Having trouble finding meaning lately, meaning in life.  I know that's probably at bit heady but it's where I'm at.  Maybe it's the significant losses lately.  First my mom in April, and then the sudden death of my 15 month old nephew in June. Or maybe cause I'm turning 49 in a few days. Or maybe it's cause L is away, out of the country, for 3 weeks. I just don't know.  Maybe it's all of the above, or maybe it's not.  Crap.

Everything feels so forced lately. although I guess I should be glad that atleast I still have the ability to make myself do things.  A former T once said to me "Sometimes you gotta fake it before you make it".  I'm not sure I really believe that (didn't really click with her) but I wonder if it's true right now for me.  I've been able to force myself back to running, although technically it may be more of a 'fast walk' than a 'run' right now, but I'm getting there. And I think the running has been helping my sleep.  I had been taking Ativan every night for a while now, but I've only taken it once this past week, and then was to get me through some anxiety about L leaving.

I've also been very mindful of being sure I spend time with my daughter and partner.  That too has been sort of forced, and sometimes I still cave in to 'going for a nap', but I've still been planning 'adventures' for us.  There's so much to do outside where we live now so I'm pushing us to go floating along a local river, driving up Mount Washington, stopping and climbing the rocks by a waterfall, kayaking, ziplining...etc.  I think it's helped my mood, but I wish it wasn't so hard.

I've even been playing the game of 'being thankful for all I have', but it still doesn't feel authentic to me.  I know I really do have so much to be grateful for, and I am, but it's still not enough to lift me from this funk, if in fact if really is a funk.

Once again it's been a long time since I've written.  I've wanted to, but I guess I've been at a loss for words, or maybe just afraid to write them down.  It's funny that I go into modes in which I don't do things that I know will make me feel better, like writing or exercising.  Hmmm, I wonder why that is.

Anywho, it's really been a horrendous, even unimaginable few months.

First my mom died at the end of April.  Although I did love my mom I was not particularly close to her, I guess I never was.  She had been sick for a while with Parkinson's disease, and of course other sordid ailments that go along with that disease and getting old.

 About a year ago we had to make the decision to put her into a nursing home.  I have 6 brothers and sisters and you can imagine that we all had different opinions about that.  For all the crap that families go thru, and we have had our share, I have to say that my brothers and sisters are all pretty caring people, but that doesn't always stop the ugliness, and towards the end of my mother's life it did get pretty ugly.

Most of the difficulty, atleast for me was making end-of-life decisions.  When or even if to call in hospice? Was she getting the best care at the nursing home? She developed a huge sore on her side, so big that you could see inside her, probably about the size of 3 golf balls. And even though I'm the second to youngest in my family, I was the healthcare proxy for both my mom and my dad.  As I stop and think about that right now I realize what a strange position I was in.

I was definitely not the closest to my mom, we had always had a sort of love-hate relationship.  One of my brothers and one of my sisters were very close, seeing her almost every day, and I believe they resented that I was the 'decision maker'.  Not that any decision was ever made in a vacuum, and trust me, we must have exchanged hundreds of text messages and emails in an effort to communicate as best we could to everyone.

But in the end I had the final say.  My mother was 85, she was not well and was only getting worse.  I made the call to bring in hospice, remove IV's that were injecting meds in her that were making her better, and worse all at the same time.  I directed them to give her 'care and comfort'. My mother was a very religious (Catholic) woman, but for all her strongly held beliefs I knew she was scared to die.

This is the first time I've written about my mother's death.  There's so much more to write, so much more to look at, and hopefully I'll come back to it. However it's not my mother's death that has prompted this entry, it is my nephews.

Isaac was 15 months old, he died just over 3 weeks ago.  It's not supposed to happen like this.  It's still so hard to wrap my head around it.

Isaac is actually my great-nephew, he was the son of my niece.

There's so much more to say......