Happy Mother's Day. Or Not. Whatever.

I couldn't get out of bed yesterday. I'd been up until 11:30 the night before doing some spontaneous spring-cleaning in anticipation of Logic's return from Utah. When my alarm went off at 6:00, I could barely manage rolling over to turn it off. After the fourth 'snooze' attempt, I decided to call in sick. My plan was to take the afternoon off anyway so I could pick Logic up from the airport so it was easy to justify having the morning off as well.
I finally crawled out of bed around 9 and was making some final alterations to the newly-arranged living room furniture when I got a call from Tom.
We'd been playing phone-tag since October. Neither one of us was really making the effort to meet up, but after a good talk with a friend on Sunday morning I decided an effort should be made. I called him on Sunday afternoon as he was heading into the movie theater. He agreed to call later that day, but I wasn't really expecting him to. To my surprise he did.
He drove over in the afternoon and we sat on my couch. We talked for two hours - a new record for us. It was weird because it wasn't weird. We talked about nothing and everything and it was really nice. So when he called me on Monday morning, I thought it would be a quick "knock knock" joke, since we'd already covered everything else. But it wasn't.
He called to tell me that Grandma passed away. He'd just gotten off the phone with mom and he wanted to warn me that she was pretty broken up. He said it was really hard to hear her like that and he just wanted me to be prepared. I was shocked twice-over. Once for hearing that Grandma was dead and twice for receiving such a sweet call from my usually-absent brother.
After talking to Tom, I immediately called my mom. She, of course, was trickling the news down the list of her children and was on the phone with Jill. She called me back a few minutes later with a lump in her throat.
"I'm fine", she kept assuring me. "It's just hard to talk about."
After a few attempts at telling me what happened, she had to put my dad on the phone.
He said that they didn't really know much. It was assumed that she died of natural causes. She had recently been moved back to the nursing home from the hospital after a quart and a half of liquid was drained from her lungs. There was no sign of pneumonia but her kidneys were acting up. Among other things, she wasn't eating or drinking and her blood pressure was higher than normal. And yet, she seemed to be improving. We were all bracing ourselves for more trouble but didn't expect her to die so soon.
The real kicker was how my mom found out. When my Aunt Jo called to tell her, my mom was at the post office... sending out my Grandma's card for Mother's Day. It breaks my heart to imagine her walking up to the mailbox, stopping to answer her phone, and then needing to decide what to do with the card.
This Sunday is going to be a really hard day for her. I really want to be there but I also want to go to Michigan in a few weeks when my mom buries both her parents' ashes. I just checked tickets to New Mexico and they are outrageous.
I just don't know what to do.