My mom's service (date clarification)

Just so my local LJ Friends know, my mother's service is on June 20th -- next Wednesday, not the Wednesday just past. We got a rather puzzled call from George's family, who showed up at Riverview, yes, yesterday afternoon. D'oh.

Here's a link to her obituary at the Winnipeg Free Press:

http://www.passagesmb.com/obituary_details.cfm?ObitID=121011

Today we went down to pick up her ashes from Cropo's Funeral Chapel, a journey that pretty much exhausted me (at least they provided a lovely red velvet bag with gold ties to keep the urn in). Afterwards we stopped at the nearby A&W for a burger and a root beer, and discovered that that particular A&W believes that "large drink" means "over a litre and a half of root beer served in an ice-cold frosted mug". Yikes. Neither of us could finish our portions.

The next stop was Don's Photo to get an enlargement of a photo for the memorial table at the service, but along the way we ended up stopping at Bison Books and doing a little shopping. After Don's Photo, we detoured to Thai Express in Portage Place so I could get some pad thai -- and found out, to my horror, that they have started putting tofu in everything they serve. And I didn't find it out the easy way, by being told before ordering. Oh, no. I found out by finding big chunks of tofu in my (supposedly) chicken pad thai.

*shudder*

Some days it's the little things that get you.

On the subject of "big things", we just got a call from my mother's landlord stating that they'll also be charging us for the month of July since we did not actually tell them my mother was dying prior to the end of May.

*waves goodbye to $692, unless they manage to sublet the place in the next two weeks, in which case they'll charge us only $40*

According to George there are a bunch more messages on the answering machine, but I already feel like a giant punching bag and I'm not sure how many more hits I can take.

A crack in the dam

About fifteen minutes ago, the dam broke open, at least a little.

I was talking to George when it hit me: My mother is gone. The world is now without her wit, her intelligence, her kindness, and her kick-ass-and–take-names attitude. Her ashes are sitting on my home altar. Her apartment lies empty. Never again will I pick up the phone and call her, or she pick up the phone and call me.

Suddenly, all I wanted was my mommy. And for the first time since she'd died, the sobbing started.

I've just stopped crying; the Novocaine seems to have descended upon my spirit once more, but I feel like I've been run over by a truck.

I just wanted to share this with the world -- grieving, it sucks.

EDITED TO ADD: To cheer myself up a bit, I just gave Emmie and Mina some catnip my mother had been keeping in her freezer. The apartment, it is full of trippin' cats -- running around, stopping dead, staring fixedly at objects, falling... slowly... over, and then repeating the whole chain of events again and again.

That and a tranquillizer are going a little way toward improving my general mood, but I think I'll still turn in early tonight.