The Heart Does Break

After my Mum passed away this March, I didn't have it in me to do much of anything... I was too numb or in a flurry of tears. My long running blog, Lose That Girl, was the least of my worries but fears of my readers mistakenly thinking that my pop culture playroom had become abandoned got the best of me. Here's my first baby steps at writing again as originally posted on Lose That Girl two weeks ago...

Hello... faithful readers & occasional visitors.

I'm so sorry to have disappeared quite suddenly a few weeks back (I must thank Blogger's automatic posting feature for making it appear somewhat that I was *here*). It's not in my nature to just *vanish* -- since I typically hang out here each & every day for a spell, and I feel my absence should be addressed ever so briefly.

I tend to keep my most personal moments private & refrain from writing about them on my site but life as I have known it -- forever -- has changed drastically for me. My beloved Mum died almost three weeks ago after a year long battle with lung cancer. My family & I are devastated and the painful process of resurfacing to our "normal" lives is proving difficult. "Normal" will now be forever changed and I think it might take awhile for us to all find our way. I haven't had the heart to write since, but I'm hoping that this first post back on the other side of normal might help me find the path that I had started...

The most routine tasks are tough right now, and I'm not shy in saying that I'm looking for solace...somewhere, anywhere. I have been trying to read a new book called 'The Heart Does Break: Canadian Writers on Grief and Mourning' compiled by Jean Baird and George Bowering (published by Random House). It's a collection of personal recollections of renowned authors on the loss of a loved one. It's painful to read and I can see my own situation mirrored in the prose, especially within the moving "Her Great Art" by Jill Frayne about her wonderful mother, June Callwood. Frayne writes, "we're different without her...June was the centre and every distance out from her has shifted, every axis on a new tilt...I'm a different woman with my mother gone. Less brave, more ordinary. If this is grief, it feels like vertigo, a kind of motion sickness. I'm making myself over, without my mother. Now that she doesn't call me, or put flowers in my room, or settle an appraising eye on me, I'm not who I was...".

It's too early to say whether this book will help me deal, but at least it makes me feel like I'm not alone in feeling so lost right now.

I'm hoping to find it in me to post more regularly soon - at least Blogger's automatic posting function will make it seem so. :)

** originally published on my pop culture blog, Lose That Girl **