Happy Mother’s Day!
So I got my present early, because it’s absolutely impossible for my Little Man to keep it a secret or hide it from me until it’s time! LOL! He got me a beanie baby, a little dog. It’s very cute and sweet. Of course he got himself one as well…*giggle* How could he possibly have done otherwise? LOL!
And he got me one of those cards where you record your message and then it plays music. Very cute and I will cherish it always!
I spent a small fortune getting cards for all the mothers in my family. And it occurred to me…we have a hell of a lot of women in this family!
Earlier this week, we celebrated my great-grandmother’s 93rd birthday! Happy Birthday Big G-ma! She moued-down on a pint of oysters and finished them all herself! LOL! Little Man drew her an incredibly detailed picture of his favorite Pokémon and explained it all to her very patiently. Her eyes just glittered as she teased him and pretended not to understand.
She might be older than dirt and a little slow to get around, but she is most definitely still here and enjoying the hell out of it! LOL! I feel so very lucky to have her here. That’s five generations alive at one time. She’s my maternal grandmother’s mother. I hope I live as long as she does. I don’t care if I have to wear a diaper! I want to live to see as much as she has and to get the chance to enjoy my son’s grandchildren!
Now if we could get her to stop dancing with death every other day, it’d be great. We know she doesn’t have much time left. But she keeps getting really ill and then bouncing back. Actually while I was at RT, I was pretty sure she’d be dead by the time I got back, but once again, she surprised us all.
But all of this is just update news. What I really wanted to talk about today is my mom. Those of you who know me well, know that my mom wasn’t June Cleaver by any means. She was a drug addict and suffered various forms of mental illness throughout her life. She gave me to my grandparents to raise when I was three, which was the best thing she could have done. I resented her for it and I resented my grandparents for taking me from her for years. It didn’t help that she tended to attempt suicide almost every year either on or near my birthday. Anytime between Labor Day and New Year’s was pretty much open season for her. I think I stopped looking forward to birthdays somewhere after my 16th. Her last real attempt was in 2006. She promised my sister and I that she wouldn’t do it again. She kept her promise, but the next year, she was cutting herself instead.
It’s sad but I actually used to hope that the next year would be the year she succeeded. Because then, I could mourn the mother I’d never had and remember only the good times, as few and far between as they were. I got my wish last year. She died on October 22nd at 5:37pm. I know this because they took her off life-support and I watched her die, my eyes flickering between the clock and the heart monitor. It seemed very important that I know exactly when her heart stopped.
It’s different than it is when you see it on TV. It’s worse. The sound on the monitor was off. But the sense of panic that came with just standing there watching and waiting for it to be over was…they can’t show that on TV. I don’t think there is an actor or actress alive who could ever accurately portray that. I was standing there holding myself back from trying to do CPR or rescue breathing…that’s what I’m trained to do. Having been a lifeguard for a number of years and being trained as a first-responder…that little stint I pulled when I thought I wanted to be an EMT. NOT responding to imminent death was very difficult.
My thoughts were as hyper as my body was not. I flickered from the panic induced by not doing anything to pleading with myself to just let it happen, to finally be done with it. After all, this is what she had been wanting for most of my life, right? She’d tried enough times…now she was getting what she wanted. And when the end came, I was so torn I was almost two separate people. I was the little girl crying for the mother who never answered, never came, never dried my tears or held me close. And I was the adult woman who felt a tremendous sense of relief and guilt at the same time.
“Thank god, she’s gone. It’s over. After all these years, it’s finally over.”
“Oh god, she’s gone. She can never make-up for what she didn’t do for me now. I’ll never get the chance to tell her how I truly feel now. Oh god, she’s gone!”
“What if I was supposed to save her? What if her eyes opening like that and her hand twitching in mine wasn’t just a muscle spasm like they said?”
“What if my sister hates me for not keeping her on life support until she got here to say good-bye?”
Then, it was trying to explain to Little Man that Grandma Julie was better-off dead. “She’s not broken anymore sweetie. There’s nothing wrong with her head now and she’s not hurting herself or anyone else. She’s finally happy.”
Then there were the arrangements to be made. It’s a good thing she had wanted to be cremated because she wasn’t all that great-looking in the end. She was blue and swollen in the hospital and by the time they had arranged her features for the I.D. viewing, she was much better, but that isn’t saying much. I mean…dead is dead. I was glad she just wasn’t blue any more. (Jerald, I don’t care who did it, but thank you so much for that. She looked worlds better than she had. Blue wasn’t her color.)
Having worked in a funeral home, in fact, in the funeral home we went to, there was comfort in KNOWING. I knew what happened next. I knew what would happen to her. I knew who would cremate her (Thank You Karl!) and who would type up her death certificate and who would take it to the doctor to be signed…I knew the ladies who would file it with the health department and the people who would work the memorial service. I knew each and every person who touched her or even stood in her presence after she died. I can’t even begin to explain what a comfort that was. I didn’t sleep for…3 days? I couldn’t sleep until I knew she was at the funeral home.
The arrangements were simple. Cremation, small keepsake urns for myself and my sister, and the rest of the cremains to be divided among the family. Grandma and Grandpa wanted some to scatter. So did Uncle Jeff and Aunt Kim. And my sister and I wanted our own. At one point, I was worried that there wouldn’t be enough of her to go around. She wasn’t that big. She had only been about 5’3” tall and at death, had weighed about 130 I think. I said it out loud too. Everyone turned to stare at me. I started laughing. I couldn’t help it. I was laughing and crying and soon so was everyone else.
What people don’t understand is that stuff like that is normal. It’s ok. When someone is grieving, dark humor is probably the best thing to hear. In fact, while working at the funeral home, I had a typical “Luci Moment” where I opened my mouth, and inserted my foot, but thankfully, it ended well that time. But that’s another story.
We spent the next several days clearing out her trailer (had to finish before the first of the month so we didn’t have to pay another month’s rent) and preparing for her memorial service. There were some serious issues trying to find a clergy member who would accept what my sister and I wanted and still give the rest of the family the nod to Christianity that they needed for comfort. But we got that settled (Thank You Rev. Theresa Liefur!).
Then, all that was left was for me to create her service folders. I paged through hundreds of memorial poems, but none of them were right. I eventually broke down and wrote my own.
Don‘t be sad at my death for I will never leave you.
I will be your guardian angel walking beside you.
I will be in the snow that falls gently upon you.
I will be in the rain drops that wash away your tears.
I will be in the earth that cushions your footsteps.
I will be in the bird song that falls sweetly on your ears.
I will be in the gentle breeze that caresses your cheek.
And I will be waiting with God at the gates,
When it’s your time to come home.
Until then, never be lonely,
Feel the snowflakes on your skin,
Look up into the rain storm,
Walk barefoot in the mud,
Enjoy the birdsong,
And open your arms wide to the wind.
When it’s your time, leave no regrets behind.
That was SO hard to write! I desperately wanted to feel that way, but I didn’t. I was mostly feeling guilty, lost and angry. I still don’t feel that way. I still haven’t been able to totally shake the anger and the guilt. I’m angry because she wasn’t perfect. I feel guilty because I gave up on her. I turned my back on her to save myself and my son. I went from being the person my family liked to use as the ambassador to Julie-land, to be being the person in the family who talked to her the least.
Having this NOT show in the words I was to speak at the memorial service was…next to impossible. But I managed. I wrote out a little speech. In it, there was nothing overly negative, nothing to show how I truly felt. I stood up there in front of everyone and cried as I read it (Thank You Ms. Susanne for the fabulous AVON make-up that didn’t smear, smudge or even budge an inch! And WOW did I put it to the test!) and they all thought I was nothing more than a grieving daughter. No one suspected how angry I really was.
Since then, I’ve tried to deal with it, but it’s been slow going. There’s something I want to explain. Mom was an addict. Addicts tend to stash things, like squirrels hoarding nuts for the winter. Mom stashed things everywhere and we will be finding little surprises for years, like the suicide letter I found addressed to me stuffed in one of my files. She put it there when she lived with me and forgot about it. She intended for me to find it “one day” after she was gone. Yet another suicide attempt. How surprising.
Now, I’d been planning on attending RT for…a whole year. I’d been lusting after it for years and I had decided that this year was the year I’d go, damn the cost. I planned and stressed and planned and drove myself crazy for it all year long. And then it came time to go. And I sat at my desk, stared at my bags and started doubting myself. In my head I heard, “why do you think you can do that? You’re a TOTALLY different person in-person than you are online! No one will like you. You’re fat, you’re ugly, you’re gimpy…you’re not good enough. You’re a fraud! You TALK about wanting to write, yet you delete anything you do write and only dream of the things you want to write. You don’t belong there!”
Pretty good at bashing myself, aren’t I? LOL! Children of addicts usually are. I decided I wanted a notebook to take with me in case I wanted to write down email addresses, names, whatever. I had inherited all of mom’s notebooks. If she bought one, she bought ten. She couldn’t just buy one! She wanted them all and they might not be there next time she came back! Typical addict behavior. So I will likely not need a notebook or paper for the next several years. I pulled one out of the drawer and decided it was too big. I pulled out the next one and decided it was too thin. The next one was too small…I finally settled on one and opened it up. I started scanning mom’s scribbling notes to make sure there was nothing I wanted to save. Mom didn’t just stash stuff, she stashed her writing too. She would be scribbling notes on a new craft project she wanted to do or making a list of stuff she wanted to buy, and then she’d turn a page and just jot down a poem or a 5 page dissertation on why smoking isn’t the horrible habit everyone thinks it is.
These little blurbs have let me see into her head in a way I never managed when she was alive. So when I come across them, I save them. That’s what I was doing, ripping pages out of the notebook to throw away, making sure there weren’t any nuggets in there I wanted to save. And as I did this, I had pretty much made up my mind not to go to RT. I was going to call everyone, tell them I would pay for the hotel like I promised and they could pay me back whenever, but that I wouldn’t be there. I’d make up a good excuse…I’d say…Little Man was sick or I didn’t have anyone to babysit my cats…something believable.
I turned a page and put the book down to pick up my phone to dial Ash Roland and let her know. And as I was about to push the Talk button, I looked down and saw this:
Believe in yourself
Set UR standards high
U Deserve the best
Try for what U want
And never settle for less
Believe in URself
No matter what U choose
Keep a winning attitude
And U can never loose.
Think about UR destination
But don’t worry if U stray
Because the most important thing
Is what U learn along the way
Take all that U’ve become
To be all that U can be
Soar above t. clouds
Let UR dreams set U free.
Mom’s been using the U that you normally see in text-language like that since she was 15. I’ve found several things she wrote when she was younger where she was using language this way. I don’t know why, but she always did want to be different from everyone else.
I read this, I hung up the phone. I cried for an hour. I cried like a little girl who lost her mommy. I cried hard, deep, wrenching sobs. I cried so hard and so loud it hurt.
And then, I looked at her picture, on the entertainment center, sitting there with her ashes, and I called her a bitch. Then I literally threw all my crap in the car and left.
I never would have left if I hadn’t found that poem. It’s not fair! ALL THESE YEARS she’s never been the mother I needed. Now, when I needed her, she “says” exactly what I needed to hear, exactly when I needed to hear it, and the bitch isn’t even here for me to hug! It just figures that when she finally acts like my mother, it has to be after death. Like I said, she always did want to be different from everyone else.
I went, and I had a blast. You’ll read about it soon when I finish my RT Virgin article. I’ll tell everyone what happened and what I saw and who I met. I even have some interviews to do! And I’m going back next year…all because of mom.
So Happy Mother’s Day Mom! Hope you’re enjoying death, whatever that entails. Can wait to see what you hit me with next.
R.I.P.
Julia Lee Gunkel
1958 – 2008
This is my favorite picture of my mom. She’s holding my little sister. She was beautiful when she smiled. She didn’t smile often enough, not really, not like this. So I cherish this picture.
So I got my present early, because it’s absolutely impossible for my Little Man to keep it a secret or hide it from me until it’s time! LOL! He got me a beanie baby, a little dog. It’s very cute and sweet. Of course he got himself one as well…*giggle* How could he possibly have done otherwise? LOL!
And he got me one of those cards where you record your message and then it plays music. Very cute and I will cherish it always!
I spent a small fortune getting cards for all the mothers in my family. And it occurred to me…we have a hell of a lot of women in this family!
Earlier this week, we celebrated my great-grandmother’s 93rd birthday! Happy Birthday Big G-ma! She moued-down on a pint of oysters and finished them all herself! LOL! Little Man drew her an incredibly detailed picture of his favorite Pokémon and explained it all to her very patiently. Her eyes just glittered as she teased him and pretended not to understand.
She might be older than dirt and a little slow to get around, but she is most definitely still here and enjoying the hell out of it! LOL! I feel so very lucky to have her here. That’s five generations alive at one time. She’s my maternal grandmother’s mother. I hope I live as long as she does. I don’t care if I have to wear a diaper! I want to live to see as much as she has and to get the chance to enjoy my son’s grandchildren!
Now if we could get her to stop dancing with death every other day, it’d be great. We know she doesn’t have much time left. But she keeps getting really ill and then bouncing back. Actually while I was at RT, I was pretty sure she’d be dead by the time I got back, but once again, she surprised us all.
But all of this is just update news. What I really wanted to talk about today is my mom. Those of you who know me well, know that my mom wasn’t June Cleaver by any means. She was a drug addict and suffered various forms of mental illness throughout her life. She gave me to my grandparents to raise when I was three, which was the best thing she could have done. I resented her for it and I resented my grandparents for taking me from her for years. It didn’t help that she tended to attempt suicide almost every year either on or near my birthday. Anytime between Labor Day and New Year’s was pretty much open season for her. I think I stopped looking forward to birthdays somewhere after my 16th. Her last real attempt was in 2006. She promised my sister and I that she wouldn’t do it again. She kept her promise, but the next year, she was cutting herself instead.
It’s sad but I actually used to hope that the next year would be the year she succeeded. Because then, I could mourn the mother I’d never had and remember only the good times, as few and far between as they were. I got my wish last year. She died on October 22nd at 5:37pm. I know this because they took her off life-support and I watched her die, my eyes flickering between the clock and the heart monitor. It seemed very important that I know exactly when her heart stopped.
It’s different than it is when you see it on TV. It’s worse. The sound on the monitor was off. But the sense of panic that came with just standing there watching and waiting for it to be over was…they can’t show that on TV. I don’t think there is an actor or actress alive who could ever accurately portray that. I was standing there holding myself back from trying to do CPR or rescue breathing…that’s what I’m trained to do. Having been a lifeguard for a number of years and being trained as a first-responder…that little stint I pulled when I thought I wanted to be an EMT. NOT responding to imminent death was very difficult.
My thoughts were as hyper as my body was not. I flickered from the panic induced by not doing anything to pleading with myself to just let it happen, to finally be done with it. After all, this is what she had been wanting for most of my life, right? She’d tried enough times…now she was getting what she wanted. And when the end came, I was so torn I was almost two separate people. I was the little girl crying for the mother who never answered, never came, never dried my tears or held me close. And I was the adult woman who felt a tremendous sense of relief and guilt at the same time.
“Thank god, she’s gone. It’s over. After all these years, it’s finally over.”
“Oh god, she’s gone. She can never make-up for what she didn’t do for me now. I’ll never get the chance to tell her how I truly feel now. Oh god, she’s gone!”
“What if I was supposed to save her? What if her eyes opening like that and her hand twitching in mine wasn’t just a muscle spasm like they said?”
“What if my sister hates me for not keeping her on life support until she got here to say good-bye?”
Then, it was trying to explain to Little Man that Grandma Julie was better-off dead. “She’s not broken anymore sweetie. There’s nothing wrong with her head now and she’s not hurting herself or anyone else. She’s finally happy.”
Then there were the arrangements to be made. It’s a good thing she had wanted to be cremated because she wasn’t all that great-looking in the end. She was blue and swollen in the hospital and by the time they had arranged her features for the I.D. viewing, she was much better, but that isn’t saying much. I mean…dead is dead. I was glad she just wasn’t blue any more. (Jerald, I don’t care who did it, but thank you so much for that. She looked worlds better than she had. Blue wasn’t her color.)
Having worked in a funeral home, in fact, in the funeral home we went to, there was comfort in KNOWING. I knew what happened next. I knew what would happen to her. I knew who would cremate her (Thank You Karl!) and who would type up her death certificate and who would take it to the doctor to be signed…I knew the ladies who would file it with the health department and the people who would work the memorial service. I knew each and every person who touched her or even stood in her presence after she died. I can’t even begin to explain what a comfort that was. I didn’t sleep for…3 days? I couldn’t sleep until I knew she was at the funeral home.
The arrangements were simple. Cremation, small keepsake urns for myself and my sister, and the rest of the cremains to be divided among the family. Grandma and Grandpa wanted some to scatter. So did Uncle Jeff and Aunt Kim. And my sister and I wanted our own. At one point, I was worried that there wouldn’t be enough of her to go around. She wasn’t that big. She had only been about 5’3” tall and at death, had weighed about 130 I think. I said it out loud too. Everyone turned to stare at me. I started laughing. I couldn’t help it. I was laughing and crying and soon so was everyone else.
What people don’t understand is that stuff like that is normal. It’s ok. When someone is grieving, dark humor is probably the best thing to hear. In fact, while working at the funeral home, I had a typical “Luci Moment” where I opened my mouth, and inserted my foot, but thankfully, it ended well that time. But that’s another story.
We spent the next several days clearing out her trailer (had to finish before the first of the month so we didn’t have to pay another month’s rent) and preparing for her memorial service. There were some serious issues trying to find a clergy member who would accept what my sister and I wanted and still give the rest of the family the nod to Christianity that they needed for comfort. But we got that settled (Thank You Rev. Theresa Liefur!).
Then, all that was left was for me to create her service folders. I paged through hundreds of memorial poems, but none of them were right. I eventually broke down and wrote my own.
Don‘t be sad at my death for I will never leave you.
I will be your guardian angel walking beside you.
I will be in the snow that falls gently upon you.
I will be in the rain drops that wash away your tears.
I will be in the earth that cushions your footsteps.
I will be in the bird song that falls sweetly on your ears.
I will be in the gentle breeze that caresses your cheek.
And I will be waiting with God at the gates,
When it’s your time to come home.
Until then, never be lonely,
Feel the snowflakes on your skin,
Look up into the rain storm,
Walk barefoot in the mud,
Enjoy the birdsong,
And open your arms wide to the wind.
When it’s your time, leave no regrets behind.
That was SO hard to write! I desperately wanted to feel that way, but I didn’t. I was mostly feeling guilty, lost and angry. I still don’t feel that way. I still haven’t been able to totally shake the anger and the guilt. I’m angry because she wasn’t perfect. I feel guilty because I gave up on her. I turned my back on her to save myself and my son. I went from being the person my family liked to use as the ambassador to Julie-land, to be being the person in the family who talked to her the least.
Having this NOT show in the words I was to speak at the memorial service was…next to impossible. But I managed. I wrote out a little speech. In it, there was nothing overly negative, nothing to show how I truly felt. I stood up there in front of everyone and cried as I read it (Thank You Ms. Susanne for the fabulous AVON make-up that didn’t smear, smudge or even budge an inch! And WOW did I put it to the test!) and they all thought I was nothing more than a grieving daughter. No one suspected how angry I really was.
Since then, I’ve tried to deal with it, but it’s been slow going. There’s something I want to explain. Mom was an addict. Addicts tend to stash things, like squirrels hoarding nuts for the winter. Mom stashed things everywhere and we will be finding little surprises for years, like the suicide letter I found addressed to me stuffed in one of my files. She put it there when she lived with me and forgot about it. She intended for me to find it “one day” after she was gone. Yet another suicide attempt. How surprising.
Now, I’d been planning on attending RT for…a whole year. I’d been lusting after it for years and I had decided that this year was the year I’d go, damn the cost. I planned and stressed and planned and drove myself crazy for it all year long. And then it came time to go. And I sat at my desk, stared at my bags and started doubting myself. In my head I heard, “why do you think you can do that? You’re a TOTALLY different person in-person than you are online! No one will like you. You’re fat, you’re ugly, you’re gimpy…you’re not good enough. You’re a fraud! You TALK about wanting to write, yet you delete anything you do write and only dream of the things you want to write. You don’t belong there!”
Pretty good at bashing myself, aren’t I? LOL! Children of addicts usually are. I decided I wanted a notebook to take with me in case I wanted to write down email addresses, names, whatever. I had inherited all of mom’s notebooks. If she bought one, she bought ten. She couldn’t just buy one! She wanted them all and they might not be there next time she came back! Typical addict behavior. So I will likely not need a notebook or paper for the next several years. I pulled one out of the drawer and decided it was too big. I pulled out the next one and decided it was too thin. The next one was too small…I finally settled on one and opened it up. I started scanning mom’s scribbling notes to make sure there was nothing I wanted to save. Mom didn’t just stash stuff, she stashed her writing too. She would be scribbling notes on a new craft project she wanted to do or making a list of stuff she wanted to buy, and then she’d turn a page and just jot down a poem or a 5 page dissertation on why smoking isn’t the horrible habit everyone thinks it is.
These little blurbs have let me see into her head in a way I never managed when she was alive. So when I come across them, I save them. That’s what I was doing, ripping pages out of the notebook to throw away, making sure there weren’t any nuggets in there I wanted to save. And as I did this, I had pretty much made up my mind not to go to RT. I was going to call everyone, tell them I would pay for the hotel like I promised and they could pay me back whenever, but that I wouldn’t be there. I’d make up a good excuse…I’d say…Little Man was sick or I didn’t have anyone to babysit my cats…something believable.
I turned a page and put the book down to pick up my phone to dial Ash Roland and let her know. And as I was about to push the Talk button, I looked down and saw this:
Believe in yourself
Set UR standards high
U Deserve the best
Try for what U want
And never settle for less
Believe in URself
No matter what U choose
Keep a winning attitude
And U can never loose.
Think about UR destination
But don’t worry if U stray
Because the most important thing
Is what U learn along the way
Take all that U’ve become
To be all that U can be
Soar above t. clouds
Let UR dreams set U free.
Mom’s been using the U that you normally see in text-language like that since she was 15. I’ve found several things she wrote when she was younger where she was using language this way. I don’t know why, but she always did want to be different from everyone else.
I read this, I hung up the phone. I cried for an hour. I cried like a little girl who lost her mommy. I cried hard, deep, wrenching sobs. I cried so hard and so loud it hurt.
And then, I looked at her picture, on the entertainment center, sitting there with her ashes, and I called her a bitch. Then I literally threw all my crap in the car and left.
I never would have left if I hadn’t found that poem. It’s not fair! ALL THESE YEARS she’s never been the mother I needed. Now, when I needed her, she “says” exactly what I needed to hear, exactly when I needed to hear it, and the bitch isn’t even here for me to hug! It just figures that when she finally acts like my mother, it has to be after death. Like I said, she always did want to be different from everyone else.
I went, and I had a blast. You’ll read about it soon when I finish my RT Virgin article. I’ll tell everyone what happened and what I saw and who I met. I even have some interviews to do! And I’m going back next year…all because of mom.
So Happy Mother’s Day Mom! Hope you’re enjoying death, whatever that entails. Can wait to see what you hit me with next.
R.I.P.
Julia Lee Gunkel
1958 – 2008
This is my favorite picture of my mom. She’s holding my little sister. She was beautiful when she smiled. She didn’t smile often enough, not really, not like this. So I cherish this picture.
