Category Archives: Loss

What Grief Has Taught Me

Posted in Loss, memories, Uncategorized by

what grief has taught me

It’s January 6th again, the day that I dread. I can hardly remember a time when I didn’t dread this day, and I think I will continue to dread it as long as my memory is intact. I’ve been dreading it more than usual this year, because January 6, 2016 is kind of a big deal.

Today marks the 25th anniversary of my mother’s death from breast cancer. I don’t know why this number seems so significant. There is something about a quarter of a century that feels substantial.

And I don’t know why measuring the time that has passed is so important to me. It’s something I just do, automatically. I can say with certainty, though, that these 25 years have changed me. Looking back to 1991 from 2016 feels like looking from one world to another. To me, it is a different world. I’ve grown up.

I’ve grown up, and I’ve grown in understanding. The roles that cancer and loss have played in my life have never been far from my mind. I’m a thinker (and an over-thinker), and I’ve never stopped thinking about the parts of my life that have so fundamentally shaped the person I’ve become.

So, small though my pool of knowledge might be, I do know this:

Cancer is a family disease.

I’ve never had cancer, but cancer is a part of me.

My mother was first diagnosed when I was four. I was young, but I was very aware of the fear gripping my family. I used to have this nightmare, over and over and over, so often that 32 years later I can still remember it in near-perfect detail. I was in my parents’ bedroom – pale blue walls, bed covered with a white, tufted chenille bedspread. My mother was standing at the foot of the bed packing a suitcase. My father was in the corner of the room crying. I was squeezed between the bed and the wall, watching, hidden. Behind my mother a bear hovered — it wanted to take her away. I knew my mother was scared but didn’t want to show it, and I knew that my father was crying because he was helpless.  This scene would repeat itself in a loop, and it scared me stiff.

Chronic illness — when it carries with it the potential of a death sentence — is terrifying for the person fighting it. It is also terrifying for those who love and need that person. During the long seven years of my mother’s illness, in my heart I was fighting alongside her. The time that has passed since her death has done nothing to diminish my sense of having battled and lost to cancer.

Sharing death with someone is an intimate, profoundly affecting act and everyone should do it once.

My mother died at Christmas. Technically, she died on the last day of Christmas, the Feast of the Epiphany. But really, her death began on the 26th when she fell into a coma that only broke when her pain became uncontrollable.

I was there the whole time. I was with her when she lost consciousness. I heard her when she emerged only to moan in pain. I learned what dying breaths sound like and I stood beside her as those breaths ebbed to a stop. I could almost see her soul depart her body.

Four years ago, when I was nearly 37 weeks pregnant with my second daughter, I sat in another room with another person I loved as cancer took his life away too. This time, it was my uncle – one of the best humans I’ve ever known – who was making his surrender. With my aunt and my cousins, I held his hand through a death that was not peaceful.

The memories of my mother and my uncle dying are among my most painful. But I also treasure them. There was an inexplicable beauty in those moments, a sense of connectedness and love. I’m better because of them.

Grief grows as one body.

When you first experience grief – not just great sadness, grief – it creates a sort of nerve in you with the cause of your grief at its core. And once that nerve exists within you, you can’t experience loss without it being touched.

Shortly after my mother died, my grandfather died, also of cancer. I grieved my grandfather, whom I loved deeply, but his death renewed my grief for my mother. As death took more of the people I loved, an uncle, my grandmothers, an uncle again, I grieved each individually and all of them together.

When my second uncle died four years ago, I felt the loss of everyone who had gone before him. But oddly enough, the grief I felt was also a kind of resurrection. Grieving them together somehow brought them back to me individually. For a time they were all with me again.

People die, but grief doesn’t.

Grief is a gut punch like no other. It shatters you absolutely. People tell you that it goes away with time, but it doesn’t.

And as much as you wish in the early days that it will go away, that it will release you and let you go back to being the person you were before it took over your life, you end up not wanting it to go away.

Time makes living with your grief more bearable, but it also takes you further away from the person you have lost. Eventually, grief becomes the strongest connection you have with them.

In 25 years, the world has changed. I’ve changed. And with every year that passes, it’s as though time has taken my mother further away from me. I don’t feel her presence anymore. The memories I have of her are pitifully few. I take them out like treasures now, cherishing them, guarding them, but lacking a sense of their relevance in my daily life.

And now that the grief of missing her in every moment has lessened, a new grief has taken its place – the grief of not missing her in every moment. It’s a quieter grief — and more bearable — but it’s grief all the same.

After 25 years, what I know above all things is that grief never dies.

Mom

 

 

Grieving the Almost

Posted in chilren, Family, Loss by

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A Facebook friend of mine once shared a post on grieving the almost. It was a beautiful and thoughtful essay on the paradoxical idea that we have the ability to miss something that never really existed, except in our perceptions or in our imaginations.

On the surface, grieving the almost seems impossible. How can you feel the pain of the loss of something that was never yours to lose? It shouldn’t be possible – God knows we have enough grief in this world from the losses of what we can feel with our own five senses. And if reality were just what we can see and touch and hear, it wouldn’t be possible.

But of course it’s possible. Because we all know that just because something happens in our heads, it doesn’t mean it isn’t real. We can grieve the love we thought we felt, but didn’t. We can grieve the marriage that was never really a marriage. We can grieve the job we never got, the dream that was never fulfilled, the potential we never reached. We can grieve the child we never conceived and we can grieve the one we lost but never met.

These days, it’s the grief of that final almost which has been foremost on my mind. I’m posting this in October, the month dedicated to bringing awareness to pregnancy and infant loss – and social media is ensuring that memories of my own loss remain on the edges of my thoughts.

I can say from experience that anyone who has lost a cherished pregnancy, no matter how early, knows what it means to grieve the almost.

A parent is able to love – overwhelmingly – the baby whose proof of life lies only in the faintest of pink lines. A parent can see the child of her heart in the sprout-like form and nubby limbs of an 8-week fetus. A parent can feel the downy hair she never nuzzled; she can know the soft weight that never warmed her chest.

A parent who has lost a pregnancy has grieved – and will always grieve – the almost.

I’m writing this post not so much in the name of awareness, but in remembrance. Because I think the hardest part of pregnancy loss is the knowledge that we (or someone we loved) once carried within her the potential for a life that will not only never be lived, but which will never be known.

And so, this post is for all of the almost babies, the shadow children, who exist in the hearts of so many mothers and fathers.  Your presence is felt in a world you never saw, because you changed those who loved you without ever knowing you. We remember you. We miss you. We grieve for the world that will never know you.

What Are 24 Years?

Posted in Family, Loss by

For the last 23 years, on January 6th, I have written. I’ve written journal entries, poems (some good, some terrible), letters, and, more recently, posts on social media.

I started writing when I passed that most challenging of milestones, the first anniversary of my mother’s death. Writing has always been my way of processing emotions that are bigger than I am, and back then, it was the only resource I had to absorb the excesses of my grief.

So I am writing again today, because I have to.  I’m not about to break a tradition that I have kept up for more than two-thirds of my lifetime. But also, even after 24 years, the grief of losing my mother is still bigger than I am, and I still struggle to process the meaning of what I lost so long ago.

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When you lose someone you love early in life, you grow up measuring your time on earth based on how far removed you are from the loss of that person. In my early 20’s, I reached the point where I had spent half of my life without my mother. Two years ago, it was two-thirds of my life. And in 10 years, three-quarters of my life with have been lived without my mom.

And yet, after all this time, with so many more years under my belt without her than with her, I still miss her. I still miss her so much that it can be hard to understand how it is possible to long for someone who has been gone from your life several times longer than she was a part of it. It can be hard to understand how you can miss the presence of a person whose presence you barely remember.

But I do miss her. I do wish she was still a part of my life. My mom was amazing in so many ways. She loved generously, she fought bravely, and she was always there — even when she was hurting, even when she was dying. She never let cancer steal the life she was determined to provide for her family. Even in the end, when it was so clear that her body was ready to rest, she still held on until she just couldn’t hold on any longer.

She didn’t deserve to die, and we didn’t deserve to lose her. It breaks my heart that with every passing year I grow farther away from the time when I had her. It breaks my heart to think about how much I have forgotten and what I will never have.

Losing a parent at a very young age means that you spend the majority of your life as a person who has lost a part of herself. You become motherless — or fatherless, or sisterless, or brotherless — in your very definition of yourself. And the child that you were when you lost  that person becomes a permanent segment of your soul as well. It’s impossible to let go of the part of you that once had what you so deeply miss.

That’s not to say that you don’t grow up, or mature, or come to grips with your grief. It doesn’t mean you don’t experience or appreciate the joys and the richness your life brings you. You do grow up. I have grown up, and my life so far has been good. Really, really good.

But the 11-year-old girl who lost more than she thought she could ever regain is still with me. And the adult who has lived without for so long still grieves the emptiness.

Twenty-four years is everything and it is nothing.

* * *

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Mom loved giraffes.

She hated birds. (You would too if a seagull had once pooped on your head.)

She hated birds. (You would too if a seagull had once pooped on your head.)

And she adored her children.

And she adored her children.

Hasta la Vista, Tio Bobbo

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Three years ago today, when I was exactly 37 weeks pregnant with my second daughter, I stood together with my cousins and my aunt, and we held my uncle’s hand as he slowly passed away.

Maybe one day I will be able to describe what it feels like to help someone you love dearly to leave this world when you are on the cusp of ushering another soul into it. It’s been three years since it happened to me, and I still can’t find the words I need. All I can say is that, before the moment of my uncle’s death, I had both seen life end and brought life forth and neither of those experiences touched me as profoundly, as radically, as that moment did.

It was cancer that killed my uncle. It seems like it’s always cancer in my family. Before it took my uncle, it had already taken my mother, my grandfather, and my other uncle. Cancer stalked and killed four-fifths of my mother’s family. That may sound melodramatic, but it feels true. Cancer took my husband’s mother too, and his uncle and a grandmother as well. It has been such a huge part of my life, that sometimes I forget I am not a survivor of the disease myself.

Or maybe I am? I am a survivor of those who have fought the battle and been overcome by a disease that seems never to pull its punches. Really, so is anyone who has lived through even one day of the fear and the pain; the chemo and the radiation; the treatments that are even worse than the disease, whether they won or lost that final battle. My whole family, then, both the living and the dead, are cancer survivors.

So this post is for them all, because I love them. But mostly it’s for my Uncle Bob, the best uncle a girl could hope for and one of the finest humans I have ever known.

Hasta La Vista, Tio Bobbo

Hasta La Vista, Tio Bobbo

 

A Tale in Eight Words

Posted in Important Issues, Loss, Uncategorized by

There is a legend about Ernest Hemingway, in which the author bets a group of his fellow writers that he can compose an entire short story in six words. No one believes him, so he ups the ante to $10 from everyone who says he can’t. And then he writes the following words on a napkin:

“For Sale: Baby shoes. Never worn.”

We can assume that Hemingway won his bet. In the context of the time period, these words — by this particular writer — require only a fragment of imagination to put together an emotionally charged story of hopeful anticipation, heartbreaking loss, and the moving forward of the human spirit. The words are simple; the tale they evoke is profound.

Over the past week, another simple sentence has been in my mind:

“A gunman opened fire in a crowded mall.” 

In just eight words, within the context of our own culture, we have another story that is chillingly complete. We don’t need any imagination at all to know that terror and violence followed. That people were hurt in body and in mind and lives were lost. That there were heroes there too, and that strangers helped one another to survive. 

Those eight words are enough to tell us that a community was changed, forever. And they have been in my mind because this time, it was my community that was changed. 

Ten days ago, a disturbed young man came to the Mall in Columbia, less than two miles from my own home. He carried with him a bag that contained a gun, ammunition, and crude explosive devices. He opened fire in one of the most crowded areas of the mall, during one of the busiest times of the week. He killed two people, and caused injury to several others, before shooting himself. And all of this happened in front of hundreds of people — children, teens, and adults — who were living out their daily lives in a location that could reasonably be considered safe.

It’s hard to express how surreal it is to see your own neighborhood on national news as the scene of what appears to be yet another mass shooting. It is surreal, but not entirely shocking — I’m realistic (and anxiety-ridden) enough to know that a gunman shooting in a crowd can happen anywhere. Part of me was waiting for something like this to happen somewhere close by. Our mall is the ideal location for this kind of violence. But way you feel when you actually witness a shooting event unfold in your own community — with the knowledge that your own friends and neighbors are among those caught in the fray — is inexplicable.

Compared to other similar shootings, we got lucky — “only” two lives were lost. From what I have read in the news, it seems like our shooter intended to kill more people, but for some reason we will never know, he chose to stop the madness and kill himself instead. I’d like to think that he saw the horror he had caused, and just couldn’t cause any more. I’d like to think — and I do — that he felt remorse.

In the aftermath of a tragedy like the one that happened here we are faced with a sea of questions that come crashing in like waves. The most insistent of these questions is also the most contentious: How do we stop this from happening again? I wish I could answer this. Or, perhaps more accurately, I wish that we as a society could come together to answer this question. Because I do have my own answers, and I feel strongly about them. But for every person who agrees with me, there is another person who passionately disagrees with me. And it feels like none of us wants to listen to anyone else, with the result that instead of stopping the hatred and violence, we are fueling it instead.

But there is another, much smaller question, that faces my own community. And this question is: Do the events of January 25, 2014 define who we are?

I think they do.

People often use the word “overcome” to describe struggling successfully through adversity. But I won’t. Because when I think of someone overcoming something,  I envision an obstacle being climbed and left behind. We overcome the bumps in the road that try to stop our progress: injuries, illnesses, setbacks in our careers.

We don’t overcome hardship: we toil through it, absorbing it as we go, until it becomes a part of us. We weather it and survive it. Survival sounds like a pathetic goal, but it isn’t. Surviving is the most powerful kind of living. And when we survive adversity, we can never leave that adversity behind — because as we were mucking through, we were shaping our spirit. We are changed, forever, and I would argue, for the better.

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My lovely little city is an idyllic place to live. Our schools are excellent. We have hundreds of miles of woodland pathways that are trailed by rivers and streams. From my own home, I can run to three different lakes, where I can see deer and blue heron and geese and ducks and tiny little turtles and frogs. In the summertime, there are musicians, and dance instructions, and family movies at the large lake behind the mall. There are free concerts at one of our several truly beautiful local parks. I chose to live here because I didn’t want to live anywhere else. I love my life here.

But we are now a lovely little city where a gunman opened fire in a crowded mall. Those eight words have changed us forever. A tragedy of this magnitude must leave its scar. The lives of two young people were taken from us; we can never be the same again.

We are changed forever in another way, too. Because the events of that day brought out a part of our community that we had never seen before — a part that was always there, but whose fine edges were etched deeper through survival.

We  now know that we are a community that comes together in a crisis. We know that we can trust our emergency system — from the dispatchers to the first responders to the crime scene investigators — to do its job and to do it well.

 Our police arrived within two minutes of the first call. Dispatchers calmly talked people through their fear and advised them on what to do to stay safe. Stories from those who were in the mall at the time of  the shooting show acts of heroism and compassion from everyone who was there. Shoppers helped and comforted one another. Mall employees almost universally jumped in to help bring people to safety. They provided shelter and shared their food and helped entertain the children.

And we were taking care of those of us who weren’t there too. Within minutes of the first 911 call to the mall, I received a message from a dispatcher friend telling me to stay away. Seconds later, a friend who was at the mall with her young daughter posted the same message on Facebook. And within a half an hour, I saw more posts, e-mails, and text messages from people checking in on me and others than I could count. I have never been more proud to be a part of any community than I was that day.

We could have heard a story about mass chaos, about patrons crushing each other to get to safety and employees abandoning their posts to barricade themselves in the offices or backrooms of their businesses. We could have heard about inefficiencies in our emergency system or inadequacy among the officers who responded. But that’s not what happened. People shone.

A tale can be told in eight simple words. Lives can be lost, hearts can be broken, and a community can be permanently changed. But  of course we know that there is more to the story, more than can ever be put into words. My community has lived this story, and we will continue to live this story for as long as people can remember it. We won’t overcome it, but we will survive it. We will shine even more brightly because of the scars.

I still don’t want to live anywhere else in the world.

* * *

These photos were taken of an impromptu memorial at the Zumiez store where the events on January 25 occurred.

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Brianna Benlolo, Tyler Johnson, and Darion Aguilar: I pray that your souls may find peace and that your loved ones may find solace as they survive your loss.

We Are All They Need

Posted in Children, Holidays, Loss, memories, Motherhood, Women by

Today is Janurary 6, my mother’s day. It became “my” mother’s day 23 years ago when my own mother, after a nearly eight-year battle, lost her life to breast cancer and when I became aware of how vitally important a mother’s presence is in the lives of her children.

For many years, whenever January 6th arrived, I thought about my own losses. A first, I missed her with every nerve; I felt flayed and exposed to a host of things that were beyond my understanding. Gradually, my piercing grief was replaced by a longing that was no less intense, because it contained the realization that with each passing year I was separated even further from her.

But now that I have children of my own, when January 6th rolls around I find myself thinking less about my own losses and more about what my mother lost when she died.

She was so beautiful.

She was so beautiful.

Parenthood is a future-thinking endeavor. When we first breathe in the newness of our just-born child, we look forward, far forward, to decades of moments with that brand-new baby. Yes, we marvel at their smallness, their freshness, their perfection. We revel in the tiny yet immense gift we have been given. But we also envision what that baby will be like as a child, and as a teenager, and as an adult. We see them on birthdays, on holidays, at graduations and weddings. We see their children.

We plan to be with them until they are grown, and to experience life with them after they have reached their potential as adults. We don’t plan for our relationship with them to end when they are children.

When my mom died, she didn’t just lose her own life. She lost her life with her children. For her, my life and my brother’s life, intertwined as they were with her own, ended when we were eleven and six.

I can’t even imagine how painful it must have been for her, when she finally accepted that the end was near, to know that she was about to lose her future with us. That she would miss all of the moments of our lives, big and small, for the rest of our lives. That she would never know us as adults, or meet the people who would become important to us as we matured. That she would never, ever, hold a grandchild in her arms.

As her daughter, and as the mother of my own children, it breaks my heart to know that this face…

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…and this face

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…are wholly unknown to her.

When she knew that she was dying, she also had to know that she was letting go of a million moments with her children. That the past was all she would ever have with us. She must have experienced the kind of pain that pray I never have to face.

***

This is not going to turn into one of those “enjoy every moment with your child because you never know how many you have” posts. I could go there, but I’m not a hypocrite. I would wager large sums of money that, when my children are grown and gone, I absolutely will not be longing to re-experience the prickly-hot feeling of panic spiked with shame that comes over you when your five-year-old is publicly behaving like a spoiled toddler, while your toddler is running in circles like an untrained dog smelling distinctly of eau de poo. There are many moments that I won’t miss.

I’m not even saying that we moms (and dads!) should be doing anything differently. If anything, I am saying we should all do less, or at least that we should worry less about what we should be doing. Because if I have learned one thing after 23 years of being without my mother, I can tell you that what I missed, what I craved, was her. Her presence. The knowledge that the world contained her.

I didn’t need any extras. I didn’t need perfection. I would have preferred to have had her healthy, but to have had her at all was a blessing and, as I have learned, a luxury. To have had her, just as she was, was enough.

And if just having her was enough, then it follows that just having us, their parents, is enough for our own children. The fact that we are in their lives, that we are actively loving them, is enough. Our flaws and imperfections and mistakes do nothing to lessen the impact of our mere presence. Isn’t that a freeing thought?

What I am saying is that the sum of moments that we have with our children is probably the best thing that we, or they, will ever have. And that if we are able to look forward to a future of these moments, when we and they are all present together in this world, then we are damned lucky.

A Christmas Post

Posted in Children, Holidays, Loss, traditions, Uncategorized by

This is going to be an unusual post for me: deeply personal, painful, and unedited.

Around this time of year, talking heads on television have a lot to say about what Christmas is, what Christmas should be, and what Christmas is not. Many of them are angry — no, outraged — over how others celebrate their holiday.

Christmas should be about CHRIST, these angry faces argue. Which means that in our words, and in our decorations, and in everything we do outwardly, we should be focusing fully on CHRISTmas. They make definitive assertions about Santa and Jesus and behind everything is an attitude of scathing contempt for people who celebrate Christ’s birth differently from them.

In the midst of this anger are people like me: people for whom Christmas is a season of anxiety, excitement, and bittersweet memories.

I have a hard time at Christmas. It has always been my favorite holiday. I have so many treasured memories of the season. And now that I have children of my own, there is even more joy to savor and celebrate. I look forward to it every year.

I also dread it every year. Because Christmas is also the season when my mother, and later my uncle, died of cancer. So along with the memories of happy Christmases past, I have the memory of myself, 11 years old, praying fervently, desperately, that my mom would be out of the hospital to celebrate Christmas with us.

I have the memory of myself a few days later, on Christmas day, in bed with my mother, who had just been released from the hospital, not because she was healthy, but because there was nothing left to do. She was in hospice care.

I have the memory of myself giving her a $5 vial of drugstore perfume, because an 11-year-old has no idea of what impending death really, truly means.

I have the memory of the last time I spoke to my her, the day after that Christmas, but I have no memory of what she said. I remember her coma, her suffering, and her death, which happened on a Sunday, January 6, just after my family returned from the Mass celebrating the Epiphany. My prayers had been answered; she was with us for Christmas, through to its very end. But my grief was nevertheless unfathomable.

It has been 23 years since that last Christmas with my mother and the grief is still there. It has changed and matured and is no longer as incapacitating as it once was. But it lingers, and at times it hits me like a punch in the stomach. I still hide in bathrooms to cry.

So you can imagine how, with all these mixed emotions coursing through my mind, I’m a little on edge at Christmas. Just a little… jumpy, if not actually constantly on the brink of a nervous breakdown.

You can also imagine my feelings when, upon tuning into the Daily Show for some much-needed laughter, I see people who, in the spirit of keeping Christ in Christmas are genuinely, thoroughly infuriated at the idea of a holiday tree in a public square or a tongue-in-cheek Festivus pole near a nativity scene.

Really? You are asking me, as an expression of my true faith in Christ, to be angry about decorations? You want me to be annoyed when people wish me Happy Holidays, and to limit my own greetings to an emphatic Merry Christmas? You want me to call legislators about how they refer to the decorated trees in their cities and you want me to complain when retailers don’t feature life-sized nativity scenes in their Christmas displays? And you want me to do these things because THAT is how we keep Christ in Christmas?

No, thank you. Christmas is hard enough for me. It’s hard enough for many, many other people for whom the holidays are a time that reminds them of their own losses, their failures, their regrets. I’m not going to get angry about how other people celebrate (or don’t celebrate) the birth of a Savior. And I’m not going to get angry at the anger.

Here’s what I am going to do, to keep Christ in Christmas: I am going to ask everyone who reads this to walk away from the anger and the criticism and the so-called culture war over what our Christian faith truly means.  I am going to ask you to remember all of us who are broken or hurting or empty this Christmas. But above all, I am going to breathe through my feelings of joy, anticipation, regret, and pain and I am going to remember that a Child was born and that he was the Prince of Peace.

She was pretty damn special.

She was pretty damn special.