Catch and Release

I picked up my mama's ashes from the funeral home today.  I have her ground up bones on my dining room table.  Weird.  My sweet and beautiful mama.

I am an orphan now.  My daddy is gone 34 yeas and my mama is gone 6 days.  I can hardly believe it's been 6 days.  Where did all those days go?  

I feel forsaken. My solar plexus hurts.  I'm sad.  

Looking at the tender underbelly of my feelings today I identify as one deserted, abandoned, left by the wayside.  But it's not all about my mama.  I'm thinking about the book,  Same Kind of Different As Me and the the part about how white people fish using the "catch-and-release" method. Denver can't believe that someone would actually catch a fish and then throw back perfectly good food.  He then uses this fishing metaphor to explain his fear of what Ron might do to him.  He's afraid that Ron will catch his friendship for the sport of it and then let him go.

I actually didn't care all that much for this book, but that part hit me straight in the gut.  It made me cry.  When I read it, part of me knew that LWINML was going to do that to me.  He did.   And it has knocked the air out of me (and he's the one that loaned me the book!)   It's true that we carry on a sweet friendship.  The love is still there.  But the bottom line is that I feel caught and released.

I have so much to be grateful for that I've been managing the loss of a lover fairly well.  I wasn't  truly devastated for long.  There has been this crack in my heart that I've been nurturing, anointing with the healing balm of so much other goodness and beauty in my life.  But now with my mama's death, that crack has broken open into a gapping wound and there is so much emptiness to bear.