Dairy intry expressing your grief at being pluked away from your family
Answers
Up late, running behind in the morning. Come into work knowing I must get a report draft done at work for the Disaster Recovery Test that happened Sunday, so I have time to get it reviewed and edited before Friday. Novel-wise, after reading and digesting some plot books last night, I really feel like Jesus and the Red Baron is about to come together. This causes a conflict in me, a need to do one thing and a feverish desire to do something else. Ah, the minor dramas life are founded on. — Immediately after writing the above lines, probably somewhere around 7:30am, during a break, my cell phone rings, caller ID saying it’s my mother. I open the cell phone and say, “Hi Mom, what’s up?” but a man’s voice responds. I think for a moment I’ve simply misread the caller ID, but then he says, “Sir, this is Officer (I don’t remember) from the Hawkins Police Department.” and I’m immediately chilled. When he continues and says, “I don’t know how to tell you this,” I know immediately that my mother is dead. There is no other reason a police officer would call from my mother’s house and say those words. He continues to explain that she was found dead this morning and that they needs someone in the family to come down and release the body to the funeral home. I am not much use for several moments, all I can say is, “Oh god, oh god,” but I finally remember that her brother, Uncle Tim, lives nearby in Tyler. I then wonder how I forgot that I had an Uncle at all. I guess in shock/grief, the mind does some crazy stuff. The second I am off the phone, I type up a careening 3-sentence email to my boss that mostly apologizes that the DR report will be late, and then I shut down my computer and call my wife. I am not thinking clearly, still, and tell her to take Sami to school. Just before I leave work, I tell my co-worker Nesbit what’s happened, and he asks over and over if I am able to drive or not. I must look shaky or staggery or something. I tell him I am NOT sure if I can drive, but I don’t really have a choice. Nebit’s right, I drive like a madman — I’m just lucky not to hit anyone. At one point, I pull through a stop light like it was a stop sign. Future reference: Driving while crying, not safe. When I get to my house, I call Uncle Tim, and he says he’s heading down and asks when will be there, and then I realize that yes, of course, I have to go down immediately. I should’ve know better than to put Sami in school, I should’ve known I would have to go out to mom’s house ASAP, but my brain is not working well. I tell Tim we will be there as soon as we can. We pick up Sami Faye, throw some clothes in a paper bag, and head out for the two-hour road trip to Hawkins. On the way, I call Betty Brown, my mom’s best friend who lives near her, but Betty’s not in. Her husband answers instead and is terrified that it’s me. He thinks he will have to tell me that my mother is dead, and it’s tearing him up like a tiger from the inside. I manage to choke back my own emotions, and quickly tell him I already know what’s going on, and just have Betty call me when she gets back. Tim and Cheryl call to tell me that they’ve left while the body is removed; Tim cannot stand to see dead bodies, and I think he should probably counted sane for that. They are at the only restaurant in town, having lunch. I ask them if they have a key, because we do not, and if the door is locked, we may be locked out. They don’t have a key, and they think the house may already be locked. We get out there, though, and the house is not locked. Tim and Cheryl are inside, holding down the fort. The house is wrecked — not dirty — very few dirty dishes, actually, all in the sink, and a steak on the table she had intended to eat, yes — but the mess is primarily paper. Bills, statements, and junk mail going back twenty years, every prescription bottle or health supplement or medicine she bought in the past 10 years, many of them sealed in the wrapper in valuepaks but still expired. The pantries are the same: huge boxes of food and expensive teas, expired for years, but unopened and still sealed. She was a collector, my mom, but unfortunately she collected a lot of things that were useless.