Monthly Archives: November 2017

Loving What Is In The Moment

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Sometimes the long view is not what I need.  I need this moment, without hostage to past or future, experienced for itself alone. ~~~Martha Whitmore Hickman

In the beginning, life moved a moment at a time and each moment was literally too much to bear.  More than one time during that first week I could not stand.  I actually fell to the ground with the weight of the reality that my daughter was dead.  Typing that last sentence brought tears and I could feel the hands of gravity again reaching up through the ground like some zombie nightmare, through my flesh to my heart and pulling me under.  It is no small thing just to admit that reality is the reality.

In the beginning my thoughts acknowledged breathing in one time, breathing out one time.  They told me I was sitting in a chair and that I was looking at a tree.  My thoughts confirmed the fact that there was a purple ribbon tied to the tree, it was twisting gently in the breeze, because my daughter died and that is one of the ways we chose to honor her life in her favorite color.

In the beginning, I was profoundly aware of the energy and effort it took to move through one moment then to and through the next moment.  Though love surrounded me at all times and I loved, I couldn’t love the moment.  Time was required before any moments could pass without debilitating pain.  More time was needed for me to believe I could have more of those moments.  Time doesn’t heal, but it does make space for healing to happen.  Some of us need more space than others and that is just fine.

It rained today and then the sun came out.  I lay in bed looking out the window at the water sparkling all over the giant trees and the beauty of it took my breath away.  The sky was so blue!  Just a few green leaves were left and the brilliance of that green against the blue with the sparkling… my mind threatened to go elsewhere and I called it back.  Breathing in one time.  Breathing out one time.  No thought.  Just feel.  No pain in this moment.

The moment spreads beyond the boundaries of myself to one I love and he sparkles, too, like the rain in the sun on the trees and it takes my breath away.  Imagine the power of the moment if two were fully in it together, or a hundred, or a million souls, fully present to the moment, to each other; oh, how that might sparkle!

The energy and effort it once took to move through each moment and into the next is now the energy and effort it takes to remain in this moment without launching myself a year, 5 years, 10 out into the unknown and unknowable and wondering how I’ll ever survive to get there.  It’s equal effort not to just let go and fall from the mountain face into the eternity swirling beneath the mist below where all the things I regret reside.

Time creates the space needed to clear the mind enough to hear the heart.  Once the heart can be heard, one can be present to it but not until.  Once present to my heart, I’ll cease adding to what swirls beneath the mist below. Once present to my heart I can no longer pretend to be anything I’m not and all I want to be is real.  My heart asks nothing of me, but eventually, everything breaks down.  It broadcasts constantly, like a radio tower atop the mountain I continually climb, but it won’t do that forever.  That is not allowed any of us.

It rained today and the sun came out.  That is what happened.  I cried today and I felt better for a little while.  That is what happened.  The rain cleansed the earth.  My tears cleansed my being.  It was no small thing.  The vulnerability of tears is never a small thing.  The vulnerability in the moment a tear falls cradles one in the safety of a moment without hostage to past or future.

~~~

It’s New Year’s Eve In My World

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It’s New Year’s Eve, except it’s November 14th and the new year begins at 7:52 pm instead of midnight, and really it isn’t the new year this moment marks, rather it marks the end of a lifetime, the end of a human life and completion of a human existence; my daughter’s human existence.  For me, the mother who gave birth to that precious life, it marks the end of the world.  It marks the beginning of not the new year but another year.

A moment after 7:52 pm that November evening in 2012, the big bang; the birth and beginning of a whole new world.  It’s a world, a life, I’m being asked to mother, to nurture, protect, provide for, and love but without my child in it and without all the wishes, hopes and dreams a lifetime and a world with my child in it once held.

Just like every other new mother, I’m afraid, insecure and feel utterly inadequate to the task but there it is, screaming to be fed, changed, bathed, cuddled, sung to softly and rocked to sleep.  Night after night, waking to panicked, desperate cries, sometimes my own.  Night after night, walking the floor, night after night, sleeping in the rocking chair, softly humming.

November 14th, 7:52 pm marks the center of my own infinity.  There is Before Danni.  There is After Danni.  This moment reordered my life in the ways I mark the passing of time, it changed the stories I tell, and all the reasons I tell them.  It created a new scale by which to measure okay and normal.  My seasons look different, have different weather patterns, and different climates altogether.  I have a new calendar that doesn’t mesh well with the one the rest of the world observes and my schedule varies accordingly to accommodate my own holidays.  Banks and government offices remain oblivious to this new system, however, and the mail is delivered right on time.

In my world, “the holidays” are already over while the rest of the world is just ramping up.  It is hard to do.  It is hard keep doing it the way it’s always been done.  It’s even harder to figure out what to do instead.  My calendar says it’s New Year’s Eve, so while the rest of the world goes nuts (the American world, anyway)  I’m ready to slow down, become quiet, or go to a place that doesn’t do this kind of crazy.  Today, my world enters the deep winter dark, anciently and traditionally experienced as the last day of December.  That is my reality.

Traditionally in my home, New Year’s Day has been one of putting Christmas back into the attic, pushing the furniture back where it beglongs, throwing out the junk food, buying salad fixins and plugging in the treadmill to walk off the guilt of all that blessed joy.  That is what I’ll be doing in my world tomorrow.

Others around me do find great joy in the celebration of holiday traditions and I certainly don’t want to diminish that for them.  I’m struggling with my new traditions though; ones I never wished to create, like how to spend this day each year and how to recover from it with enough energy and motivation to pretend to enjoy or even participate at all in the traditions of the next six weeks in a world where I no longer feel quite at home.

It isn’t that I’m not grateful.  It isn’t that I never feel joy.  I am truly grateful for a long list of people and things in my life, but I’m sad.  I’m tired.  I hurt and it’s human nature to avoid pain.  Some primitive part of my brain believes this pain will kill me.  It’s hard to resist primitive.  It’s hard to fight tradition.  Sans fight, I’ll take flight.  It’s human instinct.

Those who care the most about me remind me to be gentle with myself.  I’m learning what that means and it isn’t exactly what I once thought.  The holidays, by nature, require a lot of being gentle with others, as well.  So does grief for that matter.  One must first learn to be gentle with others before one is truly able to be gentle with oneself.  Paradoxically, people frequently say, “It’s important to put on your own oxygen mask before helping others.”  The difference between this sort of self-care and being gentle with oneself lies in the inherent permission to simply say no to helping others at all.

Self-care is drinking enough water, getting enough rest, exercising, getting a massage, or literally putting on my oxygen mask before helping others.  Being gentle with myself is turning compassion inward when a well-meaning someone says something insensitive or hurtful in trying to comfort me.  I can forgive them.  I can comfort myself.  I can begin to understand that if they knew what to say, they’d say it.  No one knows what to say.  There are no words, and that is truth.

Being gentle with myself is allowing time and space for dreams to drift back in and the grace to have faith in my power to find peace within this new reality.  Being gentle with myself means forgiving myself for not having the energy I wish I did.  Being gentle with myself means allowing the things I know I should be doing to go undone for a little while longer while I heal.  Being gentle with myself means sitting in the rocking chair with the critical inner voice that tells me I’m weak or worthless and reminding myself it’s lying; night after night, singing to it softly, rocking it to sleep, softly humming.

 

Sand and Stones

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Five years ago, my daughter had 4 days to live. Stones in my chest; that is the only thought moving through my mind. All the things I wish I could have done differently fill in the spaces like gravel. More tiny stones in a jar; there’s always a little more space to fill… like sand pouring into those spaces, actions I wish I had taken or hadn’t. Water flows, my thoughts and feelings, the inexpressible, into the space remaining. Add light. Add vibration. Infinite.

House for the Living – A Beginning

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Cotton balls, tissues, make up wipes, the envelope from her first ballot (she was killed 8 days after the 2012 election), a get well card torn into many tiny pieces, written in red, all the i’s dotted with hearts.  She went on a shopping spree November 3rd, receipts for body spray, chewing gum, a head band, October 30, October 26, not expensive things, not a lot of things, just her favorite things, toe socks, something Joe Boxer, torn pieces from a box of La Croix sparkling peach pear water, an empty Sea Breeze bottle, she ate at Subway, a tag from a stuffed Domo, she ate at Wendy’s…that was before it closed as suddenly as she was taken… and then it opened again.  We went there together when we were out late and having a girl’s night.  She always ordered spicy chicken.  A packet of birth control pills, empty except the last 5.  Chewing gum…those are her teeth marks.  A tag from Twisted Angel, I think she offered to give me what might have been attached to it at one time after a particularly heart-to-heart.  We dipped our fries in our frosties.  A mostly empty pressed powder compact and a receipt for the new one.  She’d cut some of her hair.  It is still so soft.  She was having nose bleeds.  Butterfinger wrappers, Kit Kat wrappers, a Peppermint Patty, a purple trick-or-treat bag.  She broke her ankle on Halloween one year, she was a ladybug.  A piece of cotton twine from the waistband of something.  A movie ticket stub from 2010, Sherlock, stuck to the bottom of the can under the liner.  A piece of purple yarn from the scarf she was crocheting.  I have a photo of her snuggling the Ratsies in it.  Some neon orange ribbon, frayed and hair tangled into it.  A receipt for something black from JoAnn fabrics….dated 2013…. that can’t be right…. a wire hanger twisted, bent, folded to fit into the little blue trash can.

I transfered each item from that can into a small trash bag… the remnants of my daughter’s last week on earth.  I walked the small trash bag outside to the curbside can and tossed it in.  My heart ached but tears hadn’t fallen until I opened the door to go outside.  I took a deep breath of autumn air.  I’ve let go of what she let go of and I came back in and sat down to write all I could remember seeing & touching before it, too, left me.

Now I can begin to let go of what she didn’t.  Now I can figure out how to let go of the things she held dear, the things she loved, the things she surrounded herself with, the things that expressed who she was in this world, things that comforted her in ways I’ll never really know and in ways I never could, even when I wanted to.  She was her own person from the day she was born.

After this trash can cleansing, I crumbled into the depression that seems to have returned to visit.  I woke up, made coffee (a pointless exercise) and crumbled again.  I slept more and my mind kept reciting the list, “what am I forgetting?”  like a bridal or baby shower game where you have 30 seconds to memorize every wedding or baby thing on a tray that’s then covered and the one who can write down the most items from memory wins a magnetized shopping list to stick to the fridge.  I’ve won that game more than one time in my time.  This time’s forever…and it’ll be headed to the landfill before I wake and there’s no damned prize.

I’m guilty of enshrining my daughter.  The words echo in my head from a book I’ve studied on recovering from grief, “We even knew of one woman who hadn’t changed a single thing in her daughter’s room though it had been over 5 years.”

Is that why I feel I need to start on her room now?  It’s been almost 5 years and I’m feeling like I’m supposed to be something other than a glaring example of what not to do according to someone else?  Who makes the rules of grieving, anyway?  There aren’t supposed to be any rules… no rules.