4th of July

The 4th of July was very hard. When it came to holidays, it was typically just me, my mom and brother. My mom would stay the night, the night before and spend the whole day with me, preparing whatever meal and just relaxing. She would spend the day making fun of my poor cat Louie, who has high anxiety with storms and fireworks… She loved that cat dearly and though she made fun of him, always worried about him. I am not a meat eater but any dinners with my mom, I would eat whatever she wanted. She would spends Sundays with me and the same applied then. For the 4th, we would typically do ribs. She loved my ribs. I have a special recipe and would slow cook them in the oven so they were just falling off the bone. We would make potato salad and either do homemade ice cream or a watermelon. Of course, the 4th was spent without her though people keep telling me she is with me. I wish that I could believe that. I got up at 6 that morning to take care of the cats and chickens and then went back to bed and slept till about noon and lay in bed until about 1 and tried to get on with the day. I tried to act like it was any other day. I sat on the couch and watched Little House on the Prairie. Talked for a minute or two with my sisters and then tried to hurry the evening along so it would all just be over. We never popped fireworks ourselves, we could never wrap our minds around hundreds of dollars being blown into thin air. I would always drag up chairs or we’d just sit at the end of my driveway on a blanket and watch our neighbors from all sides light up the night sky. Off to the West of us, we would always see a huge firework show off in the distance and every year, without fail, debate on where it was coming from. It was a professional show but we couldn’t figure out what business was that direction to be putting the show on. We would then go back and fourth on whether we should take a drive to find where they were coming from and decide, in the end not to, because we had already tried a year or two before. Around midnight, when it was all over… I would drive around the corner to take her home. Last night, I made the chickens go up as soon as I could get them to go up, took some ZZZQuil and went to bed. It was the worst sleep I have ever had with all the booms and pops that went on until about midnight. I couldn’t stop thinking of my mom and how none of this should have happened. I also started to think about how alone I was. I am ALONE. No one else mattered because I had her. My sisters, even my brother… they didn’t matter because I had the one person who knew me the best with me and there for me when I needed them the most. That led me to think about all my “friends” who said they would be there for me… and yet there isn’t anyone here. I understand I have made it a point that I want to be alone and that the thoughts of suicide are just that… thoughts. It’s not something I could ever do. My mom and I had several discussions on that and neither of us believe in that type of end. I do understand now how someone could be at that point. Without my mom I don’t feel any reason to be here. She was what I was here for. I would rather be with her than here on this earth without her and wait very impatiently for it to happen the way it is supposed to happen.

The below pictures are from 2016… In a couple of the pictures, at the bottom in the middle… you can see the fireworks display we always wondered about.