experiences with group therapy before, so I'm cautiously optimistic about it.

Among the many sympathy cards I've received (thank you, btw, even though it is really difficult to open them) workshop-mate DK sent a note that included the following line: I don't think anything really prepares us for losing our parents, but I am especially sorry that you have suffered this loss while you are still so young.

I really appreciated that thought. Because I feel I am too young to deal with this loss, but I'm not a child, and so I don't have the family all around me and the more structured and supported grieving that a child (ideally) would have.

[Aside: Stepgoddess Pam has recently left me two voicemails which I haven't responded. She says in each one, if you feel like talking.... I don't. But I love her. After the ashes arrived I regressed somehow back into myself. If you are reading this Pam I know you're there.]

Of course I feel like magically "older" women who lose their moms must have some grain of life experience that fortifies them for it, but that's probably not the case. My mom was 66 when she died. I feel like that's the age you're "supposed" to be when you lose your parents. 66 means you've had a lot of stuff happen in your life and probably learned how to get through a crisis or two.

I'm not saying I haven't had crises, but as far as stress goes, this situation and its surrounding weirdness equal, in stress, what happened when I was 17 years old, when my dad found out about my self-injury and moved me out of my mom's house into his apartment and I finally got diagnosed with OCD and could leave the house without breaking apart. Or when I was 20 and breaking it off with my psycho abusive boyfriend of five years. Those were times when I crossed from this reality into a border area between what's real for everyone else and what was real for me... a world so decorated with pain. Pain dripped from every aspect of the landscape. Gory, lonely, boring, crazy-making. I was so utterly crazy that I was actually bored by how crazy I was. Time stopped moving. There were people around, but I was completely alone in it.

My stylist told me I was losing my hair. From stress. But she also said it had started to grow back. Yay for growing back. Then I got all of it chopped off so I now have a little pixie with long bangs and pink extensions. It's breast cancer awareness month, you know. So pink. N said I "looked stunning" and "[she] liked my fluff."I guess that's a good description for the stuff on top off my head now. I had been calling it quills.

Here's another collage, International Correspondence (after Nick Bantock).