If You're Going to San Francisco

I did it. I'm here. The place where my Mom was born and raised, away from the crowded black city grime, smelly subways and the frantic, frenzied paces of New York City. There are layers upon layers upon layers of grief inside of myself that I feel need to be gradually picked away and loosened until they finally can dissolve, but nonetheless, I have taken the leap and moved here because it just FEELS right.

It's the first time in my life that I have made a choice like this, such a big (and costly) move, purely on my gut. If it wasn't for my mom's death, I wouldn't have been RIPPED away from New York, back to Texas. And, if I wouldn't have been RIPPED away from New York and had to witness my beautiful Mom take her last breath, I would have NEVER thought about moving out here to San Francisco. Something is nudging me and I would like to think that it might be her.

Adventures to follow... Adventures to those places that none of us like to go. Adventures inside of my head. Facing the aftermath, sweeping up the dust that has kind of settled, and all of the good and bad stuff that comes when death touches someone's life.

I hate to tell you this, but I'm headed out of here, this place, this earth, this whatever you want to call it, someday, who knows, maybe tomorrow. It's inevitable.

And, my friend, my dear, dear friend, you are too.

Now, the question is, how shall we spend our time?

Changes. Big Changes.

My mom is dead. There is no other way to put it, except for, my mom is really dead. I just got back to New York last week after being in Texas since November and I feel so empty, so devoid of emotion, like something is missing in my life. Like, say, my mom. I can't even put into words how much I've witnessed over the past 7 months. I've been on a bad, bad roller coaster ride.

My brother and I had to make the decision to take my mom off of life support in February after she was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer and had a severe allergic reaction to her first round of chemotherapy. I really can't make this shit up. Before all of this, I honestly thought I had real life drama to write about, "important" life changing decisions, like which date to go on or which shoes to wear on this superficial little blog. Now, I have real shit to write about, like how my dad crapped his pants the other day because my brother and I moved him here to NY because he had a stroke in 2005 and he can't take care of himself and he's staying in my brother's spare room and the other day he wandered out of the apartment and we called 911 and the whole NYC fucking police force had some special code out for him and we thought we lost our dad too and they found him 12 blocks away, 5 hours later... carrying a box of my mom's christmas ornaments that we had shipped here to keep some sort of memory alive of her from the house that my parents lived in for over forty years.

I don't know how much more I can take.

I'm moving to San Francisco in a couple weeks.