The process of leaving anything and everything has become a new reason for internal panic. I started crying today when we dropped the flowers from my mom's service off at the retirement home (the residents use them as an activity to make arrangements for the rooms, so we figured it was a better way to spread the flower love than keep our kitchen looking like a florist). I had to smell one last carnation really fast and more or less run out of the room so I didn't become a crying mess in front of all the people telling me what beautiful flowers they were.
Brandy and I sat for a long time in the dark sanctuary after the service was over and everyone had cleaned up and left. We just sat there staring at the three baskets of flowers we kept there for the Sunday service. It was only flowers. Flowers that we had only seen for 3 hours at the most. But they were my mom's flowers.
We tried to decide why it made us feel like we were going to have a panic attack if we left the church. It was only an empty church. But for those few hours it was my mom's church, and as soon as we left it would be everyone's church again. I'm pretty sure it's not normal to feel like you have to say goodbye to flowers or an empty church. But we did. For those few hours everyone felt a piece of what we felt, and so as hard as the service was to go through, in a strange way it was comforting. Now it was over. Life was normal. Except it wasn't. And it never will be.
Every time I have to say goodbye to something that was my mom's it's another aspect of saying goodbye to her. Leaving the church was saying goodbye. Dropping off the flowers was saying goodbye. Taking pictures off the boards from the service and putting them back in the frames was saying goodbye. And that is why every day it doesn't seem to get better. Because everyday there are new things I'm leaving, or seeing, or putting away, or reminded of. Everyday I have to keep saying goodbye.
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