Spare Change

Spillover

Posted by Bryan

We have a friend in church who is a licensed counselor. She asked us this past week if things had been difficult recently.

They had.

It's been a month (and six days), and most of the time, we've been fine. But for the past week, it seems like things haven't been so "fine."

Kelli put it well, commenting on how little things that are normally no big deal, have been upsetting this past week. In the normal cuppa joe that is life, there is plenty of room to accomodate these little things. But with mom's death, the cup is already full, so the little things that are normally no big deal now cause spillover.

Our friend says this is normal...part of a pretty typical grief cycle. For a logical guy like me, that's comforting. At least I'm still normal. Relatively speaking, anyway.

Mom is showing up in my dreams. A lot. But never as a feature performer. Just as a character actor. Like last night, I was at a home with Kelli & Kelsi that overlooked the Pacific Ocean, and the narrator of the dream (me? Kelli?) mentioned casually, "This is where Mom liked to work on her paintings." And sure enough, there were a wall full of seascape paintings.

Now this is all pretty laughable, because my mom never painted anything. When I was a teenager, she paid me to paint the walls, and then later she always hired out for the same task. And when it came to artwork, she was strictly a buyer. But somehow, in my mind, she was a Bob Ross protoge'.

I don't understand how the mind works.

These large pictures we had made for the funeral service finally arrived at our home. And it was so important to us to have them, but now that they're here, I just don't want to hang them up. They're too big. We have one up where she's with the kids. It was a candid pic from our July 4 weekend when we met in Albuquerque. It's really not even that great of a picture. We'll probably eventually settle on a smaller print and take this larger one down. I think part of me is seeing the sad but inevitable fade from memory that is taking place in the younger kids' minds, and it's frustrating to be powerless to stop it. So that frustration is at tension with the pained effort to not refurbish our home into some macabre shrine of oversized Gigi pictures.

Here's a picture from the same time. We have a jumbo of it, as well. It's one of our favorites. The funny thing about this is that its so bittersweet. I love to look at it because my mom loved much and because she was loved so much. Which is exactly what makes the photo difficult to see.

The result....spillover. Apparently, that's how the normal mind works.

August 29, 2006 1:51 AM