Single Mom | Single Mom Blog | Ms. Single Mama » death

The other side

mssinglemama — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 16:26:20 +0000

I spotted my first fallen leaves in the grass of the baseball diamond near my post office last Thursday.

The bag over my shoulder was bursting with little brown packages. Each containing a silver or bronze new leaf necklace destined for one of you. I make this walk to the post office, with Murphy in tow and sometimes Mr. Benjamin, at least a few times a week. And still, two months after quitting the day job, these post office trips are my favorite part about my new job.

The walk itself is the last step before the necklaces will be around your necks. I’ve sent packages all over the world now. One even went to Saskatchewan. Another to Argentina and yet another to Great Britian. On these walks it all comes full circle. I feel like a bearer of hope, sending little packages of it one by one to each of you who so generously chose to support my little blogging career by buying one.

When I saw the leaves I stopped for a second to digest the sight of them. August, I thought, it’s still August but I guess Fall is almost here now. I gave Murphy a little whistle and we kept walking. Now about thirty feet from the busy street I had to cross to reach the post office and with the building before me, I started thinking about her.

The first time she processed a pile of my packages, stamping them all and tucking them away under her counter she asked me what was inside.

“Necklaces,” I answered.

“Well, you’re not allowed to send jewelry to Canada,” her words were cold as her hands rested on one of my brown envelopes destined for a single mom in Ontario.

“Why is that?”

“I don’t know why,” she said. Still as cold as ice.

“What happens if I send it and they catch it? Do they just send it back?”

“Yes.” She looked annoyed now and ran her hands through her silver gray hair. It was long, falling past her shoulders. I decided she either hated me, hated being here, hated life or hated her job and then I made another decision – to send the necklaces anyway. It sounded like a stupid law anyway.

“I’ll take my chances.” We proceeded as if she didn’t know anything about the contents of my little envelopes. I paid and I left.

The next time I went in with some packages for Canada I saw her behind the counter and I cringed. Damn it. She asked me again about what was inside and I answered truthfully. She shook her head disapprovingly and we ran through the drill. I paid and I left. Even when I brought Benjamin she was still cold. One time another postal worker tipped me off, telling me to call them accessories.

The last time I had seen her, before I saw the leaves, maybe a few days beforehand she spied my brown envelopes marked with the “CAN” and said, “and what’s in them?”

“Accessories,” I answered.

“And we’ve been over the accessory thing before, right?” She asked.

“Yes,” I said politely.

I looked behind my shoulder to take a quick look at Murphy who was tied up outside and obediently waiting for me.

“What kind of dog is he?” She asked. For the first time ever I noticed a sparkle in her eyes.

“A Wheaton Terrier.”

“Oh, how cute!” She was completely lit up now and then slipped me a stack of little green customs forms. “Here just fill these customs forms out about the accessories and next time bring him in so he can have some treats.”

“You have treats?”

“Yes, we always have some back here.” She tapped her counter and was still starring through the window, unable, it seemed to take her eyes off of my dog. I paid, thanked her and then left.

I remember calling John Bear to tell him that “the mean postal lady finally smiled. It was a minor miracle.”

In spite of her wishes for me to bring Murphy in I left him tied up outside. He jumps and I saw a bit of a line in the post office, shoulders neatly stacked in a long row of bodies, hands clutching packages and envelopes. When I took my place behind them I noticed she wasn’t there. And then I piece of paper taped to the edge of her counter, the type blown up by a copy machine. It wasn’t until a few moments before I went up to meet the man standing in her place that I realized the paper was an obituary.

“Is this for the woman with the long gray hair, she used to be right here?” I asked the obvious question, the words trailing out of my mouth when I saw the man’s eyes were clearly stressed. He nodded his head as I quickly scanned the obituary.

53…Suddenly at her home.

“A heart attack?” I asked him. And she was only 53? She had looked much older.

“Yeah, a heart attack, it’s been rough.”

“I’m so sorry.” But I was mostly sorry I hadn’t made her smile sooner, I should have given her a necklace.

On the day she died Benjamin and I were on Fiesta Movement Mission 4.

Every agent picked a charity, I chose to volunteer at a senior center because I knew, without a doubt, Benjamin would brighten their days just by being there. And he did. Check the video out.

We only spent a few hours with the seniors but in that time I learned that each and every one of them, many over 80 and even some over 90, were happy – optimistic, relaxed and enjoying their moments.

I’m not saying every grumpy person out there is going to die of a heart attack but maybe making some time to just be happy, maybe trading a few material things (like that fancy car or purse) and choosing to work less hours would actually lengthen your life. There’s nothing wrong with spending a lot less because you’ll start living a lot better.

It’s not something you can do tomorrow, I understand that – it took me two years to get to the point where I could work from home – but it can happen. Maybe someday I’ll be able to tell you how to do it … need more of that thing called time, keeps slipping away, through my fingers almost. One thing I can tell you… only buy what you need. Save every penny and don’t live beyond your means.

For inspiration on how to make some extra money at home and in how you can channel your creativity browse Etsy.com, most of the items for sale here are made by work at home moms. And also visit SwapMamas.com where moms are saving big money by trading stuff they don’t need or use anymore. Mommy Pie started that site a few months back when she got laid off from her job.

Big things, mamas. Big things. Dream big, okay? And for God’s sake – smile, would ya? Oh and don’t die on me. I don’t like that when people just disappear. Freaks me out.

Smiles

mssinglemama — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 03:47:59 +0000

The radio booth smelled like old men and dusty records but I liked it anyway.

When Glenn Miller came on I would start dancing by myself. Dinner in the diner, nothing could be finer. How can you not dance to Chattanooga Choo Choo?

My Dad had introduced me to The Glenn Miller Band years earlier.

We were cleaning the living room when he popped in his Glenn Miller CD and then told me to drop the broom and “dance with me!” Dancing with him for those few songs, him leading me, trying to teach his high-strung teenage daughter to loosen up is one of those memories I will always keep, the kind no one can take away.

He was always making those kinds of memories for me – teaching me how to live life, to have fun, to enjoy the little things.

Dancing alone in the radio booth also kept me awake.

I was working the 4:00 AM Saturday morning shift, it was my first radio job and a chance to hopefully land a shift in the daylight hours. But for now I was stuck in the darkness – alone and nervous. Whenever I’d turn the microphone on I’d get chills, up my arms, down my neck and sometimes in my throat. The nerves were so intense I would occasionally bumble my words or, even worse, freeze up entirely.

Between newscasts and nerve sessions I would imagine who had sat in the seat before me, another girl perhaps or maybe a young man who was now old.

They had all warmed the same black bar stool chair with the awkward swiveling motion, they had all pressed their lips up to the microphone and they had all seen that light flick to red -”On Air” – before letting the words fly from their mouth.

If they could do it. I can do it.

I said the same thing when I learned how to drive and then when I learned how to drive a stick four years later.

I had bought the car for myself with a loan co-signed by my father. He had been diagnosed with cancer five months earlier and would be gone in one month.

“I can’t figure it out,” I told him on day, on the brink of tears.

I was so impatient, so headstrong and so determined to learn the stick shift but I kept stalling. My father was standing with me in the kitchen, resting his arm onto the counter for support. He was so light now, so skinny. He had aged 30 years it seemed in just weeks.

“Let’s go,” he said, “I’ll teach you.”

“But Dad, what if…” I didn’t want to say it out loud, so I thought it – what if you puke. He had been so sick. That’s the thing about cancer – it just gets worse as it eats you alive and in my dad’s case it was eating just about ever organ he had.

“Just go, c’mon,” his voice was stern.

So we went.

Out to the car.

He squeezed his long legs, the legs of a man who towered above most, into the back seat of my two-door Nissan Sentra.

“I don’t want you to remember me this way,” he told me between lurches.

“I won’t, Dad, I promise.”

The car jolted forward, or was it backward? Over and over.

I just couldn’t keep the damn clutch from going out. Dad was trying his best to explain, to smile but in the end we had to lurch back home so he could get out of that seat and into the bathroom.

I wouldn’t learn stick that day. It would come to me weeks later but my Dad wasn’t there. By that point he was bound to a wheel chair, unable to leave the house and definitely unable to ride in my back seat.

When you know someone is going to die, when you know they won’t be around for much longer you try to think of things to say, things you may hear in a movie or something but the words don’t come as easily as you think.

“I had a good life,” he would say, “I did. I had a beautiful wife, six beautiful children and I loved my job. At least I had everything I ever wanted.”

But he was pissed.

You could see it in his eyes. He was a physician himself and he knew his cancer was the worst kind of cancer. He knew there was no hope, he knew he was going to die and he was pissed that he had to leave us.

That he couldn’t see his children grow up or live out his life with his wife.

He wanted to stay.

When I would hear him telling my mother that the chemo would be a “waste of time” I would try to say things I thought would motivate him to will himself better.

“Dad, please, don’t you want to see me get married some day? Don’t you want to walk me down the aisle?”

I forgive myself now for saying that only because I was a kid, but it still haunts me.

Of course he wanted that, he wanted that more than anything. Words can’t turn some things around. Some things – like adenocarcinoma and three brain tumors – are unstoppable.

—-

I flicked on the microphone for the 6:00 a.m. Saturday morning newscast. But this time was different. There would be no errant chills in my throat because when I looked up, he was there.

My father had taken a detour on the way home from his overnight shift at the Emergency Room to watch me give a live newscast. He had volunteered to come, wanting to see his “little girl on the radio.”

I glanced up between stories and I could see his face through the small tiny glass window of the thick padded door – he was smiling, from ear to ear.

Kind of like he is in this picture.

—-

“Did you make someone smile today, Alaina?”

He asked me this often during my childhood.

“I think so,” I’d say.

“Did you know that when you make someone smile, just once, they’ll be a little bit happier and then they’ll make someone else smile. So for every person you make smile you could make dozens or even hundreds of other people smile.”

I think that was his secret, smiling and making other people smile.

—–
When that awesome story appeared in the Columbus Dispatch this Sunday a lot of you read it, including an old college friend who promptly sent me some photos he’d stumbled upon recently, “profile photos of a great Doctor, and a great man,” he wrote in the e-mail, “one who saved my life a few years earlier when I had a severe allergic reaction to penicillin. I wanted you to have them, as well as the knowledge of how much he garnered my respect and adoration.”

It would have been my father’s 61st birthday this week.

And today, he would want each and every one of you to make someone else smile.

Bring out the fears!

mssinglemama — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 02:26:56 +0000

Just a little over 24 hours left to bring out your fears to win a $200 flat iron!

I don’t know how I’m going to pick a winner. If you haven’t read the entries, get busy. Some will make you cry, others will make you laugh. All in all, I’d say it’s been a good week for bringing out the fears.

And because we’re all clearly afraid of death I had to post this video, Monty Python and the Holy Grail – quite possibly one of the greatest movies of all time.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=grbSQ6O6kbs

Contest deadline is Friday at midnight (PST). Enter here.

Why men die before women…

mssinglemama — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 14:13:14 +0000

A new study suggests men die before women because they are natural polygamists. Meaning, that during cave man days, polygamy was the norm – not monogamy. All of the competition for women and lots and lots of sex wore those poor guys out and they still die earlier because of it.

Read the article here.

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Why? Because this single mom outgrew the old space – so get your but over here to see the latest from Ms. Single Mama!