10 months and 4 days

I will always hold Hannah deep in my heart in a broken, beautiful place.

Ten months is no time at all, but it's an eternity of echoes of seconds since she left. Her face, her voice are etched into those of us who love her, and that loss doesn't end. The jagged edges of it have softened, beaten on the tides of tears. When one of her friends announces nuptials or pregnancy, it is a joy tinged with those tears. When her brother has good news for a change, the news is gratefully, lovingly received, but stops at the infinite ocean of  where she no longer is.  

But the sun did come up today without her, and we are learning daily how to navigate through these calmer waters, knowing that  storms will come again. We know that we will continue to push through and survive through them.

Hannah, you are loved and missed every day.

the guilt that comes along for the ride

I have been so afraid of my son's grief and depression that I have let him get away with acting like a child. Today, after a night of constant  interruption of my sleep sure to noise , when I told him to act like the adult he is, he said "fuck you" and walked away. It's almost liberating to realize that I have been reacting in a way to avoid a repeat of what happened to Hannah and I have operated from fear instead of dealing with adults and have caused a regression in the autonomy in both of them.

Don't know what this means.

grief, rage

Lately, I am finding myself suddenly, surprisingly, intensely full of rage. Since I don't know why it's happening, I turn it inward into a sea of frenetic self  loathing and a desire for violence: yelling, screaming, pounding violence against a body and mind that I try to have compassion for and find myself utterly lacking. I want to eat and punch my way out of what is going on inside me, because I give it almost no voice. My throat can't speak these words.

In times of calm, I meditate. Love and healing to myself, to my family, to the world. I tighten around the rage, because I fear that if it's  expressed it will leave a swath of poisonous waste around it. I take some precious breaths, center myself and do what needs to happen next. But my breath is shaky today, my throat tight, and so I left, afraid of what the next words might be. I have so much compassion for the suffering of my sons but can't find my 'self' to be compassionate towards this morning. The cold winter wind and gray sky are my voice, a whipping invisible, touching everything. The sound of it feels more real than the filth of my home, the depth of my despair and anger. I want to leave it all behind and go to a place of love and light and warmth but right now, I know that this is my normal and right now I need to figure out how to survive it. 

Addendum: I picked up a book 10 minutes later and opened it:

"The warrior in your heart says stand your ground. Feel the survival of a thousand years of ancestors in your muscles and your blood. You have all the support you need in your bones"

Jack Kornfield

Christmas without Hannah

 It's so incredibly quiet in this house. Tomorrow is Christmas, and the noises in the house are from mechanical things - a dryer, a fan opening under the house.  There is no music, no laughter, no arguing. No sneaking into the back bedroom to wrap the pile of gifts, because there are no gifts, no decorations. There are my sons in their separate rooms, me in a third, silent, sad, thoughtful.

Two days ago, at work, someone burst a balloon. It triggered a memory of that day. I thought she had maybe slammed a door, maybe taken my car and had slammed the car door. It was the chair being kicked away. 

Grief. I don't want this. I don't want this to be the last thing that you gave me, Hannah. You had so much that you could offer the world.

Holidays

 It's 13 days till Christmas.

I have been pretty numb these last few days. My son fell apart in the car on Wednesday, sharing that he felt that he was responsible for Hannah's death. He felt like he was mean to her while she was growing up. It was true. He was not nice to her. 

I see her face twisted and tortured in that video, over and over in my head, something inside her punishing and painful on hearing her brother yell half a house away.

I did the right thing. I told him that he was not responsible, that I love him.

Sitting on the couch, I prepare my grocery pickup list for tomorrow on the computer. There is a holiday section, and I absently scroll and click around, looking at the lights and the wreaths. And then I realize that she is dead, there is nothing to celebrate this year. Still calm, tears coming down my face, slowly at first. I close the tab.

Before thanksgiving, we decided, mindfully, what we wanted to do with that day. 

I am scheduled for surgery in 5 days. Covid is surging, with over 3000 deaths in the US yesterday. 8 days later is Christmas. We are approaching Hannah's favorite holiday, with no desire to decorate or bake cookies. Hannah was a creative and prolific baker, and her "hot tits" snickerdoodles were divine.

For many years, we made gingerbread houses, and I saw in my old photos on facebook a picture of her, huge smile on her face, sweet little gingerbread house next to her.

Photographs are beautiful, painful remembrances of this child that I adored. My gift child, I called her. She was not an accident, I would say, she was a gift.  What happens when I pass and the photos do not go to her or to the children that she might have had?  I continue to hold physical space for her belongings, at the same time knowing that there are others who might benefit from them-clothing, cookware, food. I am not ready to give them up: a beloved tie-dye onesie handed from one child to the next that I held onto for when one of my own had a child of their own; art that she created, boxes of tea that she was given for her birthday; a tin can that says "Black Lives Matter" in her scrawling handwriting.  Books and books and books, some of which are old and musty and the only significance to them is that she found them in an old, abandoned house. I could create a small museum to her with these things that have stories and meaning. 

I allow the days to pull me along. For the most part, I don't think that I am making choices so much as allowing the choices of others to make my path. I am having surgery because no one has told me not to. I go to work, I call my parents, I cook and eat, I pay my bills. These are the things that we all do on a daily basis.  This writing I choose.  It is painful sometimes, but it is for me.

My younger son was asking yesterday about where Hannah was now - her spirit. He wants to believe that she is not entirely gone, yet since he does not "believe" in God, he is struggling.

I thought this morning on awakening that if I died in surgery that maybe I would be with her....

Broken glass

 11/16 It's raining today, and I took off my boots in the front hall. On the bench in the hall is a box, and I recognized it immediately. When Hannah moved it, she brought a box of broken glass from a windshield She had found in the street, and in her usual way, saw an opportunity for art. Art that she can no longer create. It feels solipsistic to talk about how this makes me feel, but nobody reads this anyway. I sat on the step and cried. I want to take the glass and make something for her, in honor of her, but feel like a fraud, a counterfeit. 

6 Months

 Tomorrow, it will be 6 months since Hannah took her life. She was a daughter, a sister, a friend, and many other things, but since she passed, she is the silent plastic box in the velvet bag on my mantle, the home accessory I never wanted. I hate that she is in a plastic box.  It feels disrespectful.  I have been looking at urns online. It has to be the right but what is the right container for my daughter's ashes? When I try to figure out what she would have wanted, I wonder if she would not want to be contained at all, and the idea of finding the proper box or urn reinforces that unpleasant truth that she is gone.  

There is a darkness that is coming over me as I approach this milestone.  It is one of many such to come as time continues to move forward. Thanksgiving came and went, now this, then Christmas. New Years, Valentine's day, each with memories that come with them.  Thanksgiving we mindfully and carefully chose to "skip." She hated Thanksgiving's lore and its inaccuracies and felt that it further disrespected the Native Americans and lied about what we as a culture did to the first peoples of this country. She loved cranberry sauce, and that was her contribution to the meal. She happily added experimental ingredients every year: raspberry flavoring, orange liqueur, even vodka one year, orange zest, mostly with success.  Hannah loved to decorate for holidays.  I think she would be horrified to see the state of chaos that this house has fallen into in the last six months, but would be of help in trying to get it organized so that we could decorate pine cones with glitter or create a craft to brighten up the house. Her things, her brother's, are all over the house, some in boxes now. Most of the chaos beyond is mine - clothes and linens that don't get put away, bags of recycling, outer signs of inner distress. I find myself trying to take long slow breaths at times so that I can feel the air in a brain heavy with sadness. I know that I am not bearing this alone - the mere presence of my sons confirms this. Yet I feel alone, and when my son was crying yesterday after sharing the recurrent images of Hannah on that last day that he is experiencing as we come to this hallmark, I found sparks of anger welling inside of me. I feel like there are people outside of the door at my heart, which I guard against them. I was able to see that this was something dark that my son hadn't caused, and was able to be there with him, recognizing his need above my own pain. Yet, there are moments when a flicker of light appears: a card from someone I know letting me know they care. Words from someone 3000 miles away, not intended just for me, but that my heart was able to let in the light from. The part of me that wants to cling to the darkness and rage will not win. I love, and I am loved, and while I will never stop missing her, I will find a way to make peace, one flicker of light at a time.  The night sky is dark, but it is filled with stars, each one a sun.