I laughed. I cried. I yelled and shook with anger.

"I laughed. I cried. It moved me, Bob."

Um, to be accurate, I suppose the title should read more like, "I laughed. I cried. I yelled and shook with that feeling you get when you've just yelled at strangers, and whoa, did you really just do that, that is so very atypical, but man it was justified, that was ridiculous, how dare they make you yell at them..." Yeah. That emotion. Not exactly anger. Not exactly embarrassment, either.

As for the crying, that was a different occasion. And I didn't, much. Just felt like it.

This was an interesting day.

An anniversary, of sorts. The day of the Alzheimer's Mass, at work. The day, a year ago, when I started thinking and working on my first blog post about Mom's dementia. (The major thinking anyway -- most of my posts do some early percolating first, but as a step towards actually sharing what I was thinking about, it basically happened a year ago today.) The next day I finished and posted it. The Mass stays on the same day of the week, so the date is slightly off, but meh to that.

It's been... an interesting year. I think I might even mean that in the full Firefly sense. Well, the second half of the year wasn't so bad.

It was good to start a new year. Felt hopeful. Nice. Thank God all that stuff from last year is over...

Oh, wait. It isn't. One thing is just going to keep getting worse and worse. Still, without some of the other things going on, it's a LOT easier to handle. Or it would be, if it would just stay still, d*@& it.

Yeah. I was feeling fine. I sat in on a Fantastical Lit class over the fall semester, which was awesome. Processed a little bit more about Mom's dementia in the midst of the class. Occasionally worried that I was ignoring it too much, and this was going to be bad, but that was it. The worry didn't even turn me instantly depressed, like it would've if I hadn't been doing so great.

Until today. Stupid anniversary.

No, that's not true. There were some twinges before this.

She's been repeating herself more, but... well, I know that it's beyond normal, that it's obviously because of the dementia, but it doesn't seem so bad. Sometimes you repeat yourself even when you remember what you said, just because it's something that's important to you. This was beyond that, but... okay.

Recently, one of my sisters sent Christmas presents for everyone to my parents' house. Mom has them, and has been distributing them. Doesn't make complete sense, but it's one of those things she always would've done in the past, and she basically still can do it, so I guess it's good. I came over one day, she gave me mine. I think before I left she wondered for a moment if she had something for me, I reminded her she'd already given me the present, and that was that.

Then I came over again, last Thursday, to pick up something. She took me aside, pulled out the presents, was looking through the labels... "No, Mom, it's okay. You already gave it to me."

I mixed a shake for myself and was on my way out about ten minutes later. She stopped at her room, pulled out the presents... "You gave it to me already. It's okay."

Oh, and she was also pretty perplexed about how to butter her potato.

I know these are small things. I know she still has so much, so many memories that could be gone later... but today is an anniversary of sorts, and I am sad.

I ended up missing the Mass this morning, taking a friend to the hospital instead. (She's completely fine.) I'm kind of glad I missed it. The Mass itself is beautiful, but I think today seeing the Alzheimer's patients would've made me cry. I just... don't want to see that right now. I'm fine with seeing it in general. Just... not now. Please?

I mean, I would try to stop thinking about it, too, but that didn't work. I finished the novel I was reading, and killed my phone's battery browsing facebook before giving in. I could continue browsing on my computer (did, for a bit), but I think the time has come. Have to write to think. At least, in a productive, now-I-can-put-something-behind-me sense, and not the broken record kind of thinking.

The other thing I've been thinking about recently? Being young for this to happen. I was... very tentative, at first, to accept any condolences about my relative youth and her relative youth. Implying that because I'm 29 years old and was 27 that last October then this must be harder for me, well, that implies it's easier on my older siblings. And I don't want to say that, and I don't want to try to quantify or compare levels of pain. No good comes of this. Although I think I'm fine with saying it could very well be harder on Melanie. I... with the death of a parent, okay, it's obviously not good to lose a parent as a child, or in high school or college. It is Bad. With a spouse... tragic when a newlywed dies. I think the one part that made this harder for me to admit is that when someone dies after a long full life with them, you grew to know them that much better, there's even more there to miss and grieve the loss of. But... okay, you can be glad for the time you had. That's life, everyone dies eventually... But yeah, Melanie, you having to deal with this when you hadn't quite graduated from college yet? That's bad. No one should have to do that. I remember her heart attack while I was at Biola. That was bad.

29 years old, on the other hand, is not that young. That's the other bit. I was a morbid child and thought when I was a kid about my parents' age and my age and when they might die, and because I was only a child with a very limited grasp of life expectancy and it sometimes happens this way, I thought, okay, what if they die at 60? That hasn't happened. That would've been... 2001, for Mom, and end of 1998 for Dad. Thank God you're still here. Still here while I went through high school and college.

Heck, back in not-quite-as-modern times, I could die at 29, and it'd be young, but not unheard of. For my parents to die or suffer the diseases of old age when I'm 29, and they had me when they were older... Yeah, not the most tragic thing out there. I'm not a child anymore.

But all that to say, I think I'm fine with this particular condolence now. It's... lonely. I am... really, really, really tired of hearing about people's grandparents who have or had Alzheimer's. No offense to anyone who's told me that. Sincerely, I do not mind, I haven't minded any of these statements on their own. It's just as a group that it's grown taxing. It's like it's rubbing my nose in the fact that I'm young, and none of my peers are dealing with this yet. It's probably the exact thing I would say, in your place. And I'm sure having a grandparent with Alzheimer's can be very, very painful. I definitely grieved when my grandparents died, and I wasn't at all close to them.

But this... this is different. Except maybe for a few people who were raised by their grandparents instead of their parents, the relationship is different. And I'm young, and it's hard, and this kind of thing isn't supposed to happen to me yet, and it sucks. In fact, I would very much like to hit something.

There. I said it. I'm going to hold back from calling that a "pity party," and just be honest. It does suck.

I've also been thinking about identity. I'd rather identify myself by my strengths than my scars, I think, but because it's often much harder and takes much more vulnerability to show another your scars, sometimes they feel like the most real, deepest and truest things about yourself. At least to me.

I get depressed at times, and sometimes a thing like Mom's dementia can be handy when you're in pain -- you can point to it, and say, "Look, this. THIS."

But of course it isn't handy at all because it just adds to the pain.

And there were times last year when it felt like so overwhelmingly everything... of course it seemed like a part of my identity. It is. My mom has dementia. That's a part of who I am right now.

But... I had other pains, before this happened. Those were a part of my identity. They're harder to explain, and point to. Not as overwhelming right now, but if harder to share, in some ways they still feel truer, because of that? I don't know. Maybe not. But one thing I do know -- I am still the same person I was before this happened. At least in part. I've changed, but not completely, and I'm still me. So she can't be all of my identity... Not that I thought she was the whole thing but... Okay, I don't know where I'm going with this, anymore. Just thinking out loud. Sorry. Moral of the story: Identity is complicated? Guilt over how you see yourself is bad, even if you define large parts of yourself by the wounds and scars, rather than by the joys?

Now for something completely different! In honor of the other interesting part of my day! That I referenced way back at the beginning of this post, and even posted a teaser sketch for, on facebook and google+!

(I was going to do a better drawing for the post, take more time, but it's getting late, and I just want to finish this thing. I'd really like to post it tonight instead of tomorrow. That way I won't have to change my "today"s to "yesterday"s.)

It was a new experience, because I've never had people honk and yell at me for something I so obviously couldn't do anything about, before. At least, I don't think that's happened to me before. It was ludicrous.

Though I've drawn little tiny arrows, those are to show which directions the cars were pointing. We weren't going anywhere, save for a bit of impatient inching, now and then.

In retrospect, I think the guy next to me and the guy behind me didn't see or couldn't tell (respectively, probably) that there wasn't any room at all for me to move forward. I mean, it wasn't like it was one of those situations where it would be a little tight and you wonder, "Can I get through? Should I try?" No. There were two feet, maybe three between the van and the corner. But I didn't notice that the guy beside me wasn't blocked, that he could advance and fix the whole mess from the very beginning! So see? It's not always easy to be very observant about what's going on behind you! He didn't notice that I wasn't being an idiotic-let's-make-a-huge-traffic-jam-on-the-off-chance-that-if-I-wait-here-I-can-get-a-parking-spot person, and I didn't notice that he...was! Yeah.

Wait, I was trying to be nice, and give him the benefit of the doubt, and all that. Oh well. Oops.

At first I typed (and posted) that as "...I-can-get-a-parking-lot person." Yes. Just wait here, and we will give you a PARKING LOT! It's magic.

Um, so he yelled some, and the guy behind me honked, and I yelled back (complete with big arm gestures), "Where am I gonna go? I can't go back, he's there, you're beside me, they're in front of me, what do you want, I can't go anywhere!" Or something to that effect. I was ticked. And then, wonder of wonders, he moved! And the van could move, and the woman driving the van thanked me, and everyone lived happily ever after. The end. Though, driving away, I was shaking with the emotion I mentioned at the beginning of this post.

See, who ever said yelling never fixes anything?

Ooh, do you think they're wrong about hitting stuff, too?  [evil grin]