I just wrote an email to my brothers.  It goes something like this:

You don’t know what it is at first but suddenly your heart flutters and you feel like you couldn’t catch your breath.  Then your heart sinks.  It feels so heavy as if it’s pulling your shoulders the floor along with itself.  Anxiety attack?  Sounds like it.  But it isn’t.

But then tears well up in your eyes, and you realize it’s mom you’re missing.  What you feel is a hole left by her absence.

And then you cry.  Sometimes the whole sinking heart thing goes away.  Sometime it doesn’t.  Someday you wake up crying and you feel fine for another week. Someday you feel it through out the day as you march on with your day, just to come home and surrender to it once you turn off the lights.

Well, there I was. Lights out. Tears came.

Does your heart do that too?

A friend of mine who lost her mother to cancer a few years ago said that grief creeps up on you like that.  She said it was hard the first year.  You thought you were doing fine and then wham! it hits you out of nowhere.  So far I had about 3 of these in the past month.  A few pangs and one of the day I could barely get anything done at work.  I thought keeping busy would be better, but man it was hard trying not to burst into tears every 5 minutes.

I think the first call home to talk to Daddy was the trigger for that one.  It felt odd calling home and not having to ask about Mommy.  And today’s melancholy is probably also triggered by calling dad yesterday.  And the fact that, surprise!, Brandon’s dad is coming to town in the next few days.

So here I am. Awake. With my heart slowly sinking down this bottomless pit of whatever it is. Trying not to cry too much.