A Moving Target

     It sneaks up on me when I least expect it.  It usually takes me a little while to figure out what it is.  I had a series of anxiety-filled dreams last night, and woke up often, drenched in sweat and with a racing heart.  The dreams weren't exactly nightmares, but just images and feelings that made me anxious.  As I cleared my head, I tried to figure out what I was so nervous about.  I don't have any looming appointments, or meetings that would make me jumpy.  I tried to think of different things that could be bothering me, to see if one of them triggered that same anxious feeling.
     When I thought about our house, the one we will be moving back into next month - boom.  That was it. But why?  I thought of each room.  When I got to the room that was our office - the room that will be the baby's room - the anxiety hit.  That was the room my mother would sleep in when she would visit.  Even though we had a spare bedroom with a very comfortable bed, she preferred to sleep on the couch in the office.  She was a tiny person, barely five feet tall, and she felt "safer" as she put it, sleeping on the couch.
     That house is filled with memories of my mom.  I haven't dealt with any of those memories yet, because I haven't had to.  It scares me.
     Grief is a moving target.  People write about grief like it's a tunnel of muck you have to struggle through, but once you get to the other side, you're done.  But for me (and my older sister, it turns out) I never know what I'm going to feel one day to the next.  Just when I think I've crawled out of the tunnel, I am faced with a memory, or the realization of all I won't experience in the future with my mom, and it knocks me down for the day.  I consider myself to be pretty healthy emotionally, but I think the five stages of grief are pure crap.  How can I ever truly "accept" (the final stage) that I will never see my mother again?