So, I am in New Jersey.

I got here yesterday, not without getting a little lost getting off the NY Thruway and forgetting to get off at Rt. 287 South or the Garden State Parkway.

I ended up headding back north to New England. It was a Freudian Drivingslip.

I've spent alot of time talking with my Father. I don't know what else to do. I'm not feeling much. Haven't connected with my sister either. From the scuttlebutt, our Mother was only Her Mother. Not mine.

Then again, this is a sister who told me, when I was 4, that I was hatched. I think she'd really like to believe that. She's treated me that way anyway.

Who knows, perhaps, like Artemis, I am the progeny of a liason between a philandering God and a mortal woman. Maybe I was hatched.

Dad is in and out of grief. Not knowing what to do but trying to Do the Right Thing. We got to talking about Mom's stuff. My sister's claimed the old 1940's sewing machine and the clunky 1950's typewriter. Whatever. If she has a place for the junk, that's fine.

The jewlery hasn't shown up. Dad isn't sure where it is.

I told him to ask my sister when she might want to go thru things and split them up. He has told her that she's not entitled to everything. That's good on his part.

It would be nice if I had a sister I could sit down with and talk to about Mom. But that isn't going to happen. We are in neutral corners. I know she feels like she lost her best friend. I feel like I lost someone, but I'm not sure who she was in my adult life.

I was a self-raising child after about the age of 12. There was little connection between either of my parents and myself, and my sister'd had my nephew, so I was old news.

I'm more like Dad's therapist, explaining why one doesn't envy or hate others, talking about my own little deaths from divorce--it's true that death and divorce (esp. if you don't have kids) are quite similar.

I used to always say that I "lost" my ex-husband. Sometimes people would say "I'm sorry" and I would answer "oh, he's not dead. I just don't know where he lives." In a sense, he is dead to me. I have no idea what happened to him, where he lives, or anything. Same for the second one. And the boyfriend I lived with.

So, dealing with death, for me, isn't such a big deal...

I don't know why I don't feel anything. Don't think it's shock or anything like that. And it's not that I didn't love my mother. Since I was a child, I spent alot of time worrying about my Mother, wondering how I could ease her suffering or make things good for her so she would be happy.

When the sacrifices of self that I made didn't make her happy, I realized that there was nothing I could ever do to make her happy. Her suffering had been so long that I sometimes think she'd lost what it was to be happy.

We lived in tension because I was doing what I could to make myself happy and wasn't trying any more to conform to how she wanted me to be so that I could, in some way, make her happy.

It was never about her being proud of me, it was about me making her happy, making things up to her because her life had been so sad and she never got to do the things she wanted to--like be a nurse, or an artist, or join the WACS. I often felt that if I could make up for the cruelties, then everything would be okay for her.

It was never about me. I was always the parent, never the child.

So, I selfishly feel a kind of relief that she has finally found some peace.

And I feel that I no longer have to worry about my Mother's sadness, and whether or not she disapproves of my lifestyle because I didn't turn out to be a nurse or a mathematician or didn't join the Army; and whether or not she liked the birthday presents; or whether or not I'm doing the right thing by not getting married any more and not having children.

I, somehow, feel very, very free.