Hi!

It’s me.

I was quiet last week.

It was the first anniversary of my mom’s death, and for reasons I didn’t entirely expect, it hit me harder than I thought it would.

I’m not usually someone who marks death anniversaries. I’d much rather celebrate a person’s life than the day we lost them.

But grief doesn’t always ask our permission.

Sometimes it simply arrives.

I learned something this past week that surprised me.

I thought I had moved on from a lot of things.

It turns out I hadn’t moved on.

I’d simply survived them.

This essay is about what happens when “tomorrow” finally arrives, and all the things you packed into boxes because you had to keep functioning begin asking to be felt.

I hope, if you’ve ever had a season where everything seemed to be on fire, you find a little bit of yourself in this one

I’ll Think About That Tomorrow

My Mama loved Gone with the Wind.

Now, before anybody writes me a strongly worded email, yes, I am aware the story contains enormous amounts of problematic material.

But my Momma wasn’t in love with the Confederacy.

She wasn’t even particularly interested in Scarlett O’Hara’s love life.

What she loved was the stubbornness.

The refusal to quit.

The way Scarlett could be standing in the smoking ruins of her entire life and still somehow manage to announce:

“I’ll think about that tomorrow.”

“Also… do these curtains bring out my eyes?”

As coping mechanisms go, I have to admit it’s one of my favorite.

In fact, I may have accidentally built an entire life around it.

People often talk about processing their emotions.

I don’t know many people like that.

Most of the women I know are busy.

We don’t process emotions.

We move them.

Like furniture.

We drag them into a corner and throw a sheet over them.

We’ll deal with that tomorrow.

“I’ll think about that tomorrow” wasn’t actually where I learned the habit, though.

That honor belongs to my mother.

Whenever something painful happened, she had two pieces of advice.

The first was:

“Just make a pearl out of it.”

When I was a little girl, she explained that pearls begin as irritants. A grain of sand works its way into an oyster, and layer by layer the oyster surrounds the thing that hurts until it becomes something beautiful.

The second was less poetic but equally useful.

“Put it in a box and set it on a shelf in the closet.”

Not forever, she would say.

Just until you can function.

Looking back, I realize my mother was teaching me emotional triage long before I knew there was a name for it.

Which explains why, every morning before my walk, I have a little spiel I go through with myself.

Sometimes it’s lengthy.

Sometimes it’s fast-paced.

It’s also extremely well rehearsed.

The purpose is simple: persuade my brain not to set itself on fire before breakfast.

Most versions begin with the rules.

Welcome.

Please fasten your seatbelt and keep your arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times.

Do not think about the divorce.

Do not think about the caregiving.

Do not think about the finances.

Do not think about the future.

And by all means, DO NOT TALK TO THE WOULDA, COULDA, SHOULDA VOICES.

Enjoy your walk.

This system has approximately the same success rate as telling a squirrel not to eat all the seed out of the bird feeder.

Because within five minutes my brain has usually located at least three emotional disasters, a financial concern, an unresolved legal matter, and a memory from 2018 that suddenly requires immediate review.

The truth is, I didn’t postpone these things because I was emotionally unavailable.

I postponed them because everything was on fire.

The divorce.

The caregiving.

The finances.

The future.

My nervous system was basically the equivalent of a middle-aged woman running through a burning building carrying a box of family photographs while wheeling a pole with an intravenous bag of Diet Dr Pepper through the rubble.

There wasn’t a lot of time for reflection.

So now when my brain decides it would like to process a gray divorce, my Mama’s Lewy Body dementia diagnosis and death, the collapse of an entire life in Austin, several financial crises, and a few miscellaneous heartbreaks before breakfast, I find myself saying:

“Surely that’s too much for one morning.”

And my brain says:

“Interesting theory.”

“Hold my beer.”

Then it kicks open seventeen storage boxes at once.

And maybe that’s because those boxes contain entire seasons of my life.

Not moments.

Not bad days.

Entire eras.

I spent years taking care of my mother.

Long enough that caregiving stopped feeling like an activity and started feeling like the weather.

It was simply the climate I lived in.

Feed Mama.

Check Mama.

Lift Mama.

Comfort Mama.

Brush her teeth.

Change her brief.

Find a way to make her laugh.

Meanwhile, somewhere in the background, my marriage had ended.

Not dramatically.

Not with a slammed door and a movie soundtrack.

More like a building quietly condemned while people are still living inside it.

There were papers to sign.

Assets to divide.

A life to dismantle.

I looked at all of it and said the same thing I’d said to everything else.

I’ll think about that tomorrow.

Then my mother died.

And because life enjoys efficiency, she died shortly after I had spent an entire day trying to clean up the remains of another life.

Selling clothes.

Sorting books.

Making Goodwill runs.

Trying to imagine a future.

I didn’t know it was the last day.

Nobody tells you when it’s the last day.

If they did, we’d all behave differently.

I would have sat beside her bed and held her hand. 

I would have cancelled the garage sale.

I would have ignored the boxes.

I would have ignored the dishes.

I would have ignored every task that felt urgent.

I would have held her close and kissed her beautiful face a million times.

But I didn’t know.

So I did what people do.

I lived an ordinary day.

And then suddenly it wasn’t ordinary anymore.

For a long time after that, I told myself I was grieving.

I probably was.

But looking back, I think I was also staying busy enough to avoid discovering what was inside all those boxes.

Because grief wasn’t the only thing in there.

There was divorce.

There was loneliness.

There was anger.

There was fear.

There was disappointment.

There was the unsettling realization that after sixty years of being needed by everyone, I had absolutely no idea what to do when the room got quiet.

So I made plans.

Big plans.

Magnificent plans.

Property in Round Top.

Harp Weaver Manor.

Books.

Essays.

Gardens.

Businesses.

Future versions of myself who appeared considerably more organized than the current model.

None of those dreams were fake.

I still want them.

But I am beginning to suspect some of them were also camouflage.

A way of pointing toward tomorrow so I wouldn’t have to look directly at yesterday.

There’s one photograph I keep returning to lately.

My mother and my ex-husband are standing outside Rosa’s Café in Austin after lunch.

They’re both smiling.

They’re both holding canes.

My ex-husband had recently had knee replacement surgery, and my Momma had just begun using a cane herself because age was making balance a little harder.

I remember thinking it was the cutest.

The two of them looked like a matched set.

So I took a picture.

For reasons I couldn’t explain, that photograph has been following me around for months.

Then recently it occurred to me that maybe it isn’t a photograph at all.

Maybe it’s a time capsule.

Because standing inside that picture are three things I’ve lost.

My mother.

My marriage.

And the life I built in Austin.

The photograph isn’t reminding me of a lunch.

It’s reminding me of an entire world.

A world where my mother was still alive.

A world where my ex-husband was still my family.

A world where Austin still felt like home.

A world where I still believed I knew what the next chapter looked like.

The trouble is that tomorrow eventually arrives.

And when it does, it brings all the boxes with it.

The divorce box.

The grief box.

The loneliness box.

The photograph box.

The “why does every legal document seem determined to find me while I’m watering hydrangeas?” box.

The “how exactly did I become responsible for every single thing?” box.

And suddenly there you are.

Sixty-one years old.

Standing in the middle of a room filled with unopened containers.

Wondering why your brain won’t let you sleep.

Wondering why a photograph from seven years ago keeps appearing in your mind.

Wondering why your nervous system seems convinced that every slow-moving car is carrying a person that will hand you legal documents.

Wondering why you’re so tired.

Not sleepy.

Tired.

Soul tired.

The kind of tired that doesn’t want to die.

The kind of tired that just wants somebody else to drive for a while.

And maybe that’s what tomorrow is trying to teach me.

Not that I failed to deal with these things.

Not that I avoided them.

Not that I was weak.

Maybe I simply survived them in the only order available.

Maybe tomorrow wasn’t denial.

Maybe tomorrow was triage.

My mother was right.

You can’t carry all of it at once.

Sometimes you put it on a shelf until you can function.

Sometimes you make a pearl out of it.

And sometimes tomorrow finally arrives and you discover the thing waiting in the box isn’t there to destroy you.

It’s there because it’s finally ready to be felt.

Maybe that’s all I did this past week.

I opened one box.

Not all of them.

Just one.

I looked inside.

I remembered.

I cried.

I let myself feel what survival hadn’t allowed me to feel before.

And then I closed the lid again, knowing the others will still be there when I’m ready.

Because healing isn’t emptying every box in a single afternoon.

It’s trusting that you no longer have to carry them all at once.

And trusting that if my Mama taught me anything, it was this:

The things that hurt us do not always stay grains of sand.

Given enough time, enough grace, and enough love, they sometimes become pearls.

Love, Lannie♡

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