Thursday 28th January - A tourist in Limbo-Land

I feel as though I am in some kind of alternate universe. I keep going from one kind of limbo-land to another.

After my mother died on Saturday, and we had got over the initial reactions, there was nothing we could do until Monday. We entered a strange kind of "normal life" - going out for meals together, chatting. Other people were also at the pub, walking around, doing whatever, in their "normal lives". I wonder if any of them were like us, in a limbo-land?

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday were busy and empty by turns; collecting documents, making and going to appointments to register a death, make funeral arrangements, collecting her things from the Nursing Home... Moments of concentration and activity interspersed with... this and that.

I started teaching; a piano lesson on Monday, one of my classes  on Tuesday, more instrumental lessons yesterday and today.

And the emails! Oh, the emails! and the phone calls! oh, the phone calls! About half were all about family arrangements. The other half are work-related - dealing with the fall-out from cancelling lessons last week and this week, and confirming which lessons I will be teaching this week.

I'm in another limbo-land until Saturday, when we meet to decide the form the funeral service will take - what music, which readings and so on.

Then, I suppose, another week in a different limbo-land, when I go about normal life until the day of the funeral?

Part of the weird, dis-connected feeling I have must be due to the weird, dis-connected way I feel about my mother's death. When she had the major stroke, that was one "end-of-life-as-I-know-it" event. Everything changed, for all of the family in different ways. Then, when she became ill in November, everything changed again. Once she moved to the Nursing Home, it was always just a matter of time - days? weeks? months? sooner? later? who could tell? Her condition meant that aspiration pneumonia was always there in the background.

So. She was lively and "alive" all through the Christmas period, and then, quite suddenly, became ill, and sleepy, and drowsy, and asleep, and - gone., giving us all a few days to reconcile ourselves to the situation.

Here's a good poem: we may or may not use it at the funeral, but that doesn't matter. This kind of sums up how Friday and Saturday went.