Missing Mom

Sadness to my core today.
Missing Mom in a heavy burden kind of way. I feel weighted down with my grief.
Most of her sewing supplies, some of her clothes, and some momma tchotchkes are sitting on my dining room table. It is a mass of memories, heaped in piles of heavy, disorganized, sporadic heartache. Yesterday my sister and I went to Mom's. I took with me my rarely used bottle of Xanax, a just-in-case medication. I should have known I wouldn't be needing it, not because sorting through Mom's belongings was going to be easy, but because I have figured out that grief and anxiety are not the same emotion. (As it turns out, I am better at handling grief. That emotion is natural; people don't judge me for crying because my mother died ~)
Surprisingly, I did not cry while bagging up Mom's sewing stuff; I did not cry while using her bathroom (I had envisioned my seeing her plastic cup of bobby-pins ~ circa 1967 ~ as the conduit for a river of tears); I did not cry while sorting through her dresser, handling her bras and underwear, her slips, her little packages of bra extenders that she ordered through the mail; I did not cry as I sat on her bed; I did not cry going through her jewelry with my sisters, the three of us sitting on the sofa upstairs, Mom's costume stuff splayed out on the coffee table, her "good stuff" coming out at the end, we girls deciding who got what. (Still, the Xanax hid out in its bottle, in the depths of my purse.)
There was no argument. Sisters decided I should get Mom's wedding ring, as I've been the longest married (27 years).
I did not even cry as I took several Grandmother hangings off her desk; just tenderly handed them over to a sister.
Today, though? Today is tears and sadness and melancholy and an emptiness the size of the buffet over at Ryan's (one of Mom's favorite places to eat).
I have zero motivation. Writing this blog causes pain. I forced myself to launder one of her nightgowns and a couple of her housedresses. Ten minutes ago: stood at the washing machine, tears rolling, as I sniffed the collar of her black and white flowered muumuu. Her smell was there, but it was an odor of sickness and decay.
I tossed it into the machine and hit the start button.