life, moving on…..

life is moving on here and as generally seems to be the case with me, it isn’t that there’s nothing to say, it’s that there’s so much to say, it’s overwhelming because life keeps going on and i am busy as hell, but loving life, too. i am in a pretty good place regarding my mom. i feel a lot of guilt. i do think she was ready and although i think it was in her nature to fight for her life, she was very tired and very done. but i will always carry the guilt that i didn’t take her to the hospital sooner. i just hope i am not judged too harshly for that. i have to live with it and in some ways, it continues to haunt me. today is a bad grief day, as we approach the weekend of my sisters birthday, the first without her. i don’t think i can fill her shoes, i can only be who i am. i hope that’s enough….somehow i think it will always be just shy of what someone thinks it should be, but all i can do is do my best.

i have been very busy doing web editing and stuff for the fire troupe i have become involved with. it’s a ton of fun and we are working on choreography for the upcoming season. right now i am in a fire fan piece that’s a tribal bellydance fusion number that’s shaping up nicely, but i have no more hair on my arms =) tonight is the first night for the new semester of my bellydance class, and i have fans practice tues-thurs and regular fire practive wednesdays, which leaves monday my only night i am not out of the house for something during the week! exhausting yes, but very worth it, my body feels great and it’s awesome! i wouldn’t trade it for the world, though. we are also doing fundraising both with the fire troupe and an art project we hope to take to burning man this next year. i built that website too….wanna see? here it is: http://www.shivavista.com let me know what you think. the creative bit on the front page i helped write and i built the entire site from scratch. there isn’t a huge amount there, but it still took a bit of time.

i am also going to be the stage manager this year for the drum, dance, and didgeridoo festival that takes place near the end of the month long arts festival that gets held in my town during july. it’s going to be so awesome! the webpage for the festival does not do it justice, i should ask her if i can do a different one, because the person who does hers i don’t think really wants to do it. something to think about =) so, we have a bunch of exciting new artists coming this year that i had a huge hand in getting here, and i am very excited! we are doing fundraising for this festival too, and earlier this week scouted out a great club that we think will be an awesome venue for us.

my daughter seems to have pretty much given up on school in the secondary sense and wants to get her ged and go to college. i am trying not to be too judgmental about this decision, but it’s very hard. i suppose she is now her own person, but i am disappointed. she seems to feel easily persecuted and i hope that soon she learns a personal sense of responsibility for her fate and the things that happen to her. i don’t want to write anymore about that.

work is moving right along too…..

all the time i have spent doing this other stuff means less time for relationships, but i think that’s okay. i am still on good terms and things continue to go well both with d and s, my girl. we haven’t been able to be together a whole lot since my mom passed, but have managed enough time to stay connected and we will just see how things go. yesterday, an old depeche mode song came on that struck home with me. "though it’s not love, it means something…."

i think i will leave things there for right now.

peace. 

still alive….

life is still carrying on for me. i am trying to learn how to live without my mom. some days are easier than others. as much as i loved her, i am also seeing that a lot of what she had become in my life was an obligation and i didn’t need her as much as i thought i did and i didn’t depend on her as much as i thought i did. i don’t know if i should feel good about that or bad. without a doubt i miss her in my life….i think i was just more independent than i thought. i know there is a sense of freedom that exists now that didn’t before. good goddess, am i a selfish fuck? i don’t know….

last week, i had to buy a car. love the car, hate the thought of making another payment. ew. the car is a nissan altima. i love it. it gets great gas mileage. i had been looking at getting a subaru and while all wheel drive would have been nice, in reality, i just don’t really drive in bad weather often enough to give up some comfort measures to have it.

in other news, d and i went to concord and santa cruz this weekend to help some friends that just got married to celebrate their recent nuptuals. they ran off to hawaii to get hitched and didn’t pack any of us in their suitcases, so we threw a party for them when they got home. it was a pretty good time. we took the new car and it was a ton of fun. i started drinking wine with my friends about noon on saturday and ended up drunk dialing just about everyone who’s ever talked about drunk dialing me or who has, in fact, done so. i was happy to tell everyone i knew how much i loved them =)

i had never been to santa cruz before….there are a bunch of little funky houses situated strangely along the sides of mountains but overall, the experience was charming. definately some place to return to when one can.

it’s been about four hours since i began this entry and my train of thought is wrecked. so i will end this now.

peace.

dear mom….

i can’t believe that it’s only been just over three weeks since you left this life. this death thing is such an incredible dichotomy. in some ways, it seems you’ve been gone an eternity and i can’t believe it’s been such a small amount of time, and in other ways, i keep looking around the house, expecting to see you there, or hear you yelling at me, or i sit at my desk at work and expect the phone to ring and i am going to pick it up and it’s going to be you on the other end saying "hoi".

i picked your ashes up from the mortuary last week….i can’t even remember what day it was. on friday, they delivered the mini-urns so that each of us could keep you with us. i got 12 of them in case any of the grand kids wanted them or something like that. your death certificates arrived in the mail on saturday…..unexpected and sobering, in some ways again i thought they’d never show up and in some ways i hate it because it’s another reminder to me that you aren’t here anymore.

i talked to a friend of mine who is a paralegal yesterday and she says because we have a deed on file that shows you and i as joint tenants, no one should be able to take the house away from us, which is a relief. i have to file a  paper with the county giving them a copy of the death certificate stating that you’ve passed, and we should be fine from there. of course, that means sis won’t necessarily be on the house, but i don’t know if there’s anything i can do about that. you know i will do right by her.

she hasn’t gone back to work yet. she’s talking today of both going back to the bar to bartend (oh god), or going and applying for a job on a cruise ship. i know you would be rolling your eyes the same i am. she says she has no ties here now, i suppose we and her son have been relegated to the status of chopped liver, eh? we will see what happens with that….

speaking of, dg got laid off last week. before he paid his rent for december and january. sis says she got up on friday to take him to get a copy of his birth certificate so he could go job hunting again, and then he told her he didn’t want to go. i swear, those two are going to be the death of me. it doesn’t seem much that either one of them are too keen on working and i am not too keen on continuing to support them with no help. will keep you posted on that one…..

there have been a million times i’ve thought of you, at least, in the last few weeks. talking things over with different siblings and smiling with rememberance of specific things we did or experienced. i miss you soooo much. in a lot of ways, you were the sounding board and the vent i used to gauge how things were going in my life because i could tell you and you would guide me, being so much more wise than me and having lived so much more and through tougher times, too. now there’s no one to temper me, no one to tell me to think about things before i make a rash decision, and no one to love me unconditionally. d even tried to pull a fast one on me last week, towards the end. i don’t know what’s going to happen with that, but i will do my best to stay the course, even if it should be alone.

the days go on….i have been lazy lately. sis actually mopped the kitchen floor last week…it took every ounce of self-control i had not to say to her "wow, i am impressed….i didn’t know you knew how to mop"….and i totally didn’t mean it mean, it’s just that she’s never done it, ya know? bellydance classes haven’t started again, but the one’s i am doing with the fire group are on-going and things are going good there.

well, i better go pretend to work now.

i love you and i hope that you are at peace.

in other news….

 i can’t believe it hasn’t even been a month since my mom’s been gone. that truly amazes me. i got her death certificates in the mail this weekend, which was jarring.

the weekend was insular and full of sloth. i did see my girl on sunday, first time since before my mom got sick. it was good to see her.

i didn’t do laundry, i didn’t do much of anything. i think sometimes you need that….i have done more than my share of that since mom died =) i know we need to start going through her stuff, and this will ultimately make my life more orderly, but i just haven’t been able to manufacture the energy for it yet. i think i will ask my sister if we can start doing one small thing at a time. even if it’s just one drawer of one dresser at a time, one shelf, one box in her closet….the sooner we have her stuff gone through, the sooner we can move my sis in there, the sooner i can move daughter up there and the sooner we can turn daughter’s current room into a massive closet for d and my stuff. i want all storage devices and stuff out of our room. the only thing that will be kept in our closet will be robes, tv’s stuff like that. the basement will become our lair =) i like that thought. it isn’t like anyone in the house gets up early enough to cause us much trouble getting to the laundry facilities =) these are the initial plans for the getting on with things.

there is more that we need to do. we need to pull up the floor and subfloor in my mom’s bathroom and redo the flooring. there’s a section of the drywall near her shower that needs to be patched and repaired, and her bathroom needs a serious and severe updating and cleaning. i am trying to decide how i want to do that. might get new carpet for sis, but maybe not. we will see with that….it’s going to be expensive and i think that bri’s room needs it more than my mom’s. but the flooring in the bathroom, definately. now it’s just finding the motivation to do all this…..

happy monday, everyone.

bleh.

peace.

my mom….

(1/27/2026 - The below post was written on a different platform, and over the years, I have no idea what picture was originally on this post, so I've added one of my favorites...)

this is a great picture of my mom.

it was taken a couple of years ago.

i miss her.

peace.

yesterday….

 it makes me sick to think of how many more lives will be seen as expendable if this draft goes through. thanks random, for letting me know that it was soundly defeated. only two people in the house voted for it, but it’s still scary when one has son’s or anyone else they care about in that age range. ack!

yesterday was a rough day. it was as hard as i thought it would be.

my mom used to call me several times a day and i used to wonder if my employers were getting upset with me because she called a lot. yesterday my phone was silent.

i had to go to the doctor yesterday, for a follow-up. need to get some lab work done, and will take care of that this week. i had to tell the doctor what happened, so i got to cry on him too =) he talked to me and asked me if i was going to be okay. it just takes time. he did give me the card of an attorney though, that he says is a decent human being if i think i need that. i am not sure what i want to do yet. i think first i am going to wait for the death certificate’s, so that i can talk intelligently with what data i have in my hand. i also think i’d like to see if i can be named her executor. i don’t think anyone will have a problem with that, but we will see. i had the fucking will, she just hadn’t signed it =)

i spent a lot of time crying yesterday.

the custodian for my building is a friend and she had the entire month of december off. she came in yesterday afternoon and asked how my mom was, so i got to tell her too.

then, i came back into my office at one point and elvis’ "blue christmas" was on the mp3 player. my mom ADORED elvis, so i cried some more.

all my coworkers asked about the holidays and if i was doing okay. it’s nice that they care, but i want to cry every time they ask. it’s okay, though, i made it through. the whole day. i am pretty proud of that.

when i got home, my sister was a mess and she remained a mess for the rest of the day and into the night. we are different people. she, being the narcisist thinks about how horrible this is for HER and can’t seem to see that anyone else is affected as much as she is. sometimes she has moments of clarity, but when she’s in her pit of sorrow as i’ve been calling it, there’s no consoling her. i asked her when i came in if she wanted me to put the urn with my mom’s ashes somewhere out of sight. she said she didn’t care, but if she is as upset about it today, i might move it to my room so it isn’t the constant reminder.

today is a new day. yes, i have cried already today, but i feel slightly more sane today.

this morning, i had a dream about this song by blind melon, called change. here are the lyrics:

I dont feel the suns comin out today
Its staying in, its gonna find another way.
As I sit here in this misery, I dont
Think Ill ever see, no Lord, the sun from here.
And oh as I fade away,
Theyll all look at me and say, and theyll say,
Hey look at him! Ill never live that way.
But thats okay
Theyre just afraid to change.
When you feel your life aint worth living
Youve got to stand up and
Take a look around you then a look way up to the sky.
And when your deepest thoughts are broken,
Keep on dreaming boy, cause when you stop dreamin its time to die.
And as we all play parts of tomorrow,
Some ways will work and other ways we’ll play.
But I know we all cant stay here forever,
So I want to write my words on the face of today.
And then theyll paint it
And oh as I fade away,
Theyll all look at me and theyll say,
Hey look at him and where he is these days.
When life is hard, you have to change.

of course, i would change the "boys" to "grrls", but other than that, it seems to fit =)

today will be a better day.

peace.

Year, in Review….

So there it is.   And there it was.

And here it is: the year in summation.   For those of you who aren’t familiar with this little exercise, basically it’s just the first sentence from the first entry of every month.   Last year’s seemed to be a bit more accurate and relevant, but hell.  My life is nothing if not inaccurate and irrelevant!

JANUARY:  "i found an amazing resource today. it spoke to me in a way that nothing has for a long time."

FEBRUARY: "part of me wants to write, and part of me does not."

MARCH: "i went to new york for five days and got to see the city all by myself."

APRIL:  "one of my major stressors lately has been work."

MAY: " the jazz festival was awesome, as always. it’s so funny the range of emotions that occur during this weekend…everything from "OMG i can’t believe it’s here" to "why do i do this again?!?!?!""

JUNE: "i am sad for people that i have read here for a very long time who have just experienced a tremendous loss."

JULY:  " i feel kind of bad for my poor son."

AUGUST:  " another weekend is gone by and wow, am i tired =)"

SEPTEMBER:  " burning man was as amazing as it ever is, this year. this was a very good and cool year for me, personally, professionally/volunteer-wise, and relationship-wise also."

OCTOBER:  "i spent my ENTIRE WEEKEND cleaning my house."

NOVEMBER:  "i knew my mom was sick, and i knew she had a lot of issues."

DECEMBER: "so, yesterday i got up and went to get my mom up to go to the bathroom in the morning."

so there it is. and there it was. and now i have to figure out how to continue to exist. i have to be responsible. i have to be a grown up.

i don’t have a mom anymore.

i feel somewhat adrift.

peace….i write as in my town, the 3000 american soldier killed in iraq is being protested in my town.