Chapter 5: Reality Starts to Hit

August 30, 2025

Today was a very weird day.

This afternoon – Dad, my cousin, and the rest of my family took in a virtual reality exhibition which meant I had some time to myself to help dad start clearing out mom’s clothes from the house. That was harder than I thought it would be. Maybe it’s silly, but as I started to pack up individual outfits, I would be reminded of fun events that corresponded to my recollection of mom wearing them…especially her gowns. Mom was always so glamourous. It was a little hard to take when she decided to…as I called it…abandon all sense of vanity in her last few years. She stopped believing that she was beautiful, even though I always thought she was. I hope I did my best to make her feel beautiful. We had some pretty funny conversations when I would wash and blowout her hair on Mondays and Friday afternoons, when she would spend some time at my house after I picked her up from her day programs.

There are so many bags of clothes to take back to my place…so I can figure out what to do with them. Fortunately, I think this is only going to be a single car trip. I think the lack of sleep is starting to catch up with me, I am so tired. The jewelry will wait until my sister is here so we can go through everything together.

I am grateful for all of the food donations that people have brought to dad. It’s made for some pretty tasty snacking whenever I’m at his place.

His place. I guess that’s what this is now. No longer mom and dad’s. Just dad’s. Sigh.

I made sure to do a pretty thorough cleaning up of the walk-in closet and the floors in the bedroom. Where EMS worked on her that morning. I still remember the small blood stain by the closet door that I saw after they transported mom from the house into the ambulance. I made sure to clean that up before we left to go to the hospital. There was no way I wanted dad to see that when he got back to the house later that day. Why was there blood? They were doing CPR – did they hurt mom? I found a few syringe caps under the bed and made to get rid of those too. The form we signed at the hospital to formally request the autopsy outlined all of the steps that had been taken to try and revive mom’s heart. I’m glad for the transparency, but wish I could unsee some of the details. I didn’t like the doctor writing about mom in the past tense.

Speaking of, I have to remember to call the hospital on Monday to make sure we know where in the queue mom is for her autopsy. I really hope we have her remains back in time. There’s no way we can say goodbye to mom without a full Catholic Funeral Mass. And if that doesn’t happen, she is going to haunt me. Ha.

Once the family got back from the exhibition, we went to Mass together at mom’s parish…and I think, soon to be our family’s parish. We have been going there quite a bit over the past year anyway, so might as well make it official. Dad had asked me to put in an intention for mom today – for decades, she was part of St. Matthew’s Music Ministry and for much of that time, leading song for the Saturday 5pm Mass was strictly “hers.” Before I could call, though, the parish secretary actually contacted me to let me know that about 30 intentions had already been put in, including today. That’s sweet. It’s nice to know how much support there is from the church community.

There are two specific points in the service where the priest will say the name of the deceased person for whom the Mass is being offered. It felt a little weird to hear mom’s name there, but I don’t know, I guess I’m just too physically exhausted to think about what that means. After the service, someone I didn’t recognize came to offer condolences to us, but she was crying so much, none of us knew what to do. I guess it’s good preparation for next Friday. We’ll probably need to console some of the guests. I wonder if I’ll need to put effort into putting (and keeping!) my game face on or if I’ll just naturally go into “the zone.” I suppose we’ll find out soon enough.

After Mass, we all went for dinner. The photos look wrong – mom should be in them.

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