HD, grief, and The Gilmore Girls

(No spoilers) I started watching The Gilmore Girls on Netflix about a week before my mother died. I didn’t know it then, but I was setting myself up for some good grief therapy. At the center of the show is a relationship between a mother and daughter. It’s a superb relationship. The kind I dreamed of having. Since my mother died, I have watched about half of the original series.

In the first days after her memorial, it was all I could do.

Now I am starting to work my part-time job again and participate in life, and my consumption of the show is something I look forward to fitting in each day.

It seems like watching the perfect mother-daughter relationship would sting, because that is not what I had. Instead, it shows me how abnormal my situation was and I realize how much of it was because of my mother’s illness. And the happiness that I generate for the characters lingers and I feel happier all around.

The big lesson that is forming concerns what I want to do going forward. I want the people I love to know that I love them, so I am making it a point to tell them more often. It’s not eloquent like Lorelei Gilmore, because I don’t have my own writers. But it is not perfunctory either, because I mean it.

I also want to participate in the world around me. That means fighting inertia when it good for me and going out with my family. It means showing Randy and Mark New York City. It means travelling as much as I can and visiting people I love. It means enjoying every moment with Randy and making plans together.

Every now and then, it will hit me that my mother is dead. I will forget and remember again. I will remember the younger, healthier version of her. “My mama is dead,” I will say to Randy and sometimes some tears will come out.

Then I will remember how her brother who had HD writhed for years in a nursing home bed, unless he was strapped down or given paralytic drugs.

Because my mother was the stubbornest person I’ve ever known, I had every idea that she would share the same fate as her brother. But I am glad she did not spend her last years that way. She was only in a nursing home for a few months and was alert most of the time. But one day, she refused to engage in physical therapy and within weeks she succumbed to what we thought was a minor respiratory infection. I like to think she made some decision to let go…

Because of the way my mother died, suddenly the process of dying doesn’t seem so daunting and scary.

And because of The Gilmore Girls, the process of living suddenly holds the promise for fun, adventure and love.

So I am putting away the fears of dying and getting on with the living.