milestones...

today is my dad and step-mom's anniversary. i have consistently forgotten to call them to wish them a happy anniversary every year since they got married. how odd that some dates fail to stick in my head...

...while others never leave it.

next friday, november 25th, is the 10th anniversary of mom's death. november is her month. i think about her a lot. the way i've thought about her has evolved in the past decade, but the degree to which she's on my mind has not.

so, she died on november 25, 1995. exactly one year later i had to turn in a paper for a literature/philosophy class i was taking with prof. f., one of my top two favorite professors at notre dame (the other being valerie, who i pretty much want to be when i grow up). the paper was an autobiography assignment, and at that point in my young life, i thought that all things had meaning and connectedness and that having to write a paper-about-my-life with the seemingly arbitrary due date of one year after my mother had passed meant something big and important and was supposed to be some sort of marker of what had become of me in the year of being a half-orphan.

yeah. or something like that. because maybe things haven't really changed that much in the silly way i look for connections and meaning in stuff that really happens pretty much haphazardly. (i mean, jesus -- i still wish on the first star i see every night and i trust in the wisdom of fortune cookies!)

the point is that those first few anniversaries of mom's deathday were always really sad. they were full of reminders of how she had been sick, how horribly draining and overwhelming it was when she died, how empty and confused i felt trying to situate my life in a way that made good use of the void that was created when she was gone. but as the years have accumulated, what has been important to remember has not been the sadness, but the relevance of that point of my life in the grand scheme of my life. and it's been a nice excuse to just remember my mother, who truly was a fantastic and adored-by-all kinda person.

...but now it's coming up on 10 years. and that's kind of momentous. i suppose i've successfully completed all those textbook stages of the grieving process, but sometimes i miss her like it's my job... right now i miss her like it's my job.

and yet, i'm so lucky. i've said this before and i'll maintain it until the day i die: none of us is entitled to anything. so what if i don't have my mother around to call so i can get a decent recipe for sweet potatoes for an upcoming thanksgiving dinner with friends? you know what i do have? i have nineteen years of memories, her bad sense of humor, and a pretty damn good sense of what it means to love somebody. not too shabby.

i dunno... i suppose i'll end this for now. but there's almost certainly going to be another post (maybe more than one?) about this in the next couple of weeks. because i pretty much dump everything that's on my mind on this little blog, and my mom is on my mind a lot these days...