WYG Day 14: Where I Would Take You

This is about one of my first griefs, the death of my father.

I grew up in Moline, Illinois, which, as of 2020 had almost 44,000 people in it. This is one of my favorite places in the neighborhood I grew up in, but it looked different when I was growing up.

This was a ravine that was catacorner from our house. 

There were two really nice sloping hills that went down to the middle dip, and a couple of smaller hills on the side.

Those bushes with the rake on them were there then (or at least they look like they were). The trees in the background of the picture were not there–I am starting to wonder if the ravine wasn’t filled in at some point and all these trees grew because from here you cannot see the slopes of the ravine.

This was where we would sled every winter, for hours and hours. 

This was where we would roll down the hills until we felt like we would vomit and then we would lay in the bottom scoop of the ravine and watch the clouds change shape. 

This was when we would get up in the morning, have some kind of quick breakfast, and then we would be out until we were called for lunch, and then we would be out until we were called for dinner and then we would be out until the street lights came on or mom called us home, whichever came first.

This was a place that existed in the middle of a fairly large town but it felt removed, so removed.

It wasn’t always a happy place.

My father was an alcoholic and I recall, with much embarrassment still even though this happened 4 decades ago. I was at the ravine on this side, and there were some bigger kids who were teasing me and pushing me down the hill. I don’t remember the circumstances, but I do recall my father rushing out to the ravine, screaming at the kids to leave me alone, and then picking up one of their bikes above his head and throwing it into the ravine. 

The kids scattered, the one with the bike now in the ravine ran home crying, and my father brought me home. I was impressed that my father, who might have weighed 100 pounds at any given time, was strong enough to raise a whole bike above his head and throw it into the ravine.

Of course, the kids that were involved were told they couldn’t play with me anymore and I think the mom of the kid whose bike ended up in the ravine came over huffing and puffing about it, but my father was like, well, tell your kid to not push my kid down the hill.

It was also embarrassing because my father was an alcoholic. 

I was not aware that other people’s parents weren't alcoholics. I wasn’t even sure what an alcoholic was. All I knew was that my father liked to go to Homer’s bar and he would stay there for hours, sometimes with me hanging out in the car and wandering the nearby parking lots. I knew that my father had a secret bottle of alcohol in his chair that he would nip from, and that I was yelled at once when I pulled it out of the chair.

So I would take you here, but not how it looks now.

I would take you to the side by our house and sled until we couldn’t feel our feet.

I would take you to the same side, but during the summer and roll down the hill and watch the clouds.

I would take you next to the slope by my house and show you my favorite tree. It was a perfect tree and last time I was there, it wasn’t any longer. But I remember it having a graceful bend in its trunk and two perfectly placed limbs that would cradle me as I laid back and watched the wind in the leaves and the sky peeking out.

This would be the before place that I would take you. Before my father drank himself to death over the death of his brother, Bill. Before. Before. Before.

And then I would take you here. 

This is how my world seems now. Underwater, way down deep, with the light from the sky coming down, and instead of the beautiful dark blues and greens, the water sky flashes red. When I first saw this picture, I thought the diver was a mermaid.

This is what I imagine I would see if I got down the deep dark. 

It looks fairly benign, doesn’t it? I feel like it’s not. It can’t be.

But if I could take you there, I would. I would take someone with me who would maybe not even have to talk to me, but just someone to be there. To understand and see me, and honor and respect my pain and grief.

Not just anyone can go, or should go. I don’t know who should go. I don’t even know if I want to go. But I am working my way there.

WYG Day 13

Once Upon a Thirteen

It really sucks being Cassandra sometimes. Wait, I mean all the time. If I were in a fairytale, I would be one step beyond the crone–I would be the person gifted with foresight but cursed to never be believed. Do I think I have been personally blessed and cursed by the gods? No, but I can relate to this story a little too often these days.

I have spent a lot of time learning, reading and thinking about the Shoah. Ever since 2005, I have tried to understand the horrors of hate of the other. How Jews were scapegoated. How Germany became Nazi Germany. How Germany slid into banning books, banning Jewish people from everyday life in their trades, making them wear the Star of David so they were easily identified, and then the slide into the Final Solution. I know I’m going over this simplistically. There was nothing simplistic about it at all, but it was quite simple how it happened all the same.

The normalization of hate, the normalization of the Other as the source of all our problems…It’s something I see every day in the news now, and it’s terrifying to have spent nearly two decades studying something that seems to be starting to happen all over again.

Sorry, sometimes fairy tales are political.

So I get to be the person who sees things happening and go, “Hey, that happened before! Don’t you all remember what happened?” and I get to be the person who is laughed at for speaking out about things like this, even as they happen, even as families are ripped apart: migrants who came here in search of a new life, a better life, a safer life, are used as political pawns: even as uterus bearing people are having their rights stripped from them; even as LGBTQ+ people find their very beings under fire; even as books are being banned.

It’s all happened before and I fear it will happen again.

Being Cassandra sucks, but it won’t stop me. I just don’t want to be the one in the end to shake my head sadly and say, I knew this would happen.

WYG Day 12: Breathing in the Wreckage

What would it take for me to go diving into the deep ocean of grief I am in? What would it take for me to be able to face my grief and see it for what it is, love enduring? How can I dive into the darkness and not panic about being about to breathe or see on the way down?

I cannot tell if I am ready yet, or that I need to be ready to do it. Right now, it’s like I’m in an oxygenated box, settled near where the drop off is to the deepness of the grief I feel. I feel like I can see where the drop off is, and then maybe for a short distance before the drop off gets dark and murky. There’s some kind of light in the far far distance, where I can see things flitting about. What are they? Are they memories? Are they parts of my anxiety that are stalking me to take me down to the deep darkness where I will never find my way back?

As I said before, I won’t know until I go, but I don’t think I’m ready.

But is this like saying you are going to wait until you are ready to have kids, but if you actually wait until you are ready you will never be ready? Is this my anxiety directing me to stay in that little box while part of me desperately wants to see what’s down there?

I recall what my life looked like before the murders, and I am going to guess that at the bottom of that ocean crevice is the smoldering remains, and I am picking a wooden frame charred and somehow smoking, but it feels like it’s not going to look like that. There’s red light, darkness flicking in and out of the light, deep deep down.

I have social anxiety disorder, and it’s really problematic sometimes, but I am getting better at knowing when it’s anxiety and when I really don’t want to do something. For example, I might make plans with a friend, and then by the time I get to the date, I don’t want to do it. Maybe it’s because I over booked myself and I’m really tired and I am just DONE with peopling, and those are all valid reasons to cancel.

But sometimes it’s actually something that’s more deeply in my mind and my heart, where I feel like I’m going to look dumb if I go. What if I say something stupid? What if I embarrass myself in front of someone important? What if I show exactly how weird I am? What if I am in a room full of younger parents and I say something that makes me seem obviously old?

It all sounds really ridiculous writing it out, but when I am feeling these things, I am just stunned, frozen to the spot, probably making a weird face, all eyes on me, lots of giggles and smirks because I am clearly an idiot and super uncool.

Yes, I am 47, and I still have these fears.

And the way I feel about going deep into this grief is similar to how I feel about social situations. I am usually fine as long as my brain doesn’t start up. But once it starts, it’s super difficult for it to stop.

In the end, this isn’t going to be as scary as my brain makes it out to be. Part of me is afraid I am going to go beyond the feelings and reactions I had when I first found out about the murders. The tears, the almost hyperventilating, the snot rivers, the heaving gravity of this loss. How could it be worse than that first day? Than the first couple weeks? Even now, I have come far. Lula’s birthday snuck up on me, and I was very sad and tearful that day, but I haven’t cried about this since the day of Lula’s birthday and it’s been over a week since then. 

So what would I need to go deep?

Things that cannot be guaranteed. No one can say for certain that I will come out of this deep dive okay. No one can say that I won’t lose my mind in the process. No one can say that the outcome on the other side (if there is another side) is positive.

But this is looking at my grief through the lens of how our society looks at grief. And I know that if I look at grief with love, approach it with tenderness and be open to what I will see and experience, it will be something more positive than the way our society treats it currently.

I just have to see if the anxiety is what is holding me back or not.

WYG Day 11: Unable to Behave Any Better

 WYG Day 11

Unable to Behave Any Better

HOW HAS THIS LOSS MADE ALL THINGS FEEL SHARP?

I am not sure that this loss has made all things feel sharp exactly. There is definitely a prickliness to this loss, but more than feeling sharp, things feel overly revealed. I have an example.

I was once really into this guy who was all into Eastern religion and meditation. We didn’t see each other frequently, but one time we did get to see each other, we ended up kissing. And while we were kissing, the strangest thing happened. It felt like a pair of hands reached into my chest and took hold of the veil that separated my soul (maybe? Can’t think of a better word) from whatever is out there (God? For lack of a better word?) and I was touched there for the first time ever. A strange feeling ran down my spine and lodged at the bottom of my spine. 

It completely freaked me out and I sputtered some reason for me to go, and I left. I did not sleep that night, due to the energy that was coursing through my body.

That incident where i felt my most innermost self touched is as as close to describing what I feel like this loss is. I feel like this loss stripped away EVERYTHING: my sense of the world being a safe place; my sense of being able to always protect my children; my sense of control over the world.

This naked feeling is hard to live with. It feels like everyone can see all my emotions in addition to all my flaws and that everyone can see that I am not handling this week at all, but really, how should I be handling it? I think not handling it well by the standards of a world that doesn’t understand how to deal with grief is pretty okay.

WHAT MIGHT NOURISH OR FEED YOU–EVEN BRIEFLY–AS YOU LIVE INSIDE THIS GRIEF?

Being seen and heard is the thing that helps the most. This course has been helping because of the comments I have received. It’s good to know that we are all in the same unfortunate boat.

Additionally, I have been lucky to have people around me who are not judging me and are supporting me as best as they can (and their best is definitely better than what people usually get in these situations). I just need to keep surrounding myself with people who can get me and what is happening.

DO YOU HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY ABOUT YOUR INABILITY TO ‘behave better’?

Behave better compared to what? There’s a stigma about grief that is so similar to the one around mental health. Like, if you have it, you have to be cured. And depending on the mental illness, it might need to be brought under control, but I don’t think there’s a way to cure or make go away a mental illness. At least I haven’t found a way to get rid of mine. I still have depression, even when it’s under control. There’s till a lens of depression that I see the world through. Perhaps that’s where my melancholy comes from. I haven’t gotten my anxiety completely under control, but I am starting to understand it a bit better as something that I will need to learn to live with because it’s a part of me now. And so is grief.

WYG Day 10: Melancholy

When I first saw this prompt, I was honestly annoyed and taken back by it. Melancholy does NOT suit me. I am known as being a bright, bubbly, glass-half-full, sickeningly optimistic type of person. I am always cracking jokes to make people laugh.

But then I think of something a friend, Shane, once said about my writing. I think it was when I was in college and we were chatting on AOL messenger (yep, I just dated myself a bit), and after telling him about one of the most recent things I was working on for writing class, he asked me, ‘Don’t you ever write anything happy?’ I tried to protest that I do, but I actually kinda don’t. I have a few things that are funny and upbeat, but the last few things I have written have been about a dystopian patriarchal world where a girl finds her long lost twin and they take down the patriarchy; a novel about anxiety and grief; a novel about the Goebbels’ children during the last week they were alive in the Fuhrerbunker. I can’t remember before that off the top of my head.

So you see, I clearly dwell the best in melancholy. There’s something about writing about these hard emotions and difficult situations and seeing how the characters deal with them that just really gets my creativity going.

There is definitely a sharpness to melancholy that makes the beautiful things that much more beautiful.

On the day of Sarah, Lula and Tyler’s celebration of life, I definitely was feeling sad and grief clung to me like the humidity in the air. I brought a blanket that I am working on to give to Arlo, and I used the crocheting to help keep me grounded. It was a beautiful but hot evening, and I sat with my Lincoln Elementary family and we all were together and we cried as the celebration of life happened.

Then there was a tree. There was a tree donated to Lincoln by Sarah and Tyler’s family to be planted on the grounds of the school. But our principal had to leave the celebration of life early so he couldn’t take it back to the school, and we weren’t sure what to do with the tree.

So my friends Shannon and Jessica and I ended up walking down the street from the park to the school with the potted tree. Jessica was carrying it and Shannon and I walked with her and we were all cracking up laughing because it had to look RIDICULOUS walking down the street with a potted tree that kept getting stuck on the other trees as we walked. And then we had to get it in Shannon’s car to take to Jessica’s house where it would live until it was time to plant it. After we figured out that we needed to have the sunroof open, the tree poked out the top and Shannon and Jessica were on their way to Jessica’s house with the tree.

It felt so good to laugh, and it really felt like Sarah was with us in that moment because she would have thought it was hilarious what was happening. So maybe that’s why it happened.

When my depression was less under control, I was more melancholy all the time. College was soaked in melancholy. I had a boyfriend I broke up with in college because he drove me completely insane trying to help me get over my depression. I told him that this was something I needed to do myself and he said that he knew he could help me (he was a psych major so OF COURSE he could help me!). He refused to stop trying to help me. So I broke up with him and spent the rest of that winter being angry and melancholy about the whole thing.

So yeah, melancholy is apparently my thing, I just hide it and keep it a secret.

WYG Day 9: Colors

Try as I might, there are no colors coming to mind. Purple is my favorite, my daughter loves pink, Orson keeps changing his favorite color and Bill likes blue (I think–pretty sad, but when you think that I can’t remember which two days in August are the correct day for his birthday, it’s actually not surprising). We have a lovely black cat and a fat orange and white cat. 

When it comes to Sarah, Lula, and Tyler, there are no colors that come to mind at first. I see Lula’s very straight blonde hair in my mind, and I realize I will never see her hair again, nor will I be in a store and see a woman with tight golden curls and think that when that woman turns around it will be Sarah.

When it comes to my past grief, I remember wearing a pink sleeveless dress with a white t-shirt under it when I confessed to Ryan that I loved him and wanted him to be my boyfriend.

I recall a back and yellow striped dress I wore to my father’s funeral. It was soft and comfortable and I recall receiving a soft grey stuffed rabbit with a soft pink ribbon in a bow around its neck. 

I recall the black dress I wore to my mother’s graveside funeral. It was such a cold November day, and the days leading up to her funeral were those kind of warm and gold last autumnal gasp that I hadn’t thought much about how weather in November was supposed to be. So I ended up wearing tights and a sweater and I didn’t have an appropriate coat that fit me, so I had to wear whatever was appropriate. The cold is what I remember, and my ex coming to the funeral and helping carry my mother’s coffin to the site of the service. Everything was grey and brown and tan wet leaves and inside i felt touched by my ex helping to carry my mother’s coffin, and then torn asunder by singing her favorite hymn, ‘How Great Thou Art’.

It’s funny how when you think there’s no color, there’s always color, always something to remind you.

WYG Day 8: Guiding Stars

I didn’t think I had any role models for grief, but I gave it a good thought and I realized I have two: Sarah Mason and SJ (Susan) Hodges.

Sarah was married to a fella, Curtis, who I had had a very short relationship with before we realized that we were better off friends. Sarah and Curtis married in 2005 and he passed away in May of 2011. He had suffered a traumatic brain injury and spent something like a year in rehab, but he never was the same. There was a surgery that was performed to try and replace the missing part of his skull, but that surgery failed. 

I have only met Sarah once or twice, and I honestly don’t recall much about the meetings. I think it was in passing when I might have run into Curtis at some point with her, but I really don’t recall those meetings at all. I had become friends with her on facebook prior to Curtis’ accident and then I had the opportunity to bear witness to everything that happened to Curtis after his accident and how she dealt with her grief and suffering over his decline and then death. On top of dealing with Curtis’ accident and everything that happened after, Sarah had their child, Andy, at home. I think Andy was maybe 3 or 4 when all this happened. Memory is foggy for me these days.

But what I remember the most about Sarah and her posts in the days and years that have followed the accident and Curtis’ death is the honesty with which she wrote about Curtis and their life together and how hard it was to see him in the condition he was in. She poured her heart out onto a blog that she also posted on facebook, and I was struck by the depth of honesty she approached her grief. It’s been 11 years since Curtis has passed, and she still writes about him on anniversaries and when posts come up in her facebook memories. 

Sarah had a way of writing about her grief that honored Curtis, Andy and herself, and made whatever she wrote feel like it came from an almost holy place. And I felt lucky to be able to bear witness to her pain and grief. I know writing those posts and living those moments were not easy, but she made writing about it seem so easy. Based on writing about my own grief, I know it must not have been simple.

Susan has a similar way of writing about the grief that she and her daughter felt over the loss of her husband and CeCe’s father to brain cancer. Clayton, from what I have read, was an amazing human being and Susan and CeCe were so lucky to have him, but what a loss to suffer. Clayton died in 2019 after having brain cancer for a year, and Susan and CeCe relocated to Hawaii just before COVID hit in 2020. I haven’t met Susan–I found her on facebook through some theatre friends, and she sounded really cool. She was going to have a writing retreat in Hawaii but that ended up being canceled due to her mother’s health. I had hoped to attend, and if it happens in the future, perhaps I will actually get to meet her.

Susan is a professional writer; she and Clayton were in Los Angeles prior to his death. And her writing about Clayton had a white hot rage about it. And the same kind of honesty that Sarah had also written with, but there was something so blazing and angry about her writing. Her grief clearly stood in a storm and screamed, and she recorded everything that happened. It was an interesting contrast to the beauty I would see in her pictures and videos of their lives in Hawaii. 

So I have been quite lucky to have such amazing women in my life to be my lodestars for my journey into grief, and I didn’t even realize it until I was given this prompt.

I hope I can do something similar with my grief–I hope I can give it the honesty and honor that they both gave theirs. I know that in the moments, nothing was easy for them, that nothing was as beautiful probably as their writing about it, but I feel honored to have been a witness to what they were experiencing.

WYG Day 6: Kindness

Kindness

One day, maybe years from now, maybe mere hours or days, I will be lying on the floor, sobbing, for maybe years, maybe mere hours or days, and then I will realize That One has learned to speak.

That One will have become more solid, much more solid than the others ever became. That One will take an androgynous shape, hair sometimes flowing, other times shaved close to bald. Eyes will be red sometimes, most of the time. But the first time That One speaks, That One became solid, even as That One’s hair morphed, eyes flashed, smoking still lingering as a kind of clothing it wore, solid, sheer, flowing, and That One’s eyes became the saddest grey color.

I feel the palm of a firm loving hand on my back, and it feels so comforting and warm and safe, I don’t second guess what is happening. The hand is rubbing my back, and I feel my whole body release tension and I cry out all the pain I had wound in my muscles. And then I realize, I am alone with my grief shadows.

I look up and see That One sitting beside me. I sit up, startled, and scramble away from That One. That One holds up two pale hands in a calming gesture.

“Hey,” That One says, in a garbled wet sound and That One cleared its throat. 

I sat there, staring at That One.

“You can talk?” I say.

That One morphs again and smiles. “I can.”

“So, why now?” I ask.

“Because it was time,” That One says.

“Time for what?” I ask. “Time for me to be okay?”

That One smiles grimly. “Okay? You will never be okay again. Sorry about that.”

I sit back, surprised. “Then why are you talking to me? Why are you comforting me?”

“Because it’s clear you need some help,” That One says.

“How are you going to help me?” I ask.

“I’m not,” That One says, “But I am going to teach you about being kind to yourself.”

I sit up. “What do you mean?”

“You are so gentle and kind to others who are hurting,” That One says, “So I know you know what to do and how to say it and everything. You just need to apply those things to yourself.”

“But I should be over this,” I say.

“Why?” That One asks simply.

I stare at That One.

“Because I should be,” I say, “I’m being a baby about this. I shouldn’t be still laying around, sad and mopey. I should have my house clean. My kids should be doing better with school and with helping in the house. My husband should be happier. But instead, I am here, moping.”

That One stands, their clothing morphing into long draping columns of rich looking fabric. “So, by that logic, Sarah’s family should be over it. Tyler’s friends should not be sad at the thought of never seeing him again. Lula’s teachers shouldn’t feel the devastating loss of such a young bright person?”

“Of course not, “ I snap, “that would be ridiculous. They should take as much time to grieve as they need to. They won’t ever be over this.”

That One squats next to me and puts a gentle hand on my shoulder. “And neither will you.”

“But…”

“But what?” That One asks. 

“Does this mean you are only here to teach me a lesson?” I ask.

“No,” That One says, “I and my fellow grief shadows will never leave you. See that one?” They point a long finger at a particularly bedraggled one. “That One has been with you for a long long time, and its twin is newer,” That One points to an identical but fresher looking one, “But they were both borne out of the same pain.”

That One gathers some smoke and wraps it in their hands and then pushes it out toward the shadows, who intertwine with it, and build from the ground up an image of my first love, Ryan.

I stand, shocked.

“Ryan,” I say, going to him. I put my hand on his shoulder and my hand goes through.

“He is, unfortunately, not real,” That One says. “But your love for him is as real as the grief you felt that bright sunny day in the second floor stairwell of the private school you went to, when you told him that you loved him, and he told you that he couldn’t be your boyfriend.”

I look at Ryan and I recall the desperate heartbreak I felt that day. 

“He was just a boy,” I try to shrug it off, but I and That One know that I cannot.

“And then when you found out he died,” That One says, “And you got in touch with his sister and she told you that he loved you as much as you loved him, but that he was gay and he couldn’t love you the way you wanted him to.”

“How do you know all this?” I ask, frightened.

“Because I am as much a part of who you are right now as Ryan was of who you would become,” That One said. 

“So what now?” I ask.

“You need to learn to be kind to yourself,” That One say. “You need to learn to live in harmony with This One, and with them,” That One gestures to the other shadows. I watch sadly as the two that are my grief over Ryan dissolve into their former shapes.

“But how?” I choke, my throat tightening with the tears I thought I had left behind the day that I fould out that Sarah, Lula and Tyler were murdered.

“You start by allowing yourself to feel,” That One says, “You let yourself have your emotions. What do you tell your son? You tell him it’s okay to have emotions. There is nothing bad about emotions, it’s what you do with them.”

That One waves their hand in the air and clears the smoke, showing my house, my messy messy house, with so much to be done to make it livable and tolerable so my anxiety from before isn’t so triggered.

“Why are you showing me this?” I protest between sobs.

“Yesterday,” That One says, “you had energy to do some work. But you felt so overwhelmed.”

I sit down, nodding.

“But you did what you could do, and for a brief moment, you were kind enough to yourself to tell yourself that it was enough to do just that,” That One says, “You have to let yourself just do what is enough for you in this moment. And in the next. And the next.”

“But what if it’s not enough?” I croak.

“It has to be,” That One says, “ANd who says it’s not enough?”

That One watches me cry again and then begins to rub my back, soothingly. I cry as much as I can and then I finally stop. I touch the skin around my eyes and it’s so puffy, I wouldn’t be surprised if the next day it’s black and blue.

“Okay,” I say, “I will try.”

That One smiles. “And that is enough.”

WYG Day 5: Grief Personified

    That one is an additional shadow that follows me everywhere. And I have a lot of shadows, some are faded with age, others are younger, more vibrant, larger, but that one, that one is different from the other extra shadows I have gathered in my life.

That one started out big, looming over everything. That one was colored red and black, and it threatened to swallow everything.

The most bothersome aspect of that one is that that one doesn’t speak. It doesn’t speak because it doesn’t have a mouth–it’s like smoke, almost solid enough to touch, but not quite. And some days it seems more solid than others, but mostly that one just hands in the background, sometimes blowing into my face, piercing the veil between my innermost heart–the very thing that makes me me–and touches me in such a way that the pain and grief are overwhelming and shocking.

I wish that one would speak. I do better with being able to speak, but clearly, if that one was going to speak, it would have by now. Tomorrow is two months, and I am expecting that things might be rough tomorrow.

That one is trying to tell me, I think, that I need to slow down, take in what has happened, and exist inside it as long as I need to. That one is not going to go away. It joins the grief shadows from my mother, my father, my first love who couldn’t love me in return because he was gay and couldn’t say it, who I thought was my last love, who shattered me, the friend who turned out to be a drunken asshole, and friends who have passed without me being able to actually talk to them before they went. Each of these grief shadows look different, act differently. Some of them talk to me–a little too much. But all of them have taken a backseat to that one.

That one feels like it’s always tugging at my pant legs, buzzing in my ear, appearing without warning or wanting in my brain when I don’t need it to. But it is appearing for a reason, right? What does That One have to say?

But That One doesn’t speak. And the other grief shadows like to give it space.

Maybe, as time goes on, That One will speak. Until then, I guess I just have to keep observing That One’s movements and learn to live within the smokiness.