My roommate is also a huge fan of those guilty pleasure shows. His excuse for it is that he's a middle school teacher so he has to be up on what the kids are watching. I think it's just because he is a softy at heart. His show for tonight (after the Olympics, which he also told me I know nothing about. This is true..): One Tree Hill. Now, this is a show I really don't know anything about! He'd pause it, and then correctly predict to me what was going to happen later on in the show. I didn't care, nor did I understand the plot, but it's entertainment. But, thanks to my psychology and journalism classes, I learned media does have an influence on the mind. Because my mind likes to wander, in particular when I think something relates to my life, this can be either a really good or a really bad thing for me. In this case, I think it was both. See, as I walk in the house, I see and hear a woman in this show telling her grandson she wasn't going to make it to see Christmas because she was going to go join grandpa in Heaven. OK, I'm hooked for the rest of the episode. Throughout the rest of the drama on the show dealing with breakups and hookups and jealousy, it would periodically come back to this story of the daughter trying to talk with other doctors to get a second opinion on her mothers condition, the argument of the mother and daughter because the grandmother talks to the grandson without the mom being there, and you see the struggle of this 5 or 6 year old kid dealing with death- and more importantly, the death of a loved one. He's going through his belongings and having a conversation with his father about what he's doing, and it is such a grown up conversation. At the end of the scene, he says to his dad, "dad, I don't want grandma to die." When his dad tells him it's OK to cry his response was, "ok, but I'm not crying for me. I'm crying for you." Now I'm a little choked up. But at the very end of the episode, you see grandma walk down the stairs and there is the little boy sitting under a Christmas tree with some other family member (because I don't watch the show, I'm not sure who she is) and dad... and he says, "Merry Christmas, Grandma!" Then the mom walks around the corner. At this point, I've lost it.
It just really made me think about the death of my Mom and everything we went through. I remember my dad taking my sister and I to the park to tell us she would be lucky to make it to Thanksgiving, and even more lucky to make it to Christmas. She died two days later. I remember her dancing and singing to Leroy Brown with her IV pole in our living room which had a bag attached to it collecting stomach "juices" that we had send to Texas to be used to test a new treatment, which failed. I remember how my sister and I grew up really quickly, and to this day I am still told that I am mature for my age.
I hate those shows and movies that get me thinking about that stuff. It's hard to go back through it. I'd rather forget about the hospital visits and the hospice nurses and the confusion. I'd rather forget about that rainy night when the "angels", as my Grannie put it, came to take the body of my mom to the funeral home. I would rather remember the sunflowers, and the pool, and her sewing, and trying to force my sister and me to hold hands (for the record, it never worked). On top of that, I'd rather just have my mom back.
She wanted more than anything in this world to be a mom. Tonight I told a friend that pretending to be a Mom is the best job in the world. His response? "Being a parent is better." If that statement does not come out of my future husbands mouth, someone better either knock some sense into his head or into mine.
