Electric Bills & School Buses
Last week I got my monthly electric bill in my email. It was $194.62 which is more than double what it normally is. I looked into it and found two different issues that caused my bill to be so extravagant. First of all, my energy supplier was charging me about twice the market value of energy which I corrected by canceling my service with them and selecting a more competitive supplier. Secondly, the electric company apparently misread my meter because they showed my electric consumption as being much higher than it actually was. After talking with one of their customer service reps, I learned that they had estimated my consumption based upon the energy I used for the same month last year. She explained to me that there was a “spike” in my usage last August and they assumed I would be using a comparable amount of electricity this year. Well, I won’t be. The “spike” that she referred to was indeed real but it won’t be reproduced this year. Last year I had an oxygen machine running in the kitchen 24 hours a day with a long tube that reached to the living room and all the way to the second floor where the main bathroom is at. At the other end of that tube was Coleen as she struggled through the final weeks and days of her life.I am reminded of Coleen’s death in many different ways. The void in my house and my heart, the sadness in my daughter’s eyes, my granddaughters’ precious attempts to understand heaven, the awkward ways of some people to reconcile the loss. Now I have a brand new reminder of her death from an unexpected source: my electric bill.
So, has it been a year? Really? In less than two weeks an entire year will have elapsed since Coleen died. I know because I am almost counting down the days to September 18, 2014 which marks the one year anniversary of her passing. Of course I have known from the beginning that this milestone day was looming in my future without being reminded by my electric bill. How did I, how did we, get this far along without Coleen with us. How did we manage to do the things we have without her? Holidays, birthdays, special days, every days? It doesn’t feel like it all the time, some days I don’t think of her as much as other days. But she is always gone, she’s never there, and she is always missed.
Yesterday was one of those days that Coleen was conspicuously absent from. It was Samantha’s first day of school. You know the one where parents and sometimes grandparents hover around the kid waiting for the school bus. Then take pictures and videos of them getting on the bus and feeling so proud but at the same time a little melancholy because they wonder how that little girl got so beautiful and so big so fast and where does that time go to? Days like that, events like that were so special to Coleen and it seems like punishment for the rest of us not to be able to see the smile she would have worn and felt the love and pride she would have shown as Samantha waited for and then boarded her bus.
I thought of my daughter Lindsay and what she must have felt yesterday morning. I know she misses her mom so much and it is just unfair for her to go through days like this without sharing them with her. Unfair, cruel, painful.
I was in charge of recording the video part of yesterday’s memory. As I followed Samantha and Lindsay across the street, capturing the moment on my iPhone, I realized that it wasn’t that long ago that Lindsay was the one with the backpack and the unsure smile getting her picture taken on the stairs of the bus. It wasn’t that long ago, was it? Not unless you consider 27 years to be a long time. My memory of Lindsay and Coleen that morning is very vivid to me after all this time and I am happy about that. I expect my memory of Lindsay and Samantha from yesterday will also stay with me forever or 27 years, whichever comes first for me. It will always be just a little bit tarnished though, just because of that one missing person.
My countdown to September 18th is on. I am not planning any type of family gathering and I feel that day should be spent in a more personal setting than with a group. I have scheduled a much-needed reiki session for that day and not much else although I’m sure I will visit the cemetery at least once. One thing for certain is that I will not forget about that day. Not with reminders from weird places like electric bills and school buses.
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