MiaAtMidlife.com

My birthday approaching; lilt missing; everything slumps.
No card will come from my mother this year.
I spent yesterday visiting with the dying, shadowing a hospice music therapist in conjunction with a spectacularly ill-timed consulting project. What was I thinking?
Today I feel traumatized, my thoughts turbulent and sad, a grey vortex of bereavement and [...]

The orderly rows of the national cemetery don’t suit my mother. In her life she was a jaunty jumble, plaid pants and crazy knickknack shelves, swirls of cigarette smoke, piano bench cascading with sheet music. Her topsy-turvy mornings in the kitchen on the red swivel stool with a foot propped on the broken dishwasher, the [...]

Today is my mother’s birthday.
New rivers of grief. Oceans, actually. Waves of emotions and memories, tumultuous. I feel undone, overwhelmed.

Today, for the first time, I visited my mother’s grave. She is buried in the flat grassy octagon of a national cemetery near the airport; her grave is in a farflung corner alongside a freeway. How ironic, I think, that her mortal remains lie near fast lanes and flight paths, she who spent her life [...]

For three years, I tossed and turned, agonizing over how to help my mother. There was no mistaking the crisis; she was smack in the middle of a train wreck. Between her emphysema and her osteoporosis and her dodgy mind, she was in rough shape; the tormenting crisis was that she no longer had the [...]

My grief for my mother sprawls in many directions. My smart, vibrant, warm, plucky mother spent three agonizing years stooped and gasping for breath over the handles of a walker, her body ravaged and withered by emphysema. It was terrible. I could try for 10 years and not come close to describing how heartbreaking it [...]

The burgeoning of spring opens new wounds of grief.My mother’s heart shuddered to stillness in the dead of winter, the trees stark and leafless. It was one of the coldest nights in years. Yet there was also a mist in the air, heavy and warm and strange, as my mother’s body was wheeled out of [...]

The room my mother died in seemed to be waiting for spring. It was a large, westerly-facing room with a windowed balcony onto a rolling wetland. We’d seen elegant Great Blue Herons wading in the pond during my mother’s previous care center visit, at summer’s peak. The pond was frozen now, drifted over with snow, [...]

Now spring unfurls, and my awareness of my mother’s absence from the living blooming world is acute. The tulips pushing valiantly through the mulch, the budding out of ash trees and lilacs and weigela, the boy robins strutting their orange blaze, the young cardinals flashing crimson in the arborvitae. That the world is coming alive [...]

It is difficult to come to grips with everything that has happened in the past three years. How it all started: On Christmas Eve 2005, A. and I watched as my mother nearly fell down the stairs of our 1916 four-square house. I still remember it vividly. My mother looked ghostly, stricken. She’d been upstairs [...]

Her head still bent, her skinny and hunched blue-jacketed shoulders heaving, my mother on the Windsor chair that Christmas Eve did not seem to be getting any better. “I think you should go to the emergency room,” I said. “It’s just 10 minutes from here, a zip down the freeway.” 
My mother looked up at me. [...]

In the shadows of the showy Beaux Arts Cathedral, I rose from a worn kneeler and turned back to contemplate the almost mystical glow of the votive stand. The small flames of the two candles I’d lit for my mother, the flickering pluck of them, the tiny shadows on the amber glass. I felt a [...]

My mother’s death has unmoored me. How can this be? It’s not precise to say we weren’t close. But the terrain between us was marked by lapses and lies as much as by love, its prosperity thwarted by bad history, by temperamental differences, by my mother’s stunted life, by the looming and distorting presence of [...]

I’ve had one visit from my mother, the night after she died. It was extraordinary (and I do need to write about it).
But where is she now?
My grief counselor–a friendly hospital chaplain named Melody who came packaged with the hospice program that my mother was part of, if only for a slender few days–talked [...]

The day my mother was packed off from hospital to care center found me repeating The Story again and again. This had come to be the drill, whenever new health care providers or social workers appeared in the picture.
My mother’s health care history was not only a groaning database of doctor consults and hospitalizations, [...]

I should write about the end of it all. About that last, long, searingly memorable Saturday night when I kept my mother company as evening turned to night, as distress blossomed and abated, as love shone, as loneliness lingered, as tears flowed, as frost spread across her window.
About the next five days–her last, two [...]

I rue that my mother spent most of the last month of her life in in a woefully small and dispiriting room, a room so drafty–could this truly be the room allotted to a patient with respiratory disease?–that pillows were banked against frost on the inside of the window.
The room was, in truth, a [...]

We didn’t, of course, know how short her remaining time was to be. But it is hard to make peace with the fact that she was able to experience hospice’s happy float for a mere week before she died. Instead, she spent the first 21 of her last 29 and 1/3 days enrolled in a [...]

Given how quickly she went, I will always regret that my mother didn’t start out right away in the soothing arms of hospice care–the coordinated, palliative ministrations aimed at making sure a terminal patient’s remaining days are as comfortable as possible. “Comfort care” was itself a comforting proposition. The more I learned about hospice, its [...]

My mother arrived at the care center wearing a paper-thin hospital gown under the heap of warming blankets that had been tucked around her. She also had her oxygen tanks, a chapstick, and a bottle of lotion. She came with nothing at all of the life she had lived save for me, the black-parka-ed daughter [...]

On New Year’s Eve, my mother took her last trip, bumping along a suburban freeway in a medi-van to a care center perched over snow-covered wetlands–the place she would, as it happened, spend the rest of her life. Descending on the van’s wheelchair lift at the center’s doorway, the scrawny white-haired thing swaddled in heated [...]

She died in a flimsy blue hospital gown, her shoulders bare, the gown’s laces having been left loose so as not to strangle her. She had no use for fashion in the end, was in fact entirely devoid of vanity. Not that she was ever a fashionista, she of the knit JCPenney pants and poly [...]

She was much more, of course, than the weakly wasting she-gnome in a nursing home bed, her hair gone white, her back stooped, her wrists like twigs and her nostrils flaring oxygen tubing. The woman in that bed herself offered a few clues, stirring from sleep with a radiant smile, wanting CNN on the TV, [...]

In the checkout line at the food co-op this evening, after a trip to the movies, starting to bag my yogurt and pommellos, spinach and pasta, I suddenly found it difficult to breathe. The thought, as I battled dizziness and panic, veering ever closer to full-fledged hyperventilation as the unwitting checker scanned items and asked [...]

My mother. She was not part of the daily weave of my life. She was in many ways deeply significant to me. Yet she was also both real and unreal to me, in some respects a sort of phantom presence in my life. Everything about my relationship with my mother is complicated—a vast unsettled sea [...]

My mother died January 30. Can it have been a month ago already? Her death was not unexpected, but was unexpectedly expeditious. She succumbed to emphysema, finally out of breath for good after a journey of surpassing hardness. Her death in hospice, relatively peaceful and fast, was in no way beautiful, but in almost every [...]

She weighed 72 pounds and was bent nearly double by osteoporosis and the effort to draw breath into lungs ravaged by emphysema. She had both a bad end and an unfulfilled life.
Yet even in the final days, even as her breathing worsened and a stroke took her one of her eyes, even with her [...]

My life these days:
A heavy stew of grief. My mother died 29 days ago.
Anger. My father a brutish mess of narcissism, of meanness, of fast-creeping and hard-edged dementia. His demons unleashed. A lifetime of bad behavior gone to extremes, the traumas inflicted anew with a dose of the mad.
Anxiety. After a good run of [...]

Welcome to my blog, Mia At Midlife.
I’ve found my way here by desperate necessity, hoping that the blank page of an essentially anonymous online blog will free me from a profoundly crippling writer’s block. I want to write nearly all the time–that’s been true since I was a kid. But everything that is so [...]

Welcome to my blog, Mia At Midlife.
I’ve found my way here by desperate necessity, hoping that the blank page of an essentially anonymous online blog will free me from a profoundly crippling writer’s block. I want to write nearly all the time–that’s been true since I was a kid. But everything that is so [...]

My life these days:
A heavy stew of grief. My mother died 29 days ago.
Anger. My father a brutish mess of narcissism, of meanness, of fast-creeping and hard-edged dementia. His demons unleashed. A lifetime of bad behavior gone to extremes, the traumas inflicted anew with a dose of the mad.
Anxiety. After a good run of [...]

She weighed 72 pounds and was bent nearly double by osteoporosis and the effort to draw breath into lungs ravaged by emphysema. She had both a bad end and an unfulfilled life.
Yet even in the final days, even as her breathing worsened and a stroke took her one of her eyes, even with her [...]

My mother died January 30. Can it have been a month ago already? Her death was not unexpected, but was unexpectedly expeditious. She succumbed to emphysema, finally out of breath for good after a journey of surpassing hardness. Her death in hospice, relatively peaceful and fast, was in no way beautiful, but in almost every [...]

My mother. She was not part of the daily weave of my life. She was in many ways deeply significant to me. Yet she was also both real and unreal to me, in some respects a sort of phantom presence in my life. Everything about my relationship with my mother is complicated—a vast unsettled sea [...]

In the checkout line at the food co-op this evening, after a trip to the movies, starting to bag my yogurt and pommellos, spinach and pasta, I suddenly found it difficult to breathe. The thought, as I battled dizziness and panic, veering ever closer to full-fledged hyperventilation as the unwitting checker scanned items and asked [...]

She was much more, of course, than the weakly wasting she-gnome in a nursing home bed, her hair gone white, her back stooped, her wrists like twigs and her nostrils flaring oxygen tubing. The woman in that bed herself offered a few clues, stirring from sleep with a radiant smile, wanting CNN on the TV, [...]

She died in a flimsy blue hospital gown, her shoulders bare, the gown’s laces having been left loose so as not to strangle her. She had no use for fashion in the end, was in fact entirely devoid of vanity. Not that she was ever a fashionista, she of the knit JCPenney pants and poly [...]

On New Year’s Eve, my mother took her last trip, bumping along a suburban freeway in a medi-van to a care center perched over snow-covered wetlands–the place she would, as it happened, spend the rest of her life. Descending on the van’s wheelchair lift at the center’s doorway, the scrawny white-haired thing swaddled in heated [...]

My mother arrived at the care center wearing a paper-thin hospital gown under the heap of warming blankets that had been tucked around her. She also had her oxygen tanks, a chapstick, and a bottle of lotion. She came with nothing at all of the life she had lived save for me, the black-parka-ed daughter [...]

Given how quickly she went, I will always regret that my mother didn’t start out right away in the soothing arms of hospice care–the coordinated, palliative ministrations aimed at making sure a terminal patient’s remaining days are as comfortable as possible. “Comfort care” was itself a comforting proposition. The more I learned about hospice, its [...]

We didn’t, of course, know how short her remaining time was to be. But it is hard to make peace with the fact that she was able to experience hospice’s happy float for a mere week before she died. Instead, she spent the first 21 of her last 29 and 1/3 days enrolled in a [...]

I rue that my mother spent most of the last month of her life in in a woefully small and dispiriting room, a room so drafty–could this truly be the room allotted to a patient with respiratory disease?–that pillows were banked against frost on the inside of the window.
The room was, in truth, a [...]

I should write about the end of it all. About that last, long, searingly memorable Saturday night when I kept my mother company as evening turned to night, as distress blossomed and abated, as love shone, as loneliness lingered, as tears flowed, as frost spread across her window.
About the next five days–her last, two [...]

The day my mother was packed off from hospital to care center found me repeating The Story again and again. This had come to be the drill, whenever new health care providers or social workers appeared in the picture.
My mother’s health care history was not only a groaning database of doctor consults and hospitalizations, [...]

I’ve had one visit from my mother, the night after she died. It was extraordinary (and I do need to write about it).
But where is she now?
My grief counselor–a friendly hospital chaplain named Melody who came packaged with the hospice program that my mother was part of, if only for a slender few days–talked [...]

My mother’s death has unmoored me. How can this be? It’s not precise to say we weren’t close. But the terrain between us was marked by lapses and lies as much as by love, its prosperity thwarted by bad history, by temperamental differences, by my mother’s stunted life, by the looming and distorting presence of [...]

In the shadows of the showy Beaux Arts Cathedral, I rose from a worn kneeler and turned back to contemplate the almost mystical glow of the votive stand. The small flames of the two candles I’d lit for my mother, the flickering pluck of them, the tiny shadows on the amber glass. I felt a [...]

Her head still bent, her skinny and hunched blue-jacketed shoulders heaving, my mother on the Windsor chair that Christmas Eve did not seem to be getting any better. “I think you should go to the emergency room,” I said. “It’s just 10 minutes from here, a zip down the freeway.” 
My mother looked up at me. [...]

It is difficult to come to grips with everything that has happened in the past three years. How it all started: On Christmas Eve 2005, A. and I watched as my mother nearly fell down the stairs of our 1916 four-square house. I still remember it vividly. My mother looked ghostly, stricken. She’d been upstairs [...]

Now spring unfurls, and my awareness of my mother’s absence from the living blooming world is acute. The tulips pushing valiantly through the mulch, the budding out of ash trees and lilacs and weigela, the boy robins strutting their orange blaze, the young cardinals flashing crimson in the arborvitae. That the world is coming alive [...]

The room my mother died in seemed to be waiting for spring. It was a large, westerly-facing room with a windowed balcony onto a rolling wetland. We’d seen elegant Great Blue Herons wading in the pond during my mother’s previous care center visit, at summer’s peak. The pond was frozen now, drifted over with snow, [...]

The burgeoning of spring opens new wounds of grief.My mother’s heart shuddered to stillness in the dead of winter, the trees stark and leafless. It was one of the coldest nights in years. Yet there was also a mist in the air, heavy and warm and strange, as my mother’s body was wheeled out of [...]

My grief for my mother sprawls in many directions. My smart, vibrant, warm, plucky mother spent three agonizing years stooped and gasping for breath over the handles of a walker, her body ravaged and withered by emphysema. It was terrible. I could try for 10 years and not come close to describing how heartbreaking it [...]

For three years, I tossed and turned, agonizing over how to help my mother. There was no mistaking the crisis; she was smack in the middle of a train wreck. Between her emphysema and her osteoporosis and her dodgy mind, she was in rough shape; the tormenting crisis was that she no longer had the [...]

Today, for the first time, I visited my mother’s grave. She is buried in the flat grassy octagon of a national cemetery near the airport; her grave is in a farflung corner alongside a freeway. How ironic, I think, that her mortal remains lie near fast lanes and flight paths, she who spent her life [...]

Today is my mother’s birthday.
New rivers of grief. Oceans, actually. Waves of emotions and memories, tumultuous. I feel undone, overwhelmed.

The orderly rows of the national cemetery don’t suit my mother. In her life she was a jaunty jumble, plaid pants and crazy knickknack shelves, swirls of cigarette smoke, piano bench cascading with sheet music. Her topsy-turvy mornings in the kitchen on the red swivel stool with a foot propped on the broken dishwasher, the [...]

My birthday approaching; lilt missing; everything slumps.
No card will come from my mother this year.
I spent yesterday visiting with the dying, shadowing a hospice music therapist in conjunction with a spectacularly ill-timed consulting project. What was I thinking?
Today I feel traumatized, my thoughts turbulent and sad, a grey vortex of bereavement and [...]

I rue that my mother spent most of the last month of her life in in a woefully small and dispiriting room, a room so drafty–could this truly be the room allotted to a patient with respiratory disease?–that pillows were banked against frost on the inside of the window.
The room was, in truth, a [...]

I should write about the end of it all. About that last, long, searingly memorable Saturday night when I kept my mother company as evening turned to night, as distress blossomed and abated, as love shone, as loneliness lingered, as tears flowed, as frost spread across her window.
About the next five days–her last, two [...]

The day my mother was packed off from hospital to care center found me repeating The Story again and again. This had come to be the drill, whenever new health care providers or social workers appeared in the picture.
My mother’s health care history was not only a groaning database of doctor consults and hospitalizations, [...]

I’ve had one visit from my mother, the night after she died. It was extraordinary (and I do need to write about it).
But where is she now?
My grief counselor–a friendly hospital chaplain named Melody who came packaged with the hospice program that my mother was part of, if only for a slender few days–talked [...]

My mother’s death has unmoored me. How can this be? It’s not precise to say we weren’t close. But the terrain between us was marked by lapses and lies as much as by love, its prosperity thwarted by bad history, by temperamental differences, by my mother’s stunted life, by the looming and distorting presence of [...]

In the shadows of the showy Beaux Arts Cathedral, I rose from a worn kneeler and turned back to contemplate the almost mystical glow of the votive stand. The small flames of the two candles I’d lit for my mother, the flickering pluck of them, the tiny shadows on the amber glass. I felt a [...]

Her head still bent, her skinny and hunched blue-jacketed shoulders heaving, my mother on the Windsor chair that Christmas Eve did not seem to be getting any better. “I think you should go to the emergency room,” I said. “It’s just 10 minutes from here, a zip down the freeway.” 
My mother looked up at me. [...]

It is difficult to come to grips with everything that has happened in the past three years. How it all started: On Christmas Eve 2005, A. and I watched as my mother nearly fell down the stairs of our 1916 four-square house. I still remember it vividly. My mother looked ghostly, stricken. She’d been upstairs [...]

Now spring unfurls, and my awareness of my mother’s absence from the living blooming world is acute. The tulips pushing valiantly through the mulch, the budding out of ash trees and lilacs and weigela, the boy robins strutting their orange blaze, the young cardinals flashing crimson in the arborvitae. That the world is coming alive [...]

The room my mother died in seemed to be waiting for spring. It was a large, westerly-facing room with a windowed balcony onto a rolling wetland. We’d seen elegant Great Blue Herons wading in the pond during my mother’s previous care center visit, at summer’s peak. The pond was frozen now, drifted over with snow, [...]

The burgeoning of spring opens new wounds of grief.My mother’s heart shuddered to stillness in the dead of winter, the trees stark and leafless. It was one of the coldest nights in years. Yet there was also a mist in the air, heavy and warm and strange, as my mother’s body was wheeled out of [...]

My grief for my mother sprawls in many directions. My smart, vibrant, warm, plucky mother spent three agonizing years stooped and gasping for breath over the handles of a walker, her body ravaged and withered by emphysema. It was terrible. I could try for 10 years and not come close to describing how heartbreaking it [...]

For three years, I tossed and turned, agonizing over how to help my mother. There was no mistaking the crisis; she was smack in the middle of a train wreck. Between her emphysema and her osteoporosis and her dodgy mind, she was in rough shape; the tormenting crisis was that she no longer had the [...]

Today, for the first time, I visited my mother’s grave. She is buried in the flat grassy octagon of a national cemetery near the airport; her grave is in a farflung corner alongside a freeway. How ironic, I think, that her mortal remains lie near fast lanes and flight paths, she who spent her life [...]

Today is my mother’s birthday.
New rivers of grief. Oceans, actually. Waves of emotions and memories, tumultuous. I feel undone, overwhelmed.

The orderly rows of the national cemetery don’t suit my mother. In her life she was a jaunty jumble, plaid pants and crazy knickknack shelves, swirls of cigarette smoke, piano bench cascading with sheet music. Her topsy-turvy mornings in the kitchen on the red swivel stool with a foot propped on the broken dishwasher, the [...]

My birthday approaching; lilt missing; everything slumps.
No card will come from my mother this year.
I spent yesterday visiting with the dying, shadowing a hospice music therapist in conjunction with a spectacularly ill-timed consulting project. What was I thinking?
Today I feel traumatized, my thoughts turbulent and sad, a grey vortex of bereavement and [...]

Welcome to my blog, Mia At Midlife.
I’ve found my way here by desperate necessity, hoping that the blank page of an essentially anonymous online blog will free me from a profoundly crippling writer’s block. I want to write nearly all the time–that’s been true since I was a kid. But everything that is so [...]

My life these days:
A heavy stew of grief. My mother died 29 days ago.
Anger. My father a brutish mess of narcissism, of meanness, of fast-creeping and hard-edged dementia. His demons unleashed. A lifetime of bad behavior gone to extremes, the traumas inflicted anew with a dose of the mad.
Anxiety. After a good run of [...]

I’ve had one visit from my mother, the night after she died. It was extraordinary (and I do need to write about it).
But where is she now?
My grief counselor–a friendly hospital chaplain named Melody who came packaged with the hospice program that my mother was part of, if only for a slender few days–talked [...]

My mother’s death has unmoored me. How can this be? It’s not precise to say we weren’t close. But the terrain between us was marked by lapses and lies as much as by love, its prosperity thwarted by bad history, by temperamental differences, by my mother’s stunted life, by the looming and distorting presence of [...]

In the shadows of the showy Beaux Arts Cathedral, I rose from a worn kneeler and turned back to contemplate the almost mystical glow of the votive stand. The small flames of the two candles I’d lit for my mother, the flickering pluck of them, the tiny shadows on the amber glass. I felt a [...]

My birthday approaching; lilt missing; everything slumps.
No card will come from my mother this year.
I spent yesterday visiting with the dying, shadowing a hospice music therapist in conjunction with a spectacularly ill-timed consulting project. What was I thinking?
Today I feel traumatized, my thoughts turbulent and sad, a grey vortex of bereavement and [...]

For three years, I tossed and turned, agonizing over how to help my mother. There was no mistaking the crisis; she was smack in the middle of a train wreck. Between her emphysema and her osteoporosis and her dodgy mind, she was in rough shape; the tormenting crisis was that she no longer had the [...]

Welcome to my blog, Mia At Midlife.
I’ve found my way here by desperate necessity, hoping that the blank page of an essentially anonymous online blog will free me from a profoundly crippling writer’s block. I want to write nearly all the time–that’s been true since I was a kid. But everything that is so [...]

My life these days:
A heavy stew of grief. My mother died 29 days ago.
Anger. My father a brutish mess of narcissism, of meanness, of fast-creeping and hard-edged dementia. His demons unleashed. A lifetime of bad behavior gone to extremes, the traumas inflicted anew with a dose of the mad.
Anxiety. After a good run of [...]