Grief

I've been grieving again.

I hate grief. It sneaks up on you and you suddenly turn around, and there it is, where it wasn't a moment ago, looking you straight in the eye and forcing you to acknowledge its ghoulish existence.

And then it is gone again, and I go on as normal, but I am sure it is never far away, just waiting until I again least expect it . . .

After five years of faithfully going there, I have grown to hate the nursing home. Every day or so, when I go to visit, I pull in the parking lot and think, "I do NOT want to go in there ever again."

But I shake off my self-pity, and I do go in, one more time. One more time. One more time. And one more time. And, yet again, one more time.

I think this is what purgatory must feel like. Moments of normalcy, moments of the grinding, wearing sameness. I don't want to, but I will, as I have my children repeat after me.

I wondered once what horrible sins I must have done to deserve this, and then I realized that my mother is in a much worse situation--her own private Hell, if you will, as she wakes up every morning and every afternoon from her nap and isn't sure who she is and where she is and why she is there. And she sure didn't do anything which I could think of to warrant her current situation.

I keep coming back to the epitaph which said, "It hasn't been an easy life, but it's been an interesting one."

Given a choice, I would have perhaps gone for a different kind of interesting, maybe consisting of tequila bottles and the cabana boy.