Visiting Hours

Dear Mommy,
         I am coming to visit you today! I know I have not been good about coming to the cemetery.  You see, it is so very hard.  I am sitting her crying just thinking about coming to visit.  There is something so innately wrong with you being in the ground and not here with me.  I love you so and miss you like crazy.  It seems like forever since I have seen you, since you have held me in your arms, and since you last kissed my hand. In reality it has only been sixteen and a half months since you passed away.  We moved to Kentucky six months after you passed, and then I broke my leg three months after that.  I couldn't walk on both feet for almost four months, and living in a different state with no babysitters, and one car made all the difference.  Maybe I needed to insulate myself, and become stronger before I came to visit you again.  Maybe I needed to let time pass.  Maybe I needed some distance. Just like the pictures of you that I finally hung in my hallway, I am ready to come to your earthly resting place and visit again.

Why do I feel so very guilty for only having been to visit you there a handful of times? I know you are in heaven, and I shouldn't feel guilty, but yet I do.  I have thought about it a lot.  I know I should visit more often, and I will now that I am ready.  It just seems wrong to me somehow to visit a cemetery to see you, rather than driving to your house. To look at a cold piece of metal with your name on it. To talk to the air, and hoping you hear me in heaven! To bend down and touch your gravestone, instead of rubbing your warm, soft skin.  To not have you still in this life, watching your beloved granddaughter grown up with me.  You should still be here with me mom.  You went too soon! When the band aid is off, some days the pain is still so hard.  The missing, the black hole in my chest.  You are still so much more to me than a cold hard piece of metal in the ground that I come to pay my 'respects' to during visiting hours.  But you taught me well, to visit and pay respects to your dead. So I will be dropping in today. 'Cause you are my dead.  Even though you went too young, you are mine! And today I feel drawn, compelled to visit you.

I wish you were here to go with me to register my daughter for kindergarten, to see my new house, to talk to everyday on the phone, or to even visit you in the hospital.  I would give anything just to visit you in the hospital, and sit quietly and watch you sleep one more time.   I wish I could talk to you about all the crazy and crappy that has been going on in my life lately.  And the good, there is so much good mommy.  Daddy and I have become close like you and I were.  We have been there for each other, and pulled each other through the last sixteen and a half months.  I know you know all this, because you watching, but sometimes I have to have a good cry and get it all out.  Today was one of those days.  Daddy called and asked if I wanted to go to the cemetery with him, and I said yes!  I cannot wait to come visit! I am ready and I am able.

So in the middle of my crying jag, the four and a half year old comes over, and I am bawling.  I told her I was missing Granny.  So she asks me if I want her to sing a song to cheer me up! I said yes! You see that is our thing, we sing each other silly songs to cheer each other up! It went like this;

Cheer up mommy, I love you, I know you miss your mommy, but I am still here, I haven't died, I love you so so much, I love you mommy....etc

And then there was dancing on bubble wrap in the living room! My four year old definitely has a handle on keeping it real! I know you were laughing from heaven! You loved dancing, so I know you were dancing right along with us! So I will be coming to visit today. And to close, I will leave you with one of my all time favorite quotes from Steel Magnolias, the movie;
"Laughter through tears is my favorite emotion!"

Love always
              -Your loving Daughter