My mom believed that every day was a day to be celebrated.

[This particular day was celebrating my finishing my second marathon and taking off more than 40 minutes — nearly six years ago.]

I honestly believe I’m mostly doing as OK as one can during this whole wretched grieving process. I’m going on with my live while honoring my mom’s as best I can [some really cool stuff to announce in the near future related to this :)]

This past weekend, I went back to Franklin Lakes (there, now I don’t have to say the house/their house/his house/whatever) to see my sweet dad and attend a family reunion with him. As you might imagine, these things were difficult. 

I came back to the city emotionally drained and crawled into bed to nap and let myself wallow for a while.

Sometimes friends who are like family have that weird spidey sense of when you need them, and I got a text from my best friend that she was in my neighborhood, was I home? She came over and we just sat on my couch for a long time chatting about a whole lot of things going on in both of our lives. 

Eventually, we got hungry and made our way down to Republic in Union Square, which, btw, New Yorkers, is closing? (But, hot tip, they have frosé on happy hour for $8, and it’s fabulous.)

We sat at the bar chatting, and I started telling some sad story about my mom. I’m a little absent-minded to begin with, but lately I’ve been extra absent-minded (no idea why…nothing going on here), and I stopped to catch my runaway train of thought. The entire time we’d sat there, we hadn’t noticed the music playing softly as we chatted, but suddenly Shut Up and Dance, our favorite song to dance like fools to late-night, came on.

And in that moment, I knew my mom was with me, telling me to stop being sad and to have fun.

I woke up still thinking about that this morning, smiling. I went out for a run, and sure enough, another gorgeous sunny day, and I vowed to fight hard for happiness and joy today amidst sadness. It was a hard/weird day at work, but I just kept looking for the roses among the thorns and kept thinking of the advice my mom would give me if I could call her right now.

I’d love to tell you that means that I didn’t cry after getting a sweet sympathy card from a friend’s family or after texting with my cousin, but then I’d be lying. I’d love to tell you that I didn’t start writing this post with tears streaming down my cheeks, but that would be a lie, too. 

But I’m trying to have a good cry and move on, to not let it bring down the rest of my day/night. To honor the feelings, but do my best to not let them consume me.

One thing that’s helping with that is thinking about and planning for the future. Short-term, long-term, even just thinking about planning and the future gives me glimmers of hope to think to a time when this pain won’t feel quite so raw and the future will feel a little brighter than it does right now. I’ve done bullet-journaling on and off, and I’m obsessed with Rachel Wilkerson’s new book on bullet journaling. Just reading about planning is giving me some weird peace.

I’ll take it where I can get it. 

Like one of the commenters on one of my recent posts, I’m admittedly attempting to lean in hard to grief. If I lean in, it will go away faster, right? Maybe, maybe not. But much like I pored over reading ovarian cancer research studies, reading about each chemo we tried, each surgery she had, and then, in the end, the signs of death, now I can’t stop reading about grief.

Someone made the suggestion to look into Claire Bidwell Smith’s work. For those of you not familiar with her, she is a grief therapist who lost both of her parents by age 25 and writes extensively on the grief process. I’ve started reading her book After This, which is about her attempts to figure out the existential question of just what is after this life. 

One of the most important points I’ve read so far (I’m about 1/3 in) is that we don’t remember people by their clothes or what car they drove — although her Titanic-inspired dress circa 1998 is beyond memorable, her clunky ole Lincoln wasn’t — but rather by the stories they left behind, the influence they had on people.

I’ll get back to writing about fitness at some point — I am training for the NYC Marathon again, after all — but this has also largely been a blog about my life, and this loss is the biggest thing in my life right now.

[This photo just because it’s also in DC, though ~5 years after this story takes place.]

And so I wanted to tell a story that epitomizes the selflessness of my mom. [An editor’s note: I’m having a really hard time with verb tenses around this. Neither past nor present seem right right now…]

In the days leading up to her death, and in the days surrounding that whirlwind of emotions of her death, wake and funeral, so many beautiful, emotional stories were told about her. One of the words that was used over and over again was “selfless” and the following story was often repeated:

“Remember the time Carol got on the train late at night to go to Washington because Theodora was sick?”

It was either late 2007 or early 2008, I can’t remember, but I had come down with a rough case of bronchitis, was overwhelmed at work and Bailey was just a little pup. I was just having a shitty day, and I called my mom in tears, frustrated. “Do you want me to come down to Washington?” I resisted at first, but finally, through tears, choked out a yes.

It must have been at least 7 or 8 pm when we talked, but that didn’t matter to my mom, who asked my dad to drive her down to Metro Park in NJ to get on the 9pm train to DC.

“Theodora, why is everyone in the car giving me a dirty look when I’m on the phone?”

“Mom, are you in the quiet car?”

“Oh, maybe. But I’m being quiet?”

By the time she arrived at my apartment, after midnight, she walked in and told me how there was a man with a gun on the train; they had to stop the train in Wilmington, DE to get the police on board to check out the situation.

Her cab driver, she said, was drunk. I lived just four or five blocks from Union Station but this sheltered NJ lady wasn’t walking late at night with her suitcase. “Theodora, we could basically see your apartment and he still got so confused getting there and getting my suitcase out of the back. Does this ever happen to you here????”

Um, no, Mom.

But not a gunman nor a drunk cab driver nor a late night could stand between her and coming to take care of her little girl, and I have to believe that this pesky little death thing won’t stand in the way of her watching over me and taking care of me, either.