Angry and sad.

Tomorrow is a really big day, but I'm up late crying.

Four hours ago, in the car on the way home, I started crying.  I was so angry at my mom for dying.  I guess I'm always a little angry at her for dying.  Sometimes it's really hard to imagine that she's not just going to come back.  I mean, of course she'll come back, she's my mom and she loves me, and it doesn't make any sense that she wouldn't.  Except, she's dead, and she not coming back, which is flippin unbelievable to me, again and again.

So anyway, it's hours later, and we're exciting laying in bed talking about tomorrow, and we hit the lights to go to bed, and my mind just wanders with this little tiny dog Zoe (formerly Mom's, now Annie's buddy), and I started thinking of Hannah, our little wiener dog, and the time I brought her to the high school, long after I'd left for college, hidden in my bag, and Mr. Hesselbacher, the psychics and chem teacher, saw me and told me I couldn't have the dog at school, and I said, why?  Because it would make the children laugh and play, laugh and play, to see a dog at school?  And he smiled his truly rare grin.

And I thought about the day she died, hit by a car, and how it was my fault, and I wondered how it was I couldn't catch her, and why I gave up on trying to catch her.  I feel so bad, and I wish I could back up to that day, and make sure to catch the dog, and then maybe our neighbor Roger Peterson wouldn't have come to our door with tears in his eyes that night, and maybe everything would turn out different.

And the I wonder how death could have been so close and my fault, and I didn't learn anything from it, didn't see the loss that was coming later.

And then what really gets me crying is all the details of that day NOT about Hannah, but that I remember so clearly, and so completely gone.  Watching TV with my sisters and mom in the familiar furniture in our red living room eating Cannova's pizza and that pizza from the resort town, too, which Annie favored.  It was a special occasion -- I had just gotten home from Colorado that day, and it was the final episode of the first season of American Idol, which they had been following.  And my mom, alive, feeding Amy dinner.  Alive.  My mom.

I know none of this is rational.  I'm not crazy or stupid.  Just sad, and angry.

How long has it been, asks a friend.  Fourteen months, four days.