Six Years

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Today marks six years since Dannica was taken from me.  Her life ended this evening, November 14th, 2012.  The life I’d lived up to that point ended and the person I had been died then, too.  The boundaries of this writing space I’ve created only allow one aspect of who I am to exist.  However, like a ball of wire, my experience of Dannica’s death is inextricably connected to all of my experiences and every other person in my life and yet I’m not able to speak of those things.  Some days, my whole life hurts, not only because Dannica died, but because it’s all connected, and it isn’t just about her anymore, or just me.  Sometimes, I don’t know quite how to move forward without bringing it all with me.

It’s been so long, six years, and it’s still so new, like yesterday.  Both are equally true as are the many ways one could possibly feel as the result of one or the other being true on its own.  The world in general has decided that six years is a very long time, indeed, to be feeling like it’s still so new.

Some have suggested that I learn to be more at home in the quiet, empty spaces instead of uncomfortably trying to fill them.  Others have suggested that instead of trying to create happiness I need to become intimately acquainted with and truly accepting of the wounding nature of life.  Still others have suggested it is now time for me to move into my power.  I don’t know what that means.  Some days I’m still doing well to move into the next room.

In daily life, others’ comments frequently convince me it’s best to keep more things to myself; it’s best not to mention my daughter so much anymore, or my struggles in life or my thoughts about those things or, heaven forbid, my feelings.  It’s so much easier to be quiet.  Invisible.  I’ve begun to feel protective of this grief; that it is precious because it is my connection to my daughter, that it is too personal sometimes to let out of me or to share with someone I’m not sure will treat it with the respect it deserves.  I pull it close to my heart and hold it tenderly there most of the time now.

Most of my life I’ve felt the dark pull of Autumn, giving me permission and urging me to move inward, to become quiet, to rest, to silently celebrate the passing of another season.  This is the energy I was born into and the energy my daughter Dannica died into.  It is a sacred, sacred time for me.  Lately, I’ve spent time reading the writing of others who’ve experienced similar losses.  While the death of a child may not be uncommon, I’m convinced it will always be the most painful thing a parent can experience whether it happens once or many times.  It is somehow and sadly comforting to me to remember I am not alone in this experience or in this pain or in this changed way in which I now view the world around me.

For now, I’d like to share the writing of Frances Gunther, wife of American journalist John Gunther, excerpted from John’s memoir Death Be Not Proud (1949).  Mrs. Gunther writes here in response to the death of her 17-year-old son, Johnny.  She expresses so much of what fills my heart today and most of my days:

My grief, I find, is not desolation or rebellion at universal law or deity.  I find grief to be much simpler and sadder.  Contemplating the Eternal Deity and His Universal Laws leaves me grave but dry-eyed.  But a sunny fast wind along the Sound, good sailing weather, a new light boat, will shame me to tears:  how Johnny would have loved this boat, this wind, this sunny day! …

Missing him now, I am haunted by my own shortcomings, how often I failed him.  I think every parent must have a sense of failure, even of sin, merely in the remaining alive after the death of a child.  One feels that it is not right to live when one’s child has died, that one should somehow have found the way to give one’s life to save his life.  Failing there, one’s failures during his too brief life seem all the harder to bear and forgive.  How often I wish I had not sent him away to school when he was still so young that he wanted to remain at home in his own room, with his own things and his own parents.  How I wish we had maintained the marriage that created the home he loved so much.  How I wish we had been able before he died to fulfill his last heart’s desires:  the talk with Professor Einstein, the visit to Harvard Yard, the dance with his friend, Mary.

These desires seem so simple.  How wonderful they would have been to him.  All the wonderful things in life are so simple that one is not aware of their wonder until they are beyond touch.  Never have I felt the wonder and beauty and joy of life so keenly as now in my grief that Johnny is not here to enjoy them.

Today, when I see parents impatient or tired or bored with their children, I wish I could say to them, But they are alive, think of the wonder of that!  They may be a care and a burden, but think, they are alive!  You can touch them—what a miracle!  You don’t have to hold back sudden tears when you see just a headline about the Yale-Harvard game because you know your boy will never see the Yale-Harvard game, never see the house in Paris he was born in, never bring home his girl, and you will not hand down your jewels to his bride and will have no grandchildren to play with and spoil.  Your sons and daughters are alive.  Think of that—not dead but alive!  Exult and sing.

All parents who have lost a child will feel what I mean.  Others, luckily, cannot.  But I hope they will embrace them with a little added rapture and a keener awareness of joy.

I wish we had loved Johnny more when he was alive.  Of course we loved Johnny very much.  Johnny knew that.  Everybody knew it.  Loving Johnny more.  What does it mean?  What can it mean, now?

Parents all over the earth who lost sons in the war have felt this kind of question, and sought an answer.  To me, it means loving life more, being more aware of life, of one’s fellow human beings, of the earth.

It means obliterating, in a curious but real way, the ideas of evil and hate and the enemy, and transmuting them, with the alchemy of suffering, into ideas of clarity and charity.

It means caring more and more about other people, at home and abroad, all over the earth.  It means caring more about God.

I hope we can love Johnny more and more till we too die, and leave behind us, as he did, the love of love, the love of life.

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How I miss you Dannica, my beautiful, beautiful girl…

June 16, 1994 ~ November 14, 2012

~*~

Happy Birthday To You My Little Angel

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Dear Dannica,

Today marks the 6th time I will whisper “Happy Birthday,” to you in heaven.  I still relive in my mind and my body the weeks leading up to your birth… that precious, blessed event, and the first time we were alone together, looking into each other’s eyes.  The sound of your first cry still vividly vibrant in my memory.  When I held you in the next moment I already knew you.  We were together again, finally; and strangers anew.

My life since your passing has resembled one of our afternoons spent immersed in play dough.  Bits and pieces pulled and rolled and shaped and shifted and mashed and balled up again.  Starting over and over again only to ball it up once more and shove it back into the plastic can, mash the lid on and call it a (play dough) day.  I wonder what I’ll make tomorrow.

Sometimes, I play house instead, just like when I was a child.  I pretend that I’m the mom and that I make a home from the space I’m in.  I pretend this is a bed and that is an oven and the other can be a sunny window full of fresh herbs or maybe a warm hearth over which to hang pot for bubbling soup.

I pretend I have two children, the oldest a son, and a younger daughter.  I love to cook for them and play with them and teach them things about the world.  I love to bathe them before bed and rub soft smelling lotion into their skin and bury my nose in their sweet, damp hair as I read them stories that carry them to far away sparkling, starry places to dream.

In the morning I wander through the flowers and cut the most beautiful and fragrant.  I put them in a vase on the table and I make pancakes with banana slices and sweet peach cream to drizzle over.  The cream is the color of the sun through the window, casting yellow-orange giggles over sticky little fingers… I wish to kiss each little one… just one more time.

Other times, I choose not to play at all.  I choose just to be Me, all the Mes, moving in unison, supporting each other through another day; the child wearing her mother’s apron and clacky shoes, the young mother living her dream, the aging woman whose dream has been shattered and is now afraid dreams just don’t get to come true when she dreams them.

Maybe she just never understood once dreams come true all that’s left is for them to end.  Maybe she loved her first dream so much she forgot to have another one.  Maybe there are more important things to think about now and no time for dreams at all; airiest of airy castles in the sky, slowly shredded then scattered by a breeze.

I pulled a book from the shelf last night, picked at random, and in the same spirit, opened it and read the first paragraphs I saw:

“Gran?” I asked, “Why don’t you paint?”

She said, “I’m not an artist.”

“But don’t you want to talk to God?”

She paused, letting the dough spring back over her fingers as she kneaded.  “What do you mean, my little one?”

“Granpop says art is a way to talk to God.”

She turned to me, flour up to her elbows, wisps of grey hair about her face, her black eyes boring a hole into me.  “My home is my art.”

(Zen Encounters With Loneliness by Terrance Keenan pg. 49)

My home is my art.  I must have read that over 20 times.  My home is my art, too.  My work takes place in a space I’ve feathered like a nest with the intent of inviting, comforting, cradling, healing, and being with a sense of ease and peace and nurturing.  When my work is done, I offer the same to myself that I offered to others.  This nest is now empty and mostly quiet, so full of spaces where memories, bright like peach cream sunlight, play on single screens to an audience of one.

When caring people glance my way and whisper, “Isn’t she over it yet?  Why can’t she move on?” maybe they can only imagine the hole in my life shaped like a teenage daughter, “…and well, it’s been so long.”  What they can’t see, as if that’s not enough, are the holes in my life shaped like dreams; wispy castles in the sky.  What they can’t see are the years filled with the effort of pulling, rolling, shaping, shifting, mashing and balling up of the clay that used to be a life with purpose and meaning and direction…passion.

Maybe caring people aren’t whispering anything at all.  Maybe I only imagine they are.  Probably, they are happy in their own lives, with their families, their friends, feeling joy, and loving their lives.  That is good.

I keep looking for what I’m supposed to do now.  I keep hoping it’s going to be obvious.  I keep thinking you’ve led me to that answer, but I keep making mistakes and it isn’t the answer at all.  My body is tired.  My heart is broken.  My skin is lonely.  My mind is restless.  I am afraid.

I don’t blame you, Little Angel, for any of this, but I do so wish you were here still, so I could hug you on your birthday and see your beautiful smile.  I will make something sweet for your birthday.  I will softly sing your name and instead of blowing out the candles, I’ll light them and let them go until they go out.  I’ll rock in the chair and remember the dream where I held you in my arms and looked into your eyes and we knew each other well.  Happy 24th, Little Beauty.

Like Gran, I will pause, and I will let the dough spring back over my fingers.  I will try again to sculpt a new dream.  I wonder what I will make tomorrow.

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.

What I’ve Learned About Grief Through the Death of My Pet(s)

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(Written May 1, 2016 – Posted February 9, 2017)

Two days ago, I made the difficult decision that it was time to say goodbye to Blueberry (AKA Budda-Bear), my pet budgie of 14 years.  He was a buddy to my other budgie, Emi, for 12 of those years and Emi’s 2nd partner.  Emi’s 14 years old now, too… 62 budgie years according to one website.  My paternal grandfather passed away the spring we brought Emi home.  My father passed away two years later.  He was also 62.

62 is very young for a man but pretty old for a little bird.  Kidney cancer took my dad.  Kidney failure took little blue.  Today is May 1; old age and complications of Parkinson’s took my paternal grandfather 14 years ago today.  I will forever remember this anniversary, not because I’m good about that, I’m actually pretty terrible about that, but one year after grandpa’s passing, my then 9 year old Dannica came to me before school that morning and asked, “Didn’t great-grandpa pass away a year ago today?”  I really wasn’t sure.  I said so and she told me that he did and that he was sitting in the chair in the corner of the living room waving at her to remind her of that…to remind me of that.

Now, May 1st 2016, I remember that incident and I think of my Dannica, with her great grandpa, perhaps both waving at me from the chair in the corner of the living room even though I’ve lost the ability to see it for myself.  I believe she saw it… I believe they’re there.

My mind is always looking for meaning in the numbers, for patterns, for messages, for answers.  I imagine if I could somehow graph all the significant numbers I notice day to day, they might look like a sacred geometrical flower of life or an infinity symbol, the repetition of birth, life, death, and over and over and over again… maybe it would look like the Golden Ratio present in all life, like the branches of a tree, or a nautilus shell… maybe my life with all its numeric mysteries looks like that too.  If it does, I’d say all is in order even as I feel chaos, and living continues to hurt more than I’d like.

The veterinarian told me Emi would grieve Bluberry’s passing.  I didn’t know what that might look like.  As I made the 30 minute drive home from her office, Budda birdie’s fluffy little body finally at peace and bundled gently in a box, I wondered how to break the news to Emi.  I dreaded hearing his calls not being answered, watching him search for his friend, seeing him sitting there all alone puffed up and sad.  Suddenly, comforting the living was more difficult than saying goodbye to the dying.

I know this feeling well as it’s been a constant companion since my Dannica passed 3-1/2 years ago.  Her brother felt and continues to feel her absence in ways I can only imagine.  I know what it feels like to have lost my daughter, my dad, my grandpa, grandmothers, aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews, clients, a true love, other pets… I don’t know what it feels like to have lost someone as close to my heart as a sister or my best friend.

Carrying the empty cage and the little box, I sat down next to Emi’s cage and I opened the door.  I gently lifted lifeless birdie so he could see.  I saw recognition in Emi’s wide, scared eyes.  He looked from Blueberry’s body to my face and back and forth and back again.  All I could do is cry and hope he understood.  I just kept saying, “I don’t know what to do,” and I didn’t.

I lit a candle and placed the little box near a photo of my daughter and asked her to take good care of him.  I know she will.  She loved animals more than anyone I’ve ever known and they loved her.  I dug a little grave under the apple tree where Dannica’s ashes are and put the little box in it, covered it over, sat there in the rain reminding myself that Budda Bear isn’t there, in that ground, any more than Dannica is there.  He’s in my heart and he’s in Emi’s.  He’s in the house, in the trees, like Dannica, he’s in the light.

When I came back in, I swept the floor near the cage.  I don’t know why I did that but I remembered doing the same thing close in time to my Daughter’s passing and other loved one’s passings; sweeping the kitchen floor, sobbing, and sweeping, folding laundry.  It’s what the body does when the heart and mind shut down.  It doesn’t know what else to do so it does what can be done mindlessly.

Chicken soup comforts so I started chopping vegetables.  I stopped and walked back to the cage to whisper to Emi, cry a little more.  He puffed up and sat on his perch and didn’t move for the longest time.  I went back to cutting vegetables and it occurred to me that Blue had been alpha bird.  Emi would need me to initiate things, like eating, that he didn’t usually do first on his own.  I grabbed a handful of chopped carrots and sat next to him eating them one at a time.  He watched intently and then jumped down and started eating.  That’s what hope looks like.

That first night, I couldn’t bear to leave him so I slept on the couch near his cage.  He was restless for a while; hopping from perch to perch, finally settling.  He cried.  Yes, parakeets cry.  Morning brought panic and I remembered my own disorientation upon waking following Dannica’s death.  Peace crumbling into reality as I fell out of bed each morning wondering why it was even necessary to do that much.  When I gently lifted the blanket from the cage, Emi was sleeked with fear, wide eyed, and looking anxiously for his friend.  I spoke to him softly but he clung to the side of the cage, little beak hooked over one of the bars, supporting his weight, just looking to where Blueberry used to be…incredulous birdy.

I decided it was a good idea to move the cage so he had a new view through the sliding glass door to the back yard.  The sunlight was lovely, dew sparkling on the leaves of the apple tree under which his buddy-bird now rested.  I sat with him, wishing I could say or do something comforting.  I said lots of things, but he only speaks budgie so I continued to sit.  I watched him watch the world outside; a world he’d never seen, one that no longer includes his blue friend.  Even if I spoke budgie, is any answer a good enough answer to “Why?”

After a time, Emi moved toward the side of the cage closest to me and started making happy budgie noises but then hooked himself, again, in the lookout position. Eventually, he returned to me on the other side of the cage and then to the perch allowing him to look out into the sunlit world again.

He sat there, looking out the window for the longest time, not preening, not sleeping, just sitting, just looking.  I remember the first days following Dannica’s passing, how I sat on the couch, looking out into that world, watching the sun rise, watching the light shift over the trees, the grass, the day go by, the sun light fade and the stars come out and I hadn’t moved.  Grief brings with it, in the beginning, the capacity to be still.  The only force acting upon me was the gravity that held me in place.  I saw the same in Emi, his little beak hooked over the bar of the cage… gravity… Mother Earth just holding him as she held me, as she holds the apple tree and the body of Little Blue Bird and the ashes of my Daughter.

Emi and I, we’ve spent time sitting, searching, watching, crying, each whispering little happy noises to each other in our own languages, becoming quiet once more.  Napping together.  Feeling sad together.  The most peaceful moments are the ones in which we simply sit together in silence and watch the world go on. Silence needn’t be awkward.  The power of simply sitting, fully present, with another being who is grieving can be profound and more healing than anything.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Sadly, Emi developed the same painful condition Blueberry had and I let him go exactly one month after Blueberry.  He’s now also under the apple tree.  His favorite toys are hanging from the branches, little mirrors and bells.  Happy they’re together and with Dannica.  Happy they touched my life.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Dear Me

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Dear Past Me,

People don’t know you now. Don’t blame them. They’ve lost the “you” they knew and they are grieving that loss. It can be a little scary to meet new people. And, believe me, you are new.  It can be a little scary to meet new people, especially when you don’t want to; you didn’t exactly sign up for this particular opportunity. The people who seem to have turned their backs are now new to you, as well.

Many can’t cope with the depth of your pain because they haven’t felt it. If they have come close, maybe they can’t be there for you because they’re working with their own pain and wondering where everyone in their own world went.

You comfort those who don’t know what to say. That’s part of the unspoken job description of grieving. You’re letting others know that you actually are okay even when nothing feels okay. That’s okay. No one is obligated to actually be okay.

People are afraid to cry. People are afraid they’ll make you cry. If they talk to you about your loss and your grief they’ll feel it and that makes them so uncomfortable they’ll avoid it. The only way to avoid feeling anything is to avoid you. That isn’t about you. It isn’t about you at all.

Once your grief softens, once enough healing has happened that you can, once in a while, speak of your loved one without tears or, perhaps with tears of joy, with laughter, with gratitude, it’s easier for people to meet you where you are because it’s closer to where they are and where they remember you being. Your strength will build until you’re ready to meet people again, where they are.

Moving through grief and into mourning, which lasts a lifetime, is an incredibly lonely journey. You’d like to think you’ll really be there for someone else when they need you to be but the truth is, you won’t be because you are learning to live again and it’s taking all you’ve got in you. When it’s your turn to be there for someone, to comfort them, you’ll feel helpless, too. You won’t know what to say and what you do say will feel trite or heartless because you’ll think you know what they feel but you don’t. No one can know what can’t be known. Every loss, every grief, every journey on every path is unlike any other.

It’s not true that they were never friends anyway. Of course they were friends! They’re still friends in that they still care about you. People generally care about other people, don’t they? When you lost your loved one, you also lost the relationships the two of you had with others. It is loss upon loss upon loss. They were good times; there are gifts that won’t go away. Now there are spaces for new connections. The hardest work is allowing them in. The hardest work is looking outside yourself again.

You’ll think you can’t possibly feel any more alone or lonely than you do. You’ll wish that you could die. You’ll think, sometimes, it wouldn’t matter if you did. You’ll think no one would even notice and if they did, they certainly wouldn’t miss you; not this sad, angry, negative, hopeless, worthless being you think you’ve become. You’ll exist within a slow suicide. What you won’t be able to see is just how much you are loved by people you never even realized gave you a second thought; people who, despite their fear of your loss and your grief, never actually stopped thinking of you. How could you have known? You couldn’t have. That is why I’m telling you now not to give up on yourself. You can’t hear me. I know because I remember being you. But maybe somehow, because of you, I’ll be able to hear you now; and from now on.

It hasn’t felt like it to you, but you have been working so hard. You have a heart which slammed shut and erected an impenetrable wall around itself you weren’t even aware of. You still felt everything, profoundly, but you felt it alone. You could look out but no one could really see in even when you thought they could… or should, not even when you thought you were letting them in. What I want you to know is that it was important that it happened this way. It was essential that you go so far inside yourself you lost the entire world and everything in it including everything you ever thought you were or wanted to be and everything you thought was yours.

There will come a day, I promise you, though you can’t begin to imagine it, your heart will again be touchable and touched. The wall will come down. And when you step out again into the light of this reality, you will glow and your wings will be sparkling and radiant.

Remember, healing happens in the spaces of new connections.

Spaces are usually silent.

With love and compassion,
Holding you until you meet me where I am.

Future Me

A Different Sea-When the World Has Moved On – A Poem by Melissa Murphy

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Grief softens

it shifts

it changes

it erupts

it cripples, it heals but is never healed.

It is a constant companion in all the shapes and forms and intensities it takes.

The loss takes everything

…all at once.

And anything you have left is taken up simply by continuing to breathe.

Continue to breathe.

A single breath followed by another single breath.

And continue from your side of this life, in the silence of your own breath, to embrace the one you love who died.

Continue to include that love in all that you do and you’ll begin to hear their whispers in the wind, you’ll feel their presence brush your cheek, they’ll paint magnificent gifts in the clouds just for you and for all the world to see.

For those who notice.

Many won’t.

Not until they do.

Not until their own hearts are ripped by loss, when the grief introduces them to gravity.

It will happen.  It does happen.  To everyone.

It’s just your turn to walk before them.

They haven’t abandoned you.  They haven’t turned their backs.  They have continued living their own lives as they did before yours crumbled around you and pulled them in for a time.

We don’t come together for life.

We come together and drift apart so there are spaces for new connection.

Healing begins to happen in those spaces.

The tide comes in and leaves some things struggling in the sand

What’s left when the tide returns is rejoined with the sea but it’s a new sea, not the sea that left you struggling in the sand.

—written by Melissa Murphy

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