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. 

realization at an inopportune moment

 I was in a very public place today when I realized that I have two wedding dresses that I have saved for my daughters, but I have no daughters to give them to.

Where did it go wrong?

11/7/2020 I am sitting in my oldest son's apartment, close to 200 miles away from my home.  He is packing and moving back home with my other son and I for good. This is in part a financial decision, in part because the past few months he has not felt safe to stay in this place, far away from family.  

Due to the pandemic, he lost his job, and his income is basically gone. His life is devastatingly, irreversibly altered, these last few months, and he plays games on the computer to numb the anxiety and to silence the voice of grief that whispers in his ear. He is afraid that he will lose his out of state insurance by moving home. I am afraid for his safety if he stays.  The depression that he has contended with his adult life has become a jagged mountain to deal with, and outpatient intensive therapy was the recommendation.

Most of us who have lost someone to suicide feel that we should have done something differently. I wonder if she would be alive if I had *made* her go to the doctor's when I started worrying about her, paid more attention somehow to what she was saying, been more patient, encouraged her to transfer to another college. I should have seen that she had changed - that she no longer had friends, was angry and defensive.  I should have seen the increasing strain in her. I try to pick apart the threads that led her to take her life, and led her family and friends to where we are now.

Puzzling it out  won't bring Hannah back and it doesn't "fix" anything, but I desperately want to understand, and so I try to piece it together.

She was a competitive student, and knew exactly where she was in the class standings, knowing that she wanted to be high school valedictorian while she was still in middle school. She eventually was, and had to work for it, though I suspect her peers didn't know how much.

My earliest memory of the anger and hostility really manifesting is of the week before Christmas, in 2014, when she and my father got into the first of what seems like many  disagreements and fights.  I would like to say before I go too much farther, that for years, I was afraid of my dad. I didn't and still don't know exactly why, though he did have his occasional outbursts, putting holes in walls, being angry with his children in ways that included corporal punishment, and my never feeling good enough to meet a standard that I couldn't even identify, let alone meet.

We were making food for Christmas - cookies and pierogi for Christmas eve and I think we were going to do gingerbread houses? - and they got into an argument.  I have no idea what it was about, though I wish I knew so that I could maybe understand what happened, find a pattern.  There were raised voices, there was swearing, and she left, which I suspect now was a reactive fear and confusion to the escalated confrontation that was unfolding. It was raining, hard, and I tried to call her, panicked.  She texted her brother to let him know she was safe, and returned home hours later, long after my parents had left. This was a few months after Eric had harmed her, though I did not find that out until later.

There were incidents, much more minor, and she was convinced that her grandparents didn't love her.  I don't believe that it was true, but I think that they were afraid of the potential for arguments, and I know that at the least, my mom believed Hannah didn't much like them.

In college, it became more serious, though I knew only the surface of it.  She moved out of place after place, and I know that part of what happened there was due to her immediate and increasing dependence on her boyfriend and his on her.  He told me after she died that one of the first times he met her, she was talking about killing herself and went on the roof of the dormitory. She began to experiment more with drugs and alcohol. Her dormitory roommates were uncomfortable about her bringing Jacob into the room to spend the night.  She moved into a house with other students who had technical majors, and had difficulties with her roommates there, which came to a hear when the heat went out during a snowstorm, and the landlord and she got into a fight in which which Jacob "defended her" and she felt like she needed to move again. She house sat for a young man who was priveleged to own a house off campus, and she went on a trip, first with her oldest brother and then with our entire family.  While she was with her brother, she terrified him one night while they were in an argument, telling him that she was leaving because of the argument. Somehow my son was able to soothe the situation, but it was the first of many explosions. There was one in a museum in Amsterdam, where the security guard got involved because of an argument between her and her other brother. There was a fight that night between she and I, on a cruise ship, where she told me that she would be sleeping on the deck. I wonder if she would have killed herself, leaped off the ship that night, if I had not told her I would leave and she could be safe in the room.  I slept on the floor in my sons' room that night.  She told me that night that she wanted nothing to do with any of her family.  There were spats every time that she sat at a table with my father on that trip. Dinner was stressful, between needing to be social and trying to keep an ear out to make sure no fights broke out.  I don't want to make it sound like it was all bad. There were sweet times, where she got along with her brothers and I, and it felt like it would be okay. We had lovely days - St. Petersburg, where she had her 20th birthday on a river ride under lit bridges, sipping champagne and eating chocolates, the vegetarian restaurant in - was it Talinn? - that she researched and found, and had a wonderful meal at after seeing a historical reenactment, walking with her in Stockholm and Helsinki, and going to places - museums and parks and shops, wandering through streets.  And her making friends with an artist on some little island in Denmark. I was so amazed that she could put herself out there like that.

On Christmas eve 2019, there was a fight between my mother and she.  it was about a piece of information that I had believed all my life to be true, which my mother denied and said some awful things about that night.  My mother wouldn't back off.  Hannah wouldn't back off. It was horrible.  I think that it ended because my mother made something that Hannah believed was an apology and Hannah made something that my mother believed was an apology. Christmas was done, gone in the wreckage of that fight, and caution prevailed in the conversations that followed.

After that, I didn't see much of her for two or three months, though I tried. She was "busy working", she was "self quarantining" from the  virus, but I knew she didn't want to see us.  The threat from that trip, that she wanted nothing to do with us, was bearing out, and then she had to move back here.  There was an imbalance in the house: no one felt comfortable there. My other son was too loud for her, annoyed her. He didn't see that to be true and basically ignored it and lived his life.  She wanted him to quarantine so that he would not bring coronavirus into the house, and it wore on both of them that the other would not budge on this.  She didn't leave the house, but about a week after she moved in, she got quite sick. She thought she had the virus. They hadn't even developed an accurate test for it at that time, so she may well have.  

I carry the weight of my responsibility in her death, knowing that I missed that moment when I could have stopped her.  She paid the price for what I did not do, did not see.

The Truth

The truth is that there isn't a day that goes by when I don't have a deep and unflinching recognition that I fucked up and that her life was the cost of that, and now she is gone and I can't apologize. 

It doesn't matter what the "actual" truth is in the world, it is my truth, and at times like today, when I am in a garage full of real reminders of her, I want to disappear.

Musical Notes

This morning, I was talking with my oldest son (I will not be “naming” my sons or family out of respect for their privacy. I do not feel this same respect for her rapist, Eric, though.). The song Careless Whisper came up, I don’t know why the conversation went in the direction it did, but we were talking about the lyrics, then the singer. George Michael. *BOOM*  The invasion of sounds and images and smells and feelings that last day. The strangeness to me of her very strong reaction to the images in the video for the song Freedom and how low her energy was when she made the half-humorous comment (apologizing for that reaction?).

“I think there's something you should know

I think it's time I stopped the show
There's something deep inside of me
There's someone I forgot to be
Take back your picture in a frame
Don't think that I'll be back again" -Freedom 90,George Michael

Hannah was a talented musician, though the world did not get to see enough of her music. She had her own appetite and tastes in music, but also held some of the songs and musicians that I cherished close to her. Music was a force for creation for her, for putting out a voice that she felt was not being heard and communicating what she felt, especially after she felt not believed by people that she trusted after she was hurt by Eric.  I believe that it often held some ability to reduce the pain inside her when the memories or hurts swept up towards her, until it no longer did.

There are songs that will always hold memories for me:  some sweet, some bittersweet.  When she was in high school, she was enamored with a song called Shut Up and Dance by Walk the Moon. iI has been her calling card in my ear every time I’ve heard it for 7 years.  It makes me smile with tears in my eyes now. It still lifts my spirits as well.  I imagine that in her mind as a 15 year old, it rang as a love song that she could fully dive into, and I can see my sparkling, lively daughter dancing in the family room or kitchen while she helped cook or baked one of her creative baked goodies, singing to Walk the Moon, Neon Trees (Ho He) Owl City, Pink, especially the early music, Mumford and Sons, Imagine Dragons. 

As she got older, Nicki Minaj and Jesse J and the women who sang about spoke up for the rights of women and all people as well as became part of her repertory. Janelle Monae, Lizzo, Princess Nokia, other names that I wish I could remember now were significant inspirations to her music and her intersectional feminist philosophy (an phrase and concept that I had not heard of before her introducing it to me). There seemed to be a supportiveness among females in these online and musical worlds that she was lacking in the physical world.  She would tell me stories of betrayals and unkindness among people who she went to school with, until finally, online she became part of a group that accepted and understood. I don’t know how the group came together, but they were all over the world; Hannah’s passing, the group slowly drifted away.

Over the spring, while the coronavirus encapsulated her into her small, cluttered apartment with the boy who had broken up with her but stayed to sponge, she spent time working on her music, honing her skills through the constant pain in her wrists from tendonitis.  There are a number of different styles and pieces that she experimented with, sharing with her friends and the world on instagram: blues, rock, a little jazz. There is a song that she recorded during this time, but she only publicly put into the world about a minute of it. It is Wild World, by an artist that I grew up knowing as Cat Stevens, who is now known as Yusef Islam.  I have searched for the original video among her recordings, but that scrap of her singing, a little unsure for her, is all I have of it.  The song seems almost intentional, though I would guess it was not. At the time it was just a too-short piece that I was enamored of from a song I love.

“Now that I’ve lost everything to you,

You say you want to start something new, 

It’s breaking my heart, your leaving,

Baby I’m grieving…”-Wild World, Yusef Islam

I have a playlist on youtube of her songs, speeches, art pieces, including this song. I listen to it, try to hold onto the details.

Here is the link to the song: https://youtu.be/FjqhcsYT12Q .

Sneezing in the Sunlight

It's been a sunny day today, warm for late October. It's the one of the last warm ones here for a while. I left work, sunlight on my face, and remembered something that made me smile. Sunlight made her sneeze. The last week or two have been memories and realizations that have stopped me in my tracks but this one felt...good.

There are a lot of sweet, beautiful things to remember:  

-A fairy birthday party where we made dresses and wands. I wish I could remember more of it but when I try to remember anything else, I can't.

-Multiple visits to beaches, her floating and playing in the sand, our silly river beach with them "surfing the waves" from the ships, and the trips to Tahoe. 

-Berry picking and jam making

-Shakespeare-Taming of the Shrew on a cool lawn after dark in July.

-Her as Puck in Midsummer Night's Dream. She was so good. 

She was a summer baby, and a lot of the best of my memories are in sunshine.

-The canal du midi, where we read Howls Moving Castle and had a hundred crazy adventures. 

-Venice, which she told us she wanted to live in when she grew up.

-Her cupcake obsession and vanilla obsession which led to delicious experiments in baking.

-Her introduction to eating east coast Chinese food outside of Boston.

-Touring UMass Amherst and Hampshire College and Smith college. At Amherst, we ditched the tour being given by the athlete who had little interest in academics instead, exploring the parts of the campus she was interested in.  Hampshire College. That would have been such a good place for her...she thought about transferring, in part staying you take care of her fragile, emotionally manipulative boyfriend.

-Her 21st birthday at a drag show with my elderly parents, drinking champagne and cheering loudly.

The Velvet bag with the box of her ashes sits on the mantle. Below it, photos she took. To the left and right, other art that she had created. 

I am supposed to be calling another mom who lost a child, so I should stop writing. I am uncomfortable about this, suddenly don't know why I am doing it.

I like this silence, this distance from the realities of cooking and cleaning and work and  family. But the sun is going down, and I  made a promise. 

(Edit: she did not answer the phone)