ALL MY MOM'S IMPORTANT STUFF AND LETTING GO

MY MOM'S SWEATER THAT SHE LOVED TO WEAR ALTHOUGH SHE LOVED
THE COLOR BLUE MORE THAN PINK

Last night I was going through my huge pile of clothes in my bedroom.  There were some big piles that needed to be put away for sometime now.  I've been telling myself I was going to do it everyday however I never get to it.  I never knew why I just let them sit out in my bedroom when they were taking up so much space and making the bedroom look so cluttered.

Last night I thought it was time for me to tackle the messed up piles of clothes and put them in their designated place in my drawers and closet.  As I put them in their piles on my bed I realized I was becoming more and more uncomfortable and wasn't sure why.  I thought it was partially because I was having to organize my clothes in different piles and this is always a challenge. Organization and myself do not make for good friends.  Well, after I had almost all the clothes put on the bed I came to realize what was underneath the piles of clothes was making me uncomfortable.  I sat on the bed and just starred at the bins that were filled with clothes.  I became frozen for a moment and then the sadness started to creep in.  All the memories I had about these clothes were starting to fill my eyes with tears and my mind with sorrow.  These clothes weren't my clothes but my Mom's.  They were folded nicely and filled up the bins to the top.  About 8 months ago I had washed all her clothes and put them in plastic bins.  I thought unrealistically, that I was going to keep all of them!  I couldn't part with any of them except for some that I gave to my sister. But I know now that this is not possible.

What I was hiding underneath my pile of clothes was my Mom's clothes and I didn't want to face the enormous emotional task of giving them away so I buried them with my clothes on top.  The thought of parting with her clothes is so emotional for me.  Each piece is like a treasured memory and a way of feeling closer to her and I didn't want to loose that so I put them in the bins and just let them sit there untouched.  I started taking some photos of them so I'd remember them always, however I realize now that the memories are not in the things but in my mind.  So, soon I will be parting with some of them.  I have to do it a little at a time to soften the impact it will have on me.  I know some people have trouble with this when they loose a loved one, so I understand that this is the normal grieving process but nevertheless, it is painful to do.  It feels as if I am parting with her piece by piece as each piece will leave my possession.  Realistically, I know that I can not keep all her clothes forever, so I am going to donate what I can, when I can.  I will keep a few things that really remind me of my Mom's spirit and charm.  I wanted to create some kind of quilt or blanket with some of her clothes, but I don't think I will be able to, so they will have to go at some point.  I am saddened by this whole process.

MOM'S SCRUB TOP.  SHE LOOKED LIKE A NURSE WHEN SHE WORE THIS.
SHE LOVED THIS TOP. TOO!

It's interesting how we humans want to save things for their sentimental value.  It's as if we are trying to stop time, freeze time so nothing changes.  Holding on to things is a way of feeling closer to someone and if they have passed away, that grip is even harder.  I have always been a collector of things.  I am somewhat of a pack rat and I save things that make me think of and feel the person who gave them to me.  The person and the things actually merge together and become one.  This is a biological trait of nesting and collecting that is deep in our DNA and then effected by our experiences and our environment.  When I was as little as two years old, I was a collector.  I carried a bag with handles and I would take things from the ground and put them in the bag.  I had chewing gum wrappers, chewed gum, dirt, leaves, paper, and things I can't even remember.  I carried a bag with handles, for most of my childhood.  During my teenage years, I was still collecting things in bags and filling them with stuff and storing them in my closet.  Eventually, I graduated to bins and containers to house my collection of art supplies, fabric and anything to make things out of.  Still to this day however, I love bags with handles and now that I can get them anywhere, I am thrilled!  I now call it on my other art blogs, 'My Bag of Tricks'.

I mention this story to illustrate how ingrained collecting, saving and memories are linked together.  This is why I have been saving my Mom's stuff.  It is a combination of grief, collecting, saving, connection, closeness, devotion, feeling her presence, honoring her and fear of letting her go.  I will begin to let go, however little I can.  I hope the memories of my Mom don't go with her belongings and that they stay deep in my heart and soul forever.  I will never get rid of those.  So follow along with me as I begin this journey to let each one of my Mom's things go to another place.  I will write about it as I experience it and for now that is the best I can do.

MOM AND DAD THE POINTSETTIAS AND THE CEMETERY

This Christmas holiday was a challenging one and I was not sure how it was going to unfold?  I'd like to share some feelings and a story about My Mom, the Pointsettias and the cemetery.  I've been working on this post since Christmas Day and I'm finally done, so here goes.

Since my Mom has passed and it was Christmas, I wanted to put something on my Mom and Dad's grave at the cemetery.  I thought after talking it over with Paul, that we would put pretty Pointsettias.  So Friday afternoon, I picked up two flower plants.  One was white for my Dad and one was pink for my Mom.  They were pretty.  When I returned home, I placed them on the coffee table and went about my business.  My in-laws arrived about 15 minuted later and I didn't think of them again until Paul came home from work.

Most holidays I have spent Christmas Eve with my Mom and my husband Paul. and Christmas Day with the rest of my family. We used to go up to Lake Placid to see my in-laws, however, Paul has not been able to get enough days off in a row to take the long trip there.  Well anyhow, this Christmas was however, a sure change from the ordinary ones we have had, not only because my Mom had passed away but my in-laws spent the holiday at Paul's anut and uncle's home and so did Paul and I.   My Mom and Dad in-laws came down on Friday, stayed the night and we all traveled to South Jersey to Paul's Aunt and Uncles home.

Well, before we left our house we packed all of our clothes and gifts in the cars. We had a lot of gifts that were little and they captured our attention getting them in the car.  I took a look around two times to make sure we did not forget anything and everything was clear.  We jumped in the car and off we went to South Jersey.

We arrived in South Jersey and  had a great time and enjoyed the hospitality of Paul's aunt and uncle.  There home was so warm and inviting.  Two of Paul's brothers and they're families were there as well.
There were a lot of Paul's relatives there and the house was full of joy and cheer.  Somewhere during the day, I realized, "Oh, my.  I forgot the Pointsettias!"  How could I have forgotten them?  Well, all was not lost.  There was a Walmart close by and I thought that we would stop by there and pick up two more plants.  No problem.  So, after we left the gathering, we stopped at Walmart. Thank goodness for Walmart!   I ran in and picked out two of the prettiest Pointsettia plants in red.  After, we drove to the hotel we were staying at and brought our bags to the lobby.  The parking was a far walk from the entrance so Paul suggested we leave the Poinsettias in the car!  He said,"They are winter plants.  They will be fine"  I didn't know either way, so we left them in the back seat.  It was awfully cold Christmas Eve.

On Christmas Day, we hopped back in the car and we drove back to Paul's aunt and uncle's for dinner and dessert and then we were going to make our way North to my family.  We were going to stop at the cemetery before we got to Heather (cousin)and Ron's home.  Well, we went in for dinner and left the Pointsettias in the car, again.  It is not like me to forget something as important as this.  When we came back out to take a trip about 1 mile to Paul's other uncle's home to visit another aunt and uncle, we had Paul's brother and girlfriend hold the flowers on their laps.  Unfortunately, they started looking a little wilted and I thought the cold weather was causing them to die.  When we arrived back at Paul's aunt and uncle's, we placed the Poinsettias on the seat of the car thinking that they would be okay since it was not very cold.  After we had dinner and dessert, we got back in the car and headed for Heather's.  It took us about 1 hour to drive to Toms River and to get to the cemetery.

Well, needless to say, it was dark, very dark. We pulled up to the cemetery and the gates were open so we drove in.  We were the only ones in the entire cemetery.  I began looking for my Dad's grave and I could not find it in the dark.  So, I walked around looking for a familiar landmark.  It was too dark for me to see.  I had no idea where I was walking.  I must mention, that in any other time, I am petrified of cemeteries and the whole concept of graves, death and dying!  But here we were, in the pitch black looking for a grave stone.  I thought to myself, "we have got to be nuts!" But,  I knew that I had to find the grave. As I was walking in between the stones,  I came upon a stone that looked like my Dad's, so I put the Pointsettias down in front of the stone, crossed my heart and I began to walk away until something didn't feel quite right.  I looked again, closely and I realized that I had the wrong grave.  I picked up the wilted Poinsettias and walked further down and until I began to recognize the stones.  Meanwhile, Paul went to get the car, to help shine some light on the stones.  Do you believe it?  Here I was being afraid of the cemetery in the day time and I was walking a long to find my Mom and Dad's grave in the pitch dark?  I know this sounds odd but I was determined to find my Mom and Dad's grave and place the wilted Pointsettias on the grass for them.  And this was not the first time I had been there in the dark.  (it is a story for another time).

Well, anyhow, Paul drove up to me and turned the car sideways and he put the high beam lights on the stones.  Here we were in the dark cemetery, with bright lights shining on the stones looking for my Mom and Dad's grave. It was as weird as it sounds.  Eventually, I found my Dad's stone and I felt relieved that I could place the flowers for Mom and Dad on their grave.  I crossed my heart again and I was so happy to have found the stone of my Dad and Mom even though the Pointsettias were so wilted and lacked any life to them.  I thought to myself, "Merry Christmas Mom and Dad" and I apologized for the sorry looking flowers.  I also began to realize that even if the flowers did not wilt in the car, they would have soon after we placed them on the grass.  I guess they are not a "winter plant!"

 You might ask, " what is the lesson that I learned from this story?"  It is this.  I should never go to the cemetery in the dark, ever again, especially on Christmas Day!  At the end of the day, I don't know if this is a funny story or a sad one?  I'll let you be the judge.                                                                                    

ABOUT BEING THANKFUL & OLD COUNTRY BUFFET

Today I am thinking about my Mom and how much she liked Thanksgiving because my Mom, me and my husband Paul would all go to Old Country Buffet to eat and to celebrate.  My Mom loved to eat and she loved ‘Ol Country’ as she called it.  She would go up to the food bars and fill her plate to the edges with fried chicken and beef ribs, which were her favorite thing to eat.  I would watch her as she was walking up to fill her plate and I would see how happy she was.  She could barely contain herself. When Mom was walking back to the table with her full plate I was afraid she might trip or bump into to someone since Mom had trouble walking straight.  Fortunately, she always made it back to the table without spilling a thing. While my Mom was eating she would not say a word.  She was in her glory and enjoying herself so much, that she could barely notice our presence.  But Paul and I didn’t care. We were happy she was enjoying herself and experiencing pleasure, which was something she rarely experienced in her adult life.  After, dinner she would go up for dessert and again her plate was full of cake and especially vanilla soft ice cream.  We would feel so sick after we ate so much and my Mom would say that “we are never going to do that again!”

Sometimes, way back in the day,  I would have trouble going out to eat with my Mom.  I would feel so embarrassed to go in the dining room at Ol Country” and sit in the middle of the room because my Mom would be pretty messy when she ate.  Unfortunately, and tragically when my Mom was in the hospital, she lost all of her teeth.  I don’t know whether it was from lack of good dental treatment or if she had a gum disease..  Anyway, she tried dentures, however they hurt her gums, so she decided not to wear any.  This made it difficult for her to eat and she would sometimes get a mess on her shirt.  Some times because of this, I would feel so embarrassed that people were staring at us when we were eating and my anxiety antennae” went up.  I would want to hide all of us away so no one would be able to see us.  To help with this, we would sit in the back in the corner.  I never knew if my Mom knew that this was the reason that we always sat in the back in a booth.  I’m telling this story because now that I think about it, it really seems so trivial and seems to be so insignificant.  As I mentioned in About This Blog, I struggled with sorrow, fear and embarrassment because my Mom did look so disheveled at times.  I would want to fix her up so neatly so people would not stare at us.  Now that I think about all the times I was more concerned about our appearance than enjoying ourselves, I realize how sad it was for me and my Mom.  In the last years I had been overcoming my sorrow, embarrassment and social anxiety relating to my Mom, and it was feeling so good to just enjoy our selves.  In the end, I did not care what people did or how they stared, so much that I hardly noticed it.  I was so happy to be with my Mom however she was and I was so proud of her.  I was proud of how strong she was and how she had overcome so much in her life that any bad feelings were just fading away.

Now when I realize that my Mom will not be here to enjoy ‘Ol Country” and the beef ribs she loved so much, I feel so sad that it fills my heart with the sorrow that I had been trying to overcome.  I think about how silly it was to care about what other people thought.  What I am learning from this experience is that it doesn’t really matter what other people's opinions are if they are not significant or meaningful in your life.  All of us have struggles and oddities and now when I think of my Mom, I don’t ever think about how she had no teeth or that she was a messy eater.  I think of the joy on her face when she was happy, eating.  I think of the anticipation she had just waiting to get to the resturaunt. I think about Thanksgiving and the meaning of this holiday. It’s about being thankful and grateful for the people you love and those who love you.  It’s about having my Mom who I loved so much and being thankful for the time I had with her.  So, as we approach Thanksgiving I am reminded to be thankful for all of those I love and for the life I have.

HONORING MY MOM MARILYN FIDALGO

MARILYN FIDALGO     HONORING HER LIFE   AUGUST 23rd, 1937-  MAY 6th, 2011

Thank you for stopping by and sharing in the story of my beloved Mom Marilyn.  On May 6^th, 2011, my Mom passed away from Liver Cancer.  I am starting this blog to honor her because she was such an incredible person and woman.  My Mom endured so much suffering because she had a severe mental illness called Schizophrenia.   After the birth of my youngest brother my Mom became very sick and had to be hospitalized.  I think that she was 24 or 25 years old when she was hospitalized in the early 1960’s. Back in the 60’s, psychiatry was still new in terms of treatments, i.e. medications, and they were still experimenting with different treatments and using patients as guinea pigs.  Unfortunately, one of their victims was my lovely Mom. Tragically, she remained in the hospital for approximately 25 years and it is no where near certain what kind of trauma and abuse she suffered and had to endure with no one to come to her rescue.

The hospital my Mom stayed in was called Essex County Hospital or Overbrook located in Newark, New Jersey.   There, Electric Convulsive Shock Treatment was being done without proper precautions and it was being done way too much on patients. The hospital that my Mom was in, experimented with Insulin Shock Treatment which was done to help destroy a patient’s memory.   This barbaric treatment was done to my Mom and her stories about the needles in her head, have since been found out to be accurate and confirmed by a psychiatrist years after I began a relationship with my Mom.  According to what my Mom could remember, this Insulin Shock treatment was painful, frightening, abusive and done to her with tragic consequences.  As a result of these treatments, my Mom could not remember important aspects of her life and she was forever in an anxious and stressful state trying to piece together parts of her memories.  I was never sure if it was from the Insulin Shock Treatment or Electric Convulsive Shock Treatment and now, I will never know.  Most of her hospital records were lost or mysteriously disappeared.   The hospital now has been torn down.  Essex County Hospital or ‘Overbrook’ is considered by most to be one of the wierdest hospitals in New Jersey.  People would go to the hospital after it was abandoned and report that they saw ghosts there.  Recently, my husband and I were searching on the computer for the archways I remembered in my childhood and found out about these extremely bizarre stories at the Essex County or also known as ‘Overbrook” Hosiptal when it was opened and after it closed.   The confirmation of my own memories and curiousities that I have from childhood are something I could never look at while my Mom was alive. It’s only been since she passed away that I have found the strength and courage to look so closely into her past.  Now, I can only think about how my Mom had to live this awful nightmare!   I knew a lot about my Mom’s history, and that it was bad, however now I am learning just how bad it was for her This totally haunting and uncomfortable topic will be a post some where in the future.

Since my Mom was in the hospital, during my childhood and teenage years, I was unable to live with her.  I hardly knew who she was and I knew very little about her. My siblings and myself were raised by a host of family members and some strangers along the way until I was seven and my Dad took us to live at my Grandmother’s house, where I lived the rest of my childhood.  During this time, I only remember seeing my Mom approximately, 3 or 4 times until I was 16 years old. What I do have a clear memory about is that I was afraid of my Mom when I was a little girl.  But I longed for a mother and I hoped and believed she was going to leave the hospital and come back to live with us in the new home my Dad had purchased.  Unfortunately, my Dad remarried and that dream was gone.  Tragically, 6 months after we moved into our new house, my Dad passed away at the age of 40. I was 14 years old and very confused. After my Dad’s painful passing, we moved back to Gram’s and I only saw my Mom once between the ages of 14 and 24 years old. It was not until I was 24 years old that I finally did see her again.  She had been discharged from the hospital to live in a group home, but she was still very sick, since the medications were still horrendously toxic and they were not very humane.  Drugs like Thorazine and Mellarill were the standard treatments for Mom’s illness, but they came at a cost.  They had severe side effects and secondary disorders like Tardive Dyskinesa which can be a severe movement disorder. They made my Mom drugged out so much that she did not make any sense when she talked. But it wasn’t clear what was the result of all the drugs and what was the result of her illness?  It was so painful for me to see her and experiencing the shock of how sick she was, that I left that visit so distraught and I could not emotionally see her again for 10 years.

It was not until I was 33 years old that I finally felt able to search again for my Mom.  I found her again living in a boarding home in Newark, New Jersey.  She had been in and out of the hospital since I first saw her, but this time I saw her, something was different.  She was more lucid and could carry a conversation.  She smiled if only for a few moments and she could make a funny or quirky joke.  I found out that she had been put on a super new medication just released on the market, called Clozaril or Clozapine and this drug single handedly made a world of difference for her.  She was nowhere near cured or fully functional, but she was a lot better.  Things were looking up after my Mom, Marilyn spent more than half her life in an institution.  This is where the next part of our journey begins.

MY MOM'S MEMORIAL AT HER REFLECTION GATHERING

Now experiencing the pain, since my Mom passed away, it has been hard for me emotionally.  I miss her terribly and I wish I had one more day with her, so I could say all the things I have wanted to say to her literally, all my life.  Although, I was able to say some of what I needed to, I still wish I could tell her again, how much I loved her and how much she mattered to me. This is one of my wishes to begin this blog. I want it to be a place for me to write about my thoughts, feelings and memories I have about my Mom and to share stories with others.  I have so many experiences about my Mom and my relationship with her, as well as the things she did, that I am busting at the seams.  I want people to know who my Mom was and why she was here if for however, painful it was for her to survive.  She had a purpose to come and go in my life and I will search to find the meaning and reasons.  I also know there are a lot of people out there that have experienced similar things with their family members.  These stories need to be told.  We need to honor our loved ones that have become sick with different mental and neurological illnesses and we need to let people know they existed. We can’t let them fade in to the darkness because of shame or fear.  We can’t again, lock them away. We need to let people know, they mattered. I know my Mom mattered and I believe she was an extraordinary woman.  She suffered all her life and it was in silence.  Even though she had a severe illness Schizophrenia, she never complained about the handicaps, obstacles and symptoms she suffered with.  She never expressed the despair or sadness she felt, however, I could see it in her eyes.  Up until her last days in the hospital with Liver Cancer, it was only the last 4 or 5 days before she passed away, that she mouthed the word “yes”, letting us know that she was in pain.  My Mom never wanted to be a bother to anyone including me.  She was honest, good, brilliantly smart , strong and she had the character that can be compared  to the best of people I’ve ever known.  She was my friend.

I want this blog to be for memories, reflections and feelings about my Mom and for experiencing the loss of her and how it has impacted my life to have first found her and then to loose her again.  I want it to be a place for people to come to share their own stories of mental illness, love and loss. I will share the range of emotions and experiences I went through with my Mom as well as with her illness.  Sometimes, it was hard for me and sometimes I wanted to give up, but I kept hanging in there and grew to develop this extraordinary bond of love and caring for my Mom. To most people, my Mom was a throw away patient.  She didn’t matter to many people who came in contact with her, but she mattered to me and this is why I am beginning this blog. MY MOM MATTERS and your loved one matters, too.  Share and let go of sadness and shame.  Open your hearts to be free.

I Love You, Mom,

Loren