Heavenly Tears

July 26th, 2022

It’s interesting how things can go, or change.  Last year I was up here for a week and there wasn’t a lot of time to think of my parents.  Today, that’s all I am doing is thinking of them.  I had covid right before I came up here.  I am tired and it’s affects are still present.  I was on my way to NH in the beginning of July and I developed Covid, had to turn around and come home.  Was home for five days and then left to come back.  I am exhausted and I did a show up here and it was a major success, but I am tired from that, too.  It’s been too much in too short a time.  As it turns out, I am not Wonder Woman after all.  All I can think about is, “I want my mom.”  I looked up at the sky after the event I did and asked her, “Are you proud of me?  I am here and look at how well I did.”  There was no response, just the gorgeous blue sky staring back at me.  I just wish I could hear her.  Say something.  Say anything.  Bring on a storm out of nowhere, mom, just let me know you are here.  I am tired since Covid.  It was a few days of a temp that vacillated between 102 and 103 and my ribs and throat were killing me.  I bounced back due to Paxlovid, but it was still a lot.  And me with this fierce need and desire to be on the move.  To come up here, which I am so glad I did, but I am tired.  You never want to be tired in such a gorgeous location.  I want to be on the move everyday.  For the first 6 days up here, I was moving constantly and then boom.  I am in bed.  Tired.  Feeling guilty.  For what?  For being sick or healing?  God, just let me rest.  Allow me to rest.  I need strength.  I want to see and absorb all of the beauty that NH has to bring.

I drove past my parents house in PA the other day prior to leaving.  The one I grew up in.  It doesn’t look the same.  At all.  It looked so much nicer when they owned it.  It looks stark now.  White everything.  All of the trees gone.  Dull.  Home is about connections.  What do you do when all of the connections that you once knew, the one’s that meant the most are gone?  They say you make new ones.  Even though I believe that to be true, there is no truer connection then the one I had with my parents and my sister.  We felt the same way poliically.  We loved the same things.  We loved New Hampshire.  We loved just sitting and staring out at Mt Sunapee.  The beauty of it all.  There was no rush to be somewhere.  They just loved being still.  Not running to every location in NH or anywhere else.  To them, that was not resting. It was work.  My dad would come up and work on projects, but it was a simple kind of life.  Crabcakes, sitting on the porch and eating.  My dad with his glass of whiskey in his hand.  I still remember the way he looked.  He would be in the corner lounge chair with his clothes either slightly a mess from working outside, or clean and showered with a whiskey, or scotch in his hand.  We had a hammock and he would just sit in it and listen to the trees and the frogs from the pond.  The trees swaying back and forth and each tree’s bark rubbing up against other trees.   I can hear the woodpeckers as I think of it.  We’d sleep with the windows open and all of those frogs would lull me to sleep with their croaks.  I loved it.  So did my parents.         

New Hampshire is gorgeous and I am so glad to be here, but I miss them.  And I can make memories with others, but I wish they were here to experience them, too.  People go on without their parents.  They have children to replace them and the loss isn’t as great, or they have their family.  I don’t have that and that’s okay, but it’s not easy.  I have friends and loved ones, but the truth is, no one really knows the feeling that you have when you miss your family that’s passed on.  I have one friend who knows it well and I talk to her.  She has a great husband and kids but her mom is always in her thoughts.  Having said that, loss is your grief and your burden alone.  No one knows exactly how you feel.  Only you know.  You had the relationship that you did with them.  What your siblings had was different.  Your relationship is yours and yours alone.  My mom was my mom.  She was a certain way to me and the same thing of my dad and my sister.  We each had our own relationship with each parent and eachother.  I miss them.  All of them that are above.  It feels good to cry about it.  To let it out.  To be truly authentic in saying, I miss them.  And all of you (extended family that’s no longer on this earth) a part of me is always with you.  There is a sadness in me that I am not sure will ever go away.  And why is that?  Because I loved them and I loved when we were all together.  I loved hearing my Uncle play piano.  I will always love them and that will never change.  So with this good cry, which I just had writing this, I will go out and sit by a lake, a pond, I will go for a ride and make new memories because honestly, that’s what they would want me to do and I want that, too.  It’s okay to be sad and long for those who touched your heart, for the one’s you can’t replace, for the one’s you’ll forever miss.  I’m telling myself that today.