Determined To Succeed

It’s almost the end of May, 2010 (do you say twenty-ten, two-thousand and ten, oh hell, I don’t know) and it was this time last year that my mom, JoAnn, who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer on May 24, 2009, was lying in a hospital bed dying from that dreaded bitch disease. We were seeing doctors who were trying to make her comfortable and having the difficult conversations about pain management, transferring to hospice and how much time she might have left. If you ever want to know what a really hard conversation is look your wonderful, beautiful mom in the eye and answer her “we’re in a bad way, aren’t we” question with the honest, brutal and damning truth…”yes.”

During the eighteen or so days it took from her diagnosis to death, and in the days after, before I returned to South Jersey, I gained 20 pounds back of the 175 I lost. It was not only easy it was tremendously easy. When you sit in a hospital room all day you might entertain ideas of eating better, healthier and less but that quickly turns into nervously eating shit. There are moments of boredom, fear, dread, sadness, humor, anxiousness, relief…every emotion under the sun. What does it mean? It means your adrenaline has kicked in as the one helping to provide comfort and care and you eat, at least I did to help calm the storm.

When we transferred Mama to hospice I knew it was the end, and so did she, but at least the room she was in wasn’t some cold, antiseptic and functional place. It was warmer, more inviting and soothing and a much more  fitting place for my sweet Mama’s spirit to spend its final days inhabiting her body on Earth.

In hospice, I kept eating. This time I had the comfort of having pizza from Al’s Italian Restaurant and Pizzeria which was mercifully close to the hospice place. Ironically, what made this pizza awesome was the fact it tasted just like the pizza my mom and I had when I was a boy. I had this pizza twice in the six days we were in hospice. I needed it. I welcomed it, like an old friend come by for a visit after twenty years…and we had some catching up to do. I needed a taste of my childhood during those moments of fear, dread and sadness.

I just wish that taste could have come calorie- and fat-free.

Why am I telling you guys all this on a beautiful Sunday morning? Because the countdown has already begun to the last “first” I have to face since my mom’s passing, the actual one-year anniversary of that day, and slowly but surely I have been stress eating again. I can tell you it has been mostly subconscious, eating a few extra things here and there. But that is no excuse. I still get my sweet cravings at night and I feed them sometimes with good things, sometimes with bad, and my weight is slowly creeping back up because of it. Not to mention the silly, stupid dreams I have because I eat late at night (but that’s a whole separate blog post – and one for which you’d need a strong drink or cup of coffee because my dreams can be really strange sometimes).

In trying to be Zen about losing this remaining last ten pounds, which is now eleven-and-a-half, I have said many things which I need to start saying to myself. I do forgive myself this weight. I will re-lose this weight. And I know WHY I am re-gaining this weight. Those things help me, they do. I just need to listen to them and fight my way through this.

Every day I start the day the exact same way, with the blank page. Every writer starts with one, every person starts with one. Each day is what we make of it. Some continue the events of the day before, some bring about new circumstances. But all of them have a component of choice to them and it’s that choice I need to remember as June 9 gets closer and closer.

I swear to you all I will re-lose this weight. I swear it to myself, too. And that, my friends, is the first line on my blank page for today followed very, very closely by my second line…

…Mama, I love you and miss you and your voice very, very much.