In remembrance of my mother.

Some might see the space and wonder,
Where is the love?
I see the space and know its there,
Because of the love.

There are things in life we cannot have,
No matter how much we long for them.
In my case, it was you.
It was always you.

There's no strangeness of feeling like being a motherless child.
Where is it that I belong? Who will stand for me today?
A fall, a bruise, a scrape, a tear.  Once in a blue moon -
A broken heart too.

You were somewhere not where I could see.
But that never stopped the longing, nor promises unkept.
Heart's desires can't be contained so easily.
When I sleep I dream. Where are you?

Now I know. You are in that heavenly ethereal place
of love, and peace, and acceptance, and learning.
No more debauchery for you. Nothing to alter your
consciousness but the work your soul must do.

Were you ready to take that leap?

I was not. Could you feel the quickness of my heart?

There's a small unprotected space in me that knows now
that despite the mental toughness, it was you that I wanted all along.

Not necessarily the straight A's or perfect hair or perfect curves
Or eye lined baby blues to bat away a mans attention.
I didn't need anything to complete me but you.
There was always something missing, and I've been chasing it
for thirty eight years.

Turns out it was just you.
You I tried so hard to run from when you finally came around.
What I wanted was gone. Could not be had.

But then again could we?
What if you had actually tried?
Could you have given up all you thought you had
for a minutes more time with me?
Could you have stopped and wondered just a bit more often,
"What is she doing today?"

Did you care?

In your way I know that you cared as much as you could.
And I have accepted my fate as the best laid plans for my life.
There were others who gave me rivers of love.  Rivers.

I didn't know that I was worth any of it though, until you were gone.
There was some destiny in your leaving the first time,
and some magic in your leaving the last time.
When you crossed over to that land-of-endless-mild-and-honey-everything-
is-better-here-place, something happened to me too.

I grew up hard and fast and strong with my teeth gritted and eyes dry
because  you left me.
Now that you're gone again I realize that I'm enough.
Just as I am.
You took that black cloud of self doubt with you.
I can only hope you tore it up and threw it away.
We don't need it anymore.
Let there be some light now.
Light - in knowing everything happens for a reason.
Even the things we believe will wear us to bits
and tear us to shreds.

I am here today - my own woman - no longer in the shadow of your leaving.
No more fear of being  unloved.

I am stronger because you left.  No more empty holes.
I forgive you your lack of presence and love.
I know we will meet again.  I will show you the strength of my heart.

Perhaps there will be a day up there when you get bored
doing whatever it is that souls do in the afterlife.

I'll be here.  When I sleep, I dream.
Come for a visit then, and I'll see you in my dreams.

New Kids on the Block 6/20/13

VIP on a 5* ticket. Met the guys again (for the 3rd time) and had a freaking BLAST at the concert.  I snapped nearly a thousand pics between Boyz II Men, 98 degrees, and NKOTB. We had 3rd row seats and were so incredibly close to the guys I barely had to use my zoom lens.  The VIP experience left much to be desired, but the pic with the guys, even though it goes by so fast, and the 3rd row seat more than makes up for the lack of a gift bag (this year only a bag and a mini-speaker - the cholo socks were missing).  I'd love to go VIP on a cruise next!  Got dollar signs bouncing around in my head!  :)

Talking about the problem.

Gina Kyle Jackson

After only 4 hours of sleep I spent A LONG time on the phone with the funeral home in Jacksonville, then the Social Security office, and then with my uncle Randy who is helping me manage things.  Turns out I will be able to get my mothers "cremains" and will not be forced to pay $920 for them after all.  Social Security didn't know she was dead so I had to "report" this to them, and there's no "death benefit" unless I'm a minor or a disabled adult. I still don't have a death certificate, and the manner and cause of death are still officially pending, even though I know exactly what happened. One look at the medication list is all it takes. Not to mention my conversation with the cop who worked her death scene.  I actually felt sorry for her too.  She is a 23 year veteran on the Jacksonville police force and said she goes from overdose case to overdose case all the time but my mother's situation made her choke back tears all day that day.  She said she went home and wrote her own mother a letter that very day.

This whole thing, in its entirety, is one very sad story. All I know to do is what I tell our patients families to do when they're going through a death...take it one hour, one day, one week at a time until you begin to feel some peace.  And let the tears come when they will because that's healing too.

If there is anyone in your life that you love who has a problem with prescription pills, no matter how distant you may be at the moment, please encourage them to seek help, or at the very least tell them you love them no matter what.  In my mother's case it was a mental health issue & a physical addiction she battled for more than 30 years.  After she left my side as an 18 month old, that life took her over.  She was beautiful and very intelligent and could have been anything she wanted to be. She could sew like nobody's business, she loved British literature, and she was a neat freak wherever she went.  I loved her as much as I could considering the circumstances, and I know she loved me as much as she could muster.  I know she's in a better place now, but I regret she couldn't see how good this place could have been for her and for everyone else who loved her in spite of her.

Complicated grief is...well, complicated. Tears, anger, frustration, resentment, sadness and all through a sprinkling of, "Is this really happening to me right now in my life?"

I want to start a dialogue about this, to honor my mother's struggle and my lifelong loss of her, and for the millions who need an outlet or who may be struggling with the same addiction (and therefore are systematically losing everything they hold dear in this life).

Use the comments section to discuss.  I'll be checking in and writing more frequently because now the ever elusive story seems to be making itself known.

Sitting with the sad.

I'm sitting down to write just now because I'm not sure what else to do with these hours awake and alone so late at night.  I received a call from the funeral home today in Jacksonville about my mother.  Her body is still at the Medical Examiner's office.  Because I am extremely unsure about this life insurance policy that she purchased last year I cannot give her the funeral that would have been my first choice: that I think all people should have when they die.  Just a clean, respectful end to things.  My father, God love him, despite all the craziness and hurt she caused him - basically forcing him to raise me on his own and without contributing one dime to that process - actually offered to allow me to bury her in his section of grave plots right in our hometown.  So if I had an extra $12K lying around I'd do just that, but I don't.  Instead, I referred her to the indigent burial program the city of Jacksonville has for people of limited means.  Apparently though that won't work either because my very lower middle class salary at the hospital disqualifies her.  What this means is I have to pony up the $920 or "abandon the body" and allow Jacksonville to cremate her and spread the ashes, after a whole year passes, in their memory gardens after they ring a bell and say her name.

Is a box of ashes worth $920?

Right now, I'm in total self-preservation mode and I think no.  I think this woman did not raise me and she let me down over and over and over again in my life.  I can remember days where I sat and waited for the phone to ring because she said she would call.  Sometimes it would ring, but mostly it wouldn't.  I remember the wretched smell of cigarette smoke every time I got near her, usually on the one visit a year that started around age 8, but wasn't every year.  I wanted her to love me, to see me, to hold me in some important spot in her life and she just couldn't.

The drugs got her through it.

Two years ago I had her in my home for two entire weeks at Christmas.  She nearly drove me bananas with the television being on ALL THE TIME. Watching her and Hal fight over the remote was kind of funny, but all in all, I was very uncomfortable with her here even though on some kind of level in my head I knew I needed to do it.  Even when Christmas morning arrived she was too sleepy to watch Sarah open her presents.  But at one point during her visit I asked her why she did the drugs - and she flat out admitted that it was because she was trying her best to forget me.

I believe her.  Because I very much felt forgotten.  I very much felt different from all the other kids at school because I had no mother, because my mother had (gasp) left me - like bad penny.  She'd just disappeared.

Last night I found in one of her albums a picture of me taken the day after I was born.  Oh the serious look on my newborn face.  It's like my soul knew I was in for a wild, complicated, sad to the bones kind of roller coaster ride and my face reflected that from day one.  Here we go.  Next to that was  picture of a very young Gina holding a baby.  My heart leapt at the thought that it might actually be the first photo I'd ever seen of her holding me as a baby.  But then I realized the baby wasn't me.  And my Dad looked at it today and said "nope it's not you."  There's not one single picture of her holding me as an infant.  Of her owning me as her child, her baby, her responsibility.  It was simply never meant to be that way.

The summer I was fourteen I moved down to Jacksonville to LIVE with her.  Three weeks into my visit, she'd raided my savings account and then overdosed on drugs.  She couldn't handle being my mother. There was just no way in hell she could actually contribute to my life in any meaningful way beyond giving birth to me.  I remember vividly sitting in her hospital room and watching the EKG machine flatline a couple of times.  Obviously she survived, and did some time in a mental facility. Then a few weeks later when the rest of my family figured out what happened, one of my aunts took me on the long ride back to Georgia -- with all my stuff -- and with a very empty feeling inside. 

In my mid twenties I spent $99 on a plane ticket to have her come visit.  She stayed with me for all of two days, and was mostly drugged during that time too.  She was too out of it to even meet my friends.  After the second day she had me take her out to the country so she could spend time with her cousins and that's where she stayed for the rest of her time in Georgia.  It's like she broke my heart all over again and took advantage of my kindness.  Every single time I let her in, I got squashed like a bug.  There was my heart.

The night of her birthday this year I got home around 7 and fully intended to call her but my dad called first.  She beeped in and left a message and I called her back immediately.  Our conversations in my adult life were 85% about her.  Once again she dominated the talking and was going on and on about this PBS program she was watching.  She wanted the companion book for her birthday.  I agreed to get it for her.  After about a half hour of her talking I told her I had to get Sarah taken care of and in bed and that I'd call her back after I did.  Sure enough, 2 hours later when Sarah was asleep I felt that pulse in my chest - call her it said.  But I did not want to.  I mean, I really didn't.  I don't necessarily know why I didn't, and I feel guilty for it now, but I didn't want to talk to her any more that night.  But again I felt that tug at my heart and I called her just long enough to let it ring once before I hit "end" and hung up.  Thankfully, she called me back.  And we did talk, for almost another hour.  I love you was the last thing I said to her.  From what I can tell now, she was dead a mere 48 hours later.  That damn book she wanted was in my barnes and noble shopping cart on my phone.  I'd planned to call her back to ask what other book I could add to it so we'd get free shipping.  And there it sits.  I'll delete it out of the cart at some point.

Step by step I'm dismantling her earthly existence.  We packed up her apartment, and we gave lots of stuff away.  Her cat lies here under my feet, happily purring, free of cigarette smoke for the rest of his days.  One by one I'll cancel her credit accounts.  One by one I'll call her doctors and let them know.  I've already started it because this is what she left me with.  A great big mess.  One by one, erase, erase, erase.  Clear up, take away, write off, and delete all the earthly accounting of the mother who could never really be. 

But then there's this furniture here in my house, and the not-so-faint smell of cigarettes that go with it, now a constant reminder that she's gone but yet here still.  Kind of like when I was a child.  Always a part of me but never really there.  Something I wanted but couldn't ever have.

What do I do with all of this?  For a while I think I need to sit with the final stage of my grief.  Final because all my life I've grieved her in some way or another.  Even as she lived I never really had her.  Now that she's gone I'm the only one who's here to take all the things she left behind.

For now I'll sit with the sad.  Then hopefully I can take the sad and turn it into something useful for myself, and for others.  It's the only way I can right her wrongs to me.  Live my life and make it mean something to me and to others even if it didn't mean enough to her.

There are no opiates in heaven mom.

My mother was found dead on Monday morning.  She'd probably been sitting in the floor there like that for up to 3 days before her caretaker found her.  Even though we don't have the autopsy report back yet, I feel in my heart that it was a prescription drug overdose.  Earlier this year CNN did a piece on the epidemic of narcotic and benzo abuse and cited it to be the number one cause of accidental death in this country this year.  I always hated the fact that my mother used narcotics so much and felt that those pills played a large part in her continued absence in my life.  My wheels are turning now about perhaps creating a non-profit organization to educate the public about prescription drug abuse.  Not necessarily in "honor" of my mother, but because of this: I didn't just lose my mother on Monday, I lost her every single day that she was too high to have a normal life, normal feelings, and a normal conversation with me on the phone. 

Get this album now.

NKOTB's new album 10 is out.  You owe it to yourself to buy it now.  Or you can come over to my house and we'll listen to it together.  Let your ears feel the joy! Get it on iTunes or buy at Target!  I love these guys for more reasons than one.  This music just makes me happy, and definitely makes me burn more calories on my exercise bike! 

10 Happy things, in no particular order.

1. My life is now on a bit of a different track, and as scary as that is, I hope this slightly altered path will be full of new love and challenges, while still tipping my hat with respect to where I've been so far.
2. New friends. New things that interest me. New thoughts about old things in my world.
3. Dude, the New Kids on the Block just released a new CD, and its very awesome!
4. I have a 5 star VIP ticket to see them in concert in June! Squeeeee!
5. Since I will be meeting the guys in person, this provides much needed inspiration to lose this nagging tire around my belly.  Already did 2 hour long workouts on my bike this week!
6. I'm writing more.
7. I sold my 4th and 5th Disney trips all in one day yesterday!  Rockstar!
8. The Supreme Court is examining the issue of gay marriage.  About freaking time.  This is a good thing for all of you who believe in the ideals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, as well as equality and justice for all.  I am impressed by the Facebook campaigns as well.
9. My 2nd grade child is now reading at a 6th grade level.  She's freaking brilliant and I take at least half the credit for that.  Screw my ancestors.  This winner is all mine!
10. Putting a bit more effort into being a girl isn't as hard as I thought.  I am still plucking eyebrows.  I purchased eyeshadow for dummies, and I bought some new jewelry.  Still haven't figured out eye liner yet...but these days I celebrate the little things.  :)