Scarred

It's 12:51am. I can't sleep. I went to bed around nine and have been back up for about the past hour or so. I finally realized a few minutes ago that I was laying in bed with my arms above my head, ringing my hands, literally. At that point I decided it was probably worth just giving into the insomnia and getting up and letting my hands move in the way they really ache too rather than giving in any more to the swampy thoughts that were clogging my brain.

Someone died last week. Not someone I was close to, but someone a lot of other people were close to... a lot of people I am close to. And as death always should, it touched me. I spent the first several days worrying about his family and his friends and my coworkers and then as the days went by I found my thoughts beginning to be peppered more and more with thoughts of my own experiences with death. And of the death of my mom of course, to be specific.

I woke tonight with thoughts of dying myself in a car accident. Of texting or talking on the phone while driving and not realizing the car in front of me has stopped and plowing into them. I actually think of this when I am driving quite often as well, of what would happen, what it would look like and feel like if I ran into the car in front of me. What it would be like if I was gone. If people would miss me. If they would have a memorial service. What they would say. It's all quite morbid really I know. But I really can't help it I suppose. It's how both members of the generation of Sepulveda's before me died and I often wonder if this will not be my fate too. Or if not this, than cancer... but surely death at an early age. And earlier age than old age anyways. I suppose in the end, or in the ongoing as life continues to be, I have so many unanswered questions and so very little closure about the death of my mom that it always just hangs there over me in the dark sky, dangling and poking me as I try in vain to sleep.

Tomorrow is the memorial service for my fallen team member at work. I am going in several hours early to make many large catering platters for the service. My boss called me yesterday, the only time she has ever called me on my day off, to see if I needed help staffing my department tomorrow in the event that several of my employees would want to attend the mid-day service. She also asked, quite delicately and rather awkwardly, if I was planning on attending and who I wanted to ride with, etc. You see, she has said a few times that she wants to read my blog but I've been unwilling to share the website, knowing that there is not only a lot about my personal life here but a lot about my spiritual and theological beliefs too. I knew it not appropriate for my coworkers to read. But after writing the last entry about the day Dave died, and seeing how moved and torn up she was last week by the whole experience, I sent her a link... I suppose hoping to say to her without having to awkwardly say in person and at work, "I feel you, I've been there, I've got your back." I apologized in advance for the sappiness or rawness of my writing possibly freaking her out and she sent me a very short response thanking me for letting her "know me." She also told me I am an inspirational woman. Wow, to both of those things. Funny how I don't see that in myself for a half a second but how I see it in her and most of the other people I encounter in the world all of the time. In any event, I wondered for a brief moment as we were talking on the phone yesterday, if knowing a little more about my experience with death, she was wondering in the moment if about all this talk of death, of memorial services and food and flowers and eulogies might just... be hitting a little too close to home at that moment. Or maybe this self-involved train of thought was just an example of my selfishness, of me making someone else's death, about me and my own life's experience.

I've been trying not to think much about death this past week. As much as that is possible. It actually sounds really stupid now that I am saying that. How can I not after what happened at work? And how can I not allow it to bring back up memories and emotions I usually try to keep at bay about loss I have experienced in my own life. In the past week, as much as I tried to keep them tightly bundled up in some distant corner of my brain, in quiet hours alone in the dark, unable to sleep, I have been flooded repeatedly with memories of November 10th, 2003 and the many days afterward. I can recall with exact clarity things that were said and what people were wearing and thoughts I had and places I went and things I saw... and it has felt rather like... revisiting a trauma all over again. And so, I can't sleep you see. It's funny, I hadn't realized until this past week how much of my life between then and now I have very little or no memory of. I can recall that first week after my mom's death almost moment to moment... and then for months, years afterwards I have very little memories at all. I can't describe or remember what my life was like or what I was like or how I functioned in the world at all. Which, apparently, other than work I didn't really do at all according to my ex. When she said something awhile back about how withdrawn I was from the world, I don't remember this at all. I don't remember anything other than playing scrabble on the floor by myself for hours on end. That's my only memory of the months afterward and of the few years afterward I remember very little other than being at work and walking Shumba. And I remember I was moody and volatile and that I baked a lot. But that is all. I must have been such a horrible partner. I think probably, I was horrible from then on out...

In any event, death can scar us just a little bit or a lot if we let it. To the trained eye, to the eye that has seen death many times itself, I am covered in gashes, in scabs and in scars; my loss visible in my every move. In my inability to let people get close to me... in my inability to believe in my dreams and in myself... in my inability to get over my absolute terror of really getting out into the world and living. I try not to be a statistic, to be someone who has, "failure to progress," but know deep down this maybe describes me all too accurately. In most moments I don't think about this and I know that I function in the world alright and live my life... but there's a gap... Sometimes I wonder, how can I progress when I don't even know what happened to cause the death of my own mother? How can I progress when I never even really said goodbye.

I think the real reason I can't sleep is because I have guilt and I have regret. Tomorrow is a memorial service and all week I've been worried about attending, about the emotions it will bring up. I've never been to one you see, not even for my mom. I remember days after she died her friends pestering my brother and I to come up with something... but it all just felt too surreal... too impossible. I was still in a state of complete and total shock and so was he. And so a group of her friends in Portland and a group in Washington held their own individual memorial services where no family was in attendance. I have often worried that they probably think my brother and I horrible people because of this. And even though the thought of this; of a service memorializing my mom, of having to say goodbye in such a public, final way absolutely terrifies the living shit out of me like very little else I can imagine does... I feel kind of robbed and sad that I didn't have this. I feel guilty that I am preparing food and participating in the memorial service of a man I hardly knew when I couldn't even do the same for my own mother. Shame on me. Shame, shame, shame shame on me. And this, this is I think, why I can't sleep.

I have spent the past couple of years thinking and writing about the death of my mom, about death in general, about the implication and affect of death on how we live our lives, about how the two are completely intertwined, about the reality of morality, about how death connects us all to each other almost more than any other experience... and in doing so, I thought that I had helped myself finally find some closure and begin to heal... But the events of this past week have brought up so many unanswered questions to be revisited, so many raw emotions that had been pushed down into the depths of my being, so much anger and resentment and frustration and sadness and depression... that I'm left sitting up on my couch with all the lights on at one thirty seven in the morning wondering if I've really progressed or healed much at all; if I've ever moved on pass the moment when my father choked out the words, "You mom was in an accident..." so many years ago. Or is the only difference between then and now that these days I have learned to scream silently on the inside to myself rather than aloud for other people to hear? I hope when I go to work today, I won't be screaming too much or choking on the emotion of it all on the inside. I hope that I will find satisfaction and ease in letting my hands work, in staying busy, in being able to do for someone else something which I couldn't even do for my own mother. And I hope that in so doing, maybe just one of these big scars plastering my soul will begin to melt away.

Namaste.