Someday.

Someday it will be me.

It will be that moment no one likes to think about. Or even say out loud.

Saying goodbye…forever.

Today is day one of many goodbyes to our Grandmother.

It doesn’t come as a shocker. It was not sudden or painful.

It was just time.

Ninety-six years of time.

Blessed time.

But five years without her sweetheart.

So yes…it was just time.

Time to say goodbye to all of us here, and hello to her sweetheart again.

I am trying desperately to remember this…we were blessed. We had her for so long. And now it is time for her to be at peace.

I told her it was okay (we all did), I whispered it in her ear, told her I loved her, many times…we had several weeks with her to say goodbye, as she slowly declined into a peaceful eternal sleep.

But I am still so heartbroken…

I will miss her…my husband and children and sisters and Aunts and Uncles and cousins…we will all miss her.

She was amazing…stylish, classy, funny, devoted and fierce.

She would be hard to forget.

So I will continue to tell stories about her to my children and remind myself of all the beautiful memories we had with her.

She was like a second mother to me and my sisters through some very tough years for our mother and her painful divorce from our father. Our grandmother stepped in and protected us and hugged us and made us smile, when our mother just couldn’t. I don’t hold this against our mother…it was actually a gift. We were able to create a special bond with our Grandmother.

We are forever grateful.

Tonight, is our first of many goodbyes and many tears…some sad but many happy.

We were all blessed to be loved and adored by our Grandmother, Mother, Aunt, Mother-in-law, friend, sister…

 

Thank you, Gram, for just being you…

Unable are the loved to die. For love is immortality. ~Emily Dickinson

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We Most Likely Won’t Be Friends Anymore After I Vote On November 8th.

I am voting on Tuesday, as we all should. But I have decided to stick with my gut, and vote with my heart. I will be writing Bernie Sanders in. He told his supporters months ago, to not listen to him if he tried to convince us to vote for someone else.

And I trust he is right.

Otherwise, I am stuck with voting for two humans…a man and a woman…who are, combined, the most loathed candidates at one time in U.S. Presidential election history.

Both equally shady. Both equally disturbing.

I won’t tell anyone who to vote for, but I sure have had many people attempt to convince me to drop the Bernie act, or else.

I see it as a much bigger problem though.

We can be bullied into voting for one of two people who most likely will wind up having to be pardoned or impeached. I choose to save our country a little time a money, and be more optimistic.

We had a candidate that crushed the GOP candidates in almost every poll. We had a candidate that surpassed the other choice in many polls and won a shocking number of states in the primary…

But somehow he lost. We let him go.

We really needed someone-anyone like him to revive this self-destructive country from even more potential damage.

We should have been focusing on what was truth and what we needed to heal as a nation from years of failing healthcare, violence against each other, hate, low wages…

Instead we were distracted with even more violence and hate and even more of a headache with more insane plans for healthcare, how to stop violence, and creating jobs and equality for all.

We were told we were not sensitive enough to blacks, to gays, to police, to refugees…we were told to hate the other side even more because the Orange guy said racist and bigoted things. We were told to hate the lady in the pantsuit because…well, because she is a lady.

We never stopped to look around at the rubble…of the senseless murders of all the blacks and gays and police we were all too busy hating on.

The smoke is so thick in front of our eyes…

We have been blinded by the media and government…this hate never went away. Martin Luther King Jr. lead the path to transparency to seek truth and justice…but it wasn’t over yet.

It never really went away.

The Orange guy says all those dirty little secrets that have been whispered for ages…he spoke truths for those who were silenced by the media and government…and that’s ok in my book. We were fooled. We began to think people were more empathetic towards each other…enlightened after too many years of hate. These folks never decided to be more open-minded or more liberal. They kept talking, but no one was listening…until now.

The Orange guy handed them the megaphone on a silver platter…for ALL the world to hear…yes, world, this is how many Americans still feel. They are full of hate and fear and loathing for all things different-sexuality, abortion, race…nothing has changed.

And as for that lady…I wouldn’t give her that dignified title as a Lady…

She may have a vagina, but she has the balls of a hundred men.

To brazenly try to walk back in the White House as the rightful heir after she and her husband and their entourage of thugs were ever so nicely kicked to the curb…for many good reasons.

So now we are to forget about all their scandals, and all the hate speech the Orange guy spews and celebrate Tuesday night as we elect one of two criminal psychopaths? We are to cheer and to praise God he won/she won? That it is finally over?

Wednesday will be a hangover that will last for four very long years…

America made the wrong choices…for both parties.

 

I will not tell you to write in Bernie (although if you want to, that’s great!), but we need to reflect on how we got to this point, and how we will survive four years of pure hell. We had plenty of options on both sides…and now we have come to this…

I will have to live with your choices…I voted for Bernie. And I will not be told to or bullied into voting for either of your candidates. I will not make this bed…

You can make the bed…I won’t be lying in it.

 

 

Snapshots.

After very little sleep last night, I decided to take a quick cat nap this morning after getting the kids off to school. Knowing I have a long full day ahead, I usually cannot nap and don’t like to, but thought it was necessary.

I closed my eyes and immediately had a dark sensation overwhelm me. I thought how lucky I was to be afforded this time, and also how peaceful it was at that very moment, but how quickly things can change in an instant.

After a stressful morning and short fuse, I really needed this rest. But my peaceful moment was now being flooded with memories swirling like snapshots in photographs…

Within seconds I was there again…so clear and vivid…so chilling.

My mind was telling me a story again that I think about occasionally, but always on this day…every year…for eight years.

The time span of these snapshots this morning was not even thirty seconds maybe, but enough (coming fast and furious) to bring me to tears and wide awake.

The hotel lobby…the room…the smells…the pool…our luggage…

There were no cat naps or resting now.

I remembered the dark room in the spa. The knock on the door. The annoyance visibly spread over the masseuse’s face. No one ever interrupts a massage.

This was my moment of relaxation after several days in Disney with family-we finally planned it right…de-stressing from a whirlwind five days in Disney, now in Clearwater at a quiet hotel on the water.

The de-stressing never happened.

The car ride to Clearwater was more stressful than the visiting of the parks…the children were tired and cranky. We became tired and cranky…we should have just headed home.

But after several trips to Disney, we saved for this treat, knowing we always wished to find some chill out time after long full, yet fun days in the parks.

The following morning after we arrived in Clearwater, I was treated to a massage-a little Mommy pampering (maybe a belated birthday gift from a few weeks prior?), then back to the husband and kiddies for some beach or pool time…whatever we wanted at our own pace…we were relaxing…finally.

The knock on the door during my massage immediately made me think something was wrong with the kids, or maybe my husband’s 98 year old Grandmother back home who wasn’t well before we left…

The girl at the door told the masseuse it was an emergency and I needed to find my husband right away.

I quickly got dressed and found my phone buzzing away and noticed several missed calls from back home…oh shit.

What on Earth is going on????

I walked back into the vast lobby and see my husband charging down the stairs white as a ghost…where are my babies?

What is going on?

My husband was running to the car to search for his cell phone after getting a call in the room from a friend back home…

It’s gone…all gone.

Our home burned, not to the ground…but everything is gone…

The rest of the story now leaves me in tears as I write this…the hysterics on our children’s faces as we tell them what happened…

Their toys, their clothes, pictures…everything…their stuffed animals and trophies…their beds…

Where will we go?

What will we do?

The nightmare trip home of begging to get on a flight…only to have it delayed overnight because birds flew in the engine…

Are you frigging kidding me??

Why? Why now? How much more bad karma can one family take?

It could be worse, we were told…after almost 24 hours trying to get home, then arriving to family and friends covered in soot with tired eyes and heavy hearts…

These snapshots will haunt us forever.

We rebuilt a stronger and safer home…our family and community surrounded us with love and food and shelter and clothing…even Halloween decorations to cheer up our girls…

We came out of it all that much stronger…

When we feel weak and can bare no more, we remember these snapshots as I did this morning from eight years ago today, they lift us up and tell us we can and we will be stronger.

 

October 20, 2008

“Strength doesn’t come from what you can do. Strength comes from overcoming the things you thought you couldn’t”- Unknown