Sometimes, Eeyore doesn’t need you to help him find his tail.

Life lessons are hard.

I have spent my whole life fixing things. It’s my superpower. Facing things that I can’t fix is a new experience for me, and I suspect that it’s a skill that I am going to need to perfect as I get older.

This past spring, my mother fell and broke her hip. Apparently among seniors, this is a contributing factor in a large percentage of deaths. It’s not the broken bone itself, it’s their body’s inability to recover from trauma and the resulting surgery.

Sometimes, Eeyore doesn’t need you to help him find his tail. sometimes, he just needs you to help him be sad that it’s gone.

I convinced myself that she would just power through it. She’s always been a survivor. I set about trying to fix anything that I could. – running errands, finding a home where she could recover, bringing her whatever she needed. Making her comfortable.

What I didn’t do – was to spend enough time just sitting with her and talking about nothing. Holding her hand while she slept. Just being with her.

Sometimes, Eeyore doesn’t need you to help him find his tail…..

I wasted a big portion of the time that we had left *doing* things for her – rather than *being* with her. We all wish for more time, but what I really wish is that I had used the time that I had better.

The nice thing about procrastination is that you always have something to do tomorrow.

Tomorrow will always be soon enough, because there are an infinite number of tomorrows.

Until there isn’t.

I lost my mom. Knowing that it was coming didn’t soften the blow because it wasn’t going to happen until tomorrow (or the day after, or the day after that).

But now I don’t have any tomorrows with my mom. And I don’t know how to process that.

She lived with us in our house for 5 years following a hospital stay, when we felt that she was going to need some extra help for a while – and we were happy when it became permanent.

I am thankful that we were able to have her close for that time, and for the conversations that we were able to have, and for the holidays together and the dinners out.

I am angry that smoking used to be so cool that it took away my mother before I was ready – even though she quit a long time ago, the damage was done.

But mostly, I am going to miss her tomorrow.

There is an absolutely beautiful and sad song that sadly, few people have heard. It’s called To Say Goodbye to You, by a young lady named Aselin Debison. You can listen to it here, and the lyrics are below: