Day 73 - Pi day

Today is the 3rd day of the 11th week, the 14th day of the 3rd month, the 73rd day of 2023, and:

• Celebrate Scientists Day
• Crowdfunding Day
• Genius Day
• Einstein's Birthday ((which probably explains a lot about some of the other days))
• International Ask a Question Day
• International Day of Action for Rivers
• International Day of Mathematics 
• Learn About Butterflies Day
• Legal Assistance Day
• Moth-er Day
• Nanakshahi New Year, the first day of the month of Chet [Sikhism]
• National Children's Craft Day
• National Equal Pay Day - this shows how far into this year a woman must work [438 days] to earn what a man in her position made last year [365 days].  
• National Organize Your Home Office Day
• National Potato Chip Day
• National Save a Spider Day
• National Write Your Story Day
• Pi Day
• Science Education Day
• White Day on which men give gifts to women [a version of Valentine's Day in Japan and other Asian countries], celebrated annually since around 1978.  I couldn't find a reference to explain why the color white was chosen
• the last quarter of the moon at 10:10 PM EDT

Quote of the day:

"Grief is in two parts.  The first is loss.  The second is the remaking of life."

~ Anne Roiphe, American writer and journalist

It has been 10 years now since my mother passed away.

My mother and I did not have a good relationship.  She was reared to believe with every fiber of her being that love was totally conditional, that to love someone you had to approve of their lifestyle and personality, as well as endorsing their choices.  She had a backbone of tempered steel, a memory like a steel trap, and her family used a sarcastic, belittling form of character assassination during every confrontation which once lead me to describe it as having quivering slices of flesh surgically removed with great precision to do maximum hurt.  I was a headstrong, naïve only child with definite ideas and a mindset that she found ...   inappropriate [to put it mildly], and far too like my father, who absconded when I was in my early teens.  It was a very bad combination.

At 21, I left the house one night in a huff after a nasty argument precipitated by my having let the dishes air dry on the counter rather than drying them and putting them away.  We didn't speak again for years.  She missed two marriages and her two grandchildren.  

Then, after the death of his own mother in 1987, Frank was the one who brokered a settlement [so to speak] and we had about 21 years where we got along well enough, even going on family vacations together.  And then, when the management company declined to renew the lease of the apartment where she had stayed for over 30 years, we tried to live together in 2008.  I'm not going to go into the details, but it was an unmitigated disaster.   My mother had developed severe dementia and was sunsetting.   Less than a year later, she was unwillingly in assisted living, and we once again were at odds, barely speaking.   Her cousin's 2nd wife took over and was able to deal with her, with my full support, and eventually my mother was placed in a nursing home.  When her money had run out completely, and she knew she would have to leave her private room because Medicaid would only fund being in a quad unit, she just stopped eating.

My daughter and I saw her the weekend before she died.  There was no closure or peace from that meeting; both my mother and I were in tears when I left.  She died alone, and was laid out across from St Clement's, where she had gone to church all her life.   She was buried next to Aunt Nell, in a cemetery plot she had purchased decades ago, near where my grandparents are laid to rest. 

I wish we had known each other better, known how to communicate with each other without creating or reinforcing misunderstandings.