The middle months were: going to work. Coming home. Checking my email for updates from the lender. Not getting any. Checking again. Texting Tessa. Texting Luke occasionally. Not texting my mother, except to respond briefly when she reached out. Sleeping in my apartment. Waking up in my apartment. Having a normal Tuesday, having a normal Thursday, having a weekend that was mostly okay and sometimes unexpectedly sad.
There was a phase, somewhere around months two and three, when I would wake up at three or four in the morning with the specific clarity that your brain produces in the dark about problems it has been working on while you sleep. The clarity was not productive. It was the kind where you go over everything you’ve already thought through and arrive at the same conclusions and then lie there and feel them anyway, without the benefit of having learned anything new. I have a lot of experience with this kind of three AM, and I have not found a cure for it, but I have found that getting up and making tea and sitting somewhere other than the bed helps move through it faster.
I drank a lot of tea in the middle months.
I was also, during this period, aware of a specific grief that I did not have good language for at first. It took me a while to name it. What it was, I think, is this: the mother I thought I had was not quite the mother I actually had, and the adjustment between those two versions was a kind of mourning. Not the mourning of a complete loss — my mother was still alive, still calling, still sending articles I might find interesting — but the mourning of an image. I had understood her as someone who was difficult and anxious about appearances, but I had not understood her as someone who would do this. And the understanding I now had was irreversible. You cannot un-know a thing once you know it.