The visitation

Tonight was my mother's visitation, and by tonight I mean all damn day because somebody (and I'm not naming names but it was me) decided to have the thing from 1:00 to 5:00 so it was too early to do things before and too late to do things after so it was effectively all day long. And there were people who RSVPed, who actually said  "I'll see you there" and then they never showed up. Friends of my mom's, people who I would totally expect to show up, just didn't. And you know how you always say it doesn't matter if people come and it's not mandatory? Well it turns out that when it's your mom, and you've spent days burning CDs of her music and printing out photos of her and picking out her jewelry to wear and stuff, it turns out that it's totally mandatory. I mean, these are people who knew her for years and worked with her and spent time with her socially and then they just didn't come by or anything. WTF.
But then some people came by whom I hadn't seen in years. Friends who couldn't afford to sent flowers. People with no link to my mother came by just to comfort me. Family members I'd never met, from my father's side, came just to let me know that the family was thinking of me. It was a really surprising outpouring.
But now it's over. And now all the little detail work that's been distracting me is over. And now there's nothing left to do but go through her stuff and clear out her house and settle her affairs and generally think about her being dead and that prospect scares the holy fuck out of me.
And Tom has been awesome through all of this. He's let me sleep in every day because the only thing that keeps me from thinking about her being gone is an absolute loss of consciousness, and he's been going through her bills and making lists of what I have to do and who I need to call and who needs copies of the death certificate, and he's been looking up things on line to see what we might be able to split between my brother and I and what we'd have to sell and then split the money from, and he's been getting Tommy off to school every day and he bought the food for Tommy to bring to his class Thanksgiving Feast (and then totally forgot to actually send the food, or the kid, to the Thanksgiving Feast) and I couldn't have gotten through this without him, which is why Tom now has to make all his own arrangements before he dies.
Any my parting advice to all of you, my 3 lonely readers, is this: Don't wear heels to a visitation. Four hours on your feet will kill them. My feet hurt so bad now.