In one of my high school English classes, we had to read Samuel Beckett's play of this name. Thirty-some-odd years later, I don't remember the details, only that it centered around two men who seemed to be relatively old, penniless, and alone. They met at a particular spot each day, left each evening, and could only remember one day past and think towards one day forward. They awaited a third character, the eponymously named "Godot", who never arrived. The style was considered existentialist in that there wasn't all that much character development: what you saw was what you got. While I never read the French original, in English, "Godot" seemed a thinly-veiled metaphor for "G-d" — and since old, penniless (and possibly homeless) folk have always had the shortest from-this-point life expectancy, it made sense — at least on one level — that these two characters were waiting to die.

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After a lot of tsuris which I'm certain Mom never meant to visit upon us, her remains were laid to rest on Friday the 13th, and — for what it's worth, since we've been far from traditional about it — the week of shivah, the deepest mourning, has been observed.

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While I really hate being such a "Debbie Downer" this early in the year, I'm getting extremely frustrated with the red tape surrounding my mother's passing. The basic: we are still waiting on the life insurance to cut loose enough money to bury my mother. While she pre-paid the funeral expenses, she didn't have enough money to pay for a plot —
and without the life insurance money, neither do we.

I'll spare the details of dealing with government-based life insurance (Mom was a Federal Government retiree). The funeral home has been as helpful as possible (which is actually very helpful, especially in terms of compassion and empathy), but the end result is that we are dealing with businesses, and at the end of the day, they need to report a profit (or at the very least, the lack of a loss).

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In ancient times, the body was said to be controlled by four humours, related to the body fluids blood (sanguine/red), phlegm (phlegmatic), yellow bile (choleric), and black bile (melancholy). In addition to predisposition to certain diseases, an excess of one or another humor was associated with a particular appearance, personality, and/or personality disorder. While the theory is long discredited, the descriptions carry through to today: a sanguine personality is friendly and outgoing; a phlegmatic one, slow-moving or lazy; a choleric one, quick to anger; and a melancholic one, prone to sadness, discontent, or depression. (Interestingly, I haven't been able to find a relationship between diabetes — either major type — and an imbalance of one or more humours.)

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I've not slept well these past few nights.

Not only am I in a strange bed in a place that has not been "home" for over eight years, I'm trying to deal with the financial, emotional, and logistical elements of our current situation. Rather than resting and staying asleep, my mind is trying to figure out how to move our office into our already-packed living room, plus adding additional book cases and filing cabinets, without sacrificing my ability to put up my sewing machine, keep my only means of transportation (bicycle) in the apartment, and find space for sentimental treasures, plus finding a way to monetize that which we cannot keep or store, so that we can finance the process.

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Other than the expected shock, you never know how you'll react to someone passing away in front of your eyes -- or while you are en route to a critically-ill relative -- until it happens. I don't usually experience grief in terms of torrents of tears. I do experience a degree of depression, and psychological paralysis, and for months afterward (sometimes even years!) I think I see deceased people walking in crowds (they're pretty obviously someone else who looks similar). Right now, logistics are the only thing in my mind.

Logistics -- not that my mother has left this world, and my father is in his own Alzheimer's world. How are we going to make sure my sister can continue to survive? How are we going to deal with personal effects? What can we keep, and how do we sell what must be sold? How are we going to foot the unpaid bills of burial -- not to mention whatever emergency-room bills follow?

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