Meeting Fellow Travelers

[Pictures of my Angel]

 Most days, I'm fine. I walk through life without thinking, without remembering, without looking at my angel's pictures. They still hurt too much, and it's been 12 years. She'd be 13 in March. I even trudged through the holidays with only a few tears because I just didn't have the energy to think. I'm too burned out from survival. 

[Fellow Travelers: source.]

But then, I meet a fellow traveler, another member of the Empty Arms Club. And I think about how much pain that person must have gone through. Which brings me back to empathy and thinking. And, inevitably, my own pain. 

[Tumult always beneath the Surface: source]

It's always there, just beneath the surface, waiting to plunge outward like a molten lava from a volcano. That ridiculous fairy tale about the five stages of grief gives you hope that volcano will go dormant, that if you can just make it through numbness, anger, and all the other stages, you'll finally reach peace. 

["Stages" of grief: source]

When I first lost my Alli, I heard about the stages of grief and thought they worked like stages of childhood, one after another and done. But then, I read a book that took the whole five-stages bit apart, showed how there as no scientific foundation for it, no studies to prove anything. Just a woman making stuff up to help people as they face their own upcoming death. It slowly got spread and turned into false hope. Even she struggled with it when it became her turn to face her mortality, from what I understand.

[Grief Is more like a Rollercoaster: Source]

But the truth is that real grief is more like a rollercoaster of the most terrible variety. One minute, you're numb, then suddenly, you see or hear or smell or think something that makes you remember how thin the crust over the lava is, that pops it open and brings the pain to the surface again. You may go through all the feels all at once, or you may go days in one place, emotionally, then hop to another. There's nothing stable, predictable, or stage-like in grief. There's no moment when you know it's over. There's no "getting over" it. The only way is through. There's no right or wrong way to grieve. There's nothing anyone can say to make it better. 

[A good hug is magical: source]

Time helps. Self-expression like writing or art or photography can help with healing. Finding someone to wrap their arms around you and hold in the pieces helps as well. What has helped me the most is understanding there's hope for the future, the quiet assurance that I'll see my angel again. If you don't know it's true, I recommend you find out. The Lord suffered our pain, knows our grief on a very visceral level. He will help you through if you seek Him out. This song helps me when I'm struggling. One way or another, find peace and healing. That's all any of us can hope for. 

Back around to Surviving the Holidays

 

[Helping hand--source]

In years past, I survived the holidays by reaching out and trying to make others' holidays as bright as possible. I've given out used toys, donated money and gifts to friends and family above and beyond the normal, sometimes providing all the gifts and food same families needed, bought gifts for children with charity organizations, and just looked for ways to serve, so I didn't have to ponder my pain. I helped pull my extended family together for the holidays, including the gift exchange. 

[A house-source.]

I wanted to give through the rest of the year, too, to help, to be kind. A few years ago, we built a house for my sister with her promise that she would help build it, pay regularly, take care of it, and be grateful. All that started to fall apart almost immediately but finally entirely collapsed recently. For the first time in years, we won't have my sister and her kids around for the holidays. In the end, it feels like our sacrifice cost me a sister. And it hurts. 

[A gift for my angel-source]

For 12 years, I've seen all this service as a gift to my angel. I would write up any service item we did through the year and especially around the holidays and put them in a bottle. We opened that bottle every year on Christmas day as my angel baby's Christmas present. 

[Christmas dims-source]

This year, it feels like we just did this, that the year has flown by so much that I just put together all the details for the holidays a week ago. I've been burned out since February. Even a summer break didn't help. I just don't know that I have the energy or ambition to be that holiday hero for everyone this year. I feel like I've been carrying so many through the years. And it just feels too heavy this year. All I want to do is the minimum. Let others carry it for a while. We had a family reunion recently, and I didn't have to do much other than show up. It was so nice. 

[Done carrying the burden-Source]

I don't know that I'm being selfish or just need a break. Maybe both. I don't know that this holiday season will be better because I'm not seeking more than I can carry. I'm hoping next year, my energy will be back. My drive to serve others and love those who need to be loved above and beyond will be back. Right now, it's all I can do to carry myself and my immediate family. For now, that will have to be enough. 

When Your Doctor's Office Doesn't Get the Memo

[texting-source]

I got a text a couple of weeks ago that felt like a punch to the gut. "Alamanda hasn't been to see the doctor in a while. It's time to set your appointment." Something like that. Now, I know my doctor has been with us since before my first was born. He's great. But he recently turned a lot of work over to his nurse, who is new. She didn't know she was inquiring about my baby who died 12 years ago in an accident that killed my innocence and ripped out my heart. She didn't mean to send a trigger. But in not checking the file, she sent me a major trigger. 

[Fixing up a house-source]

Then, a short time later, I had to text back because of a UTI. I haven't had a UTI since I had one of my last miscarriages. Pregnancy usually brings UTIs, not working all day on fixing up a house we built 3 years ago, just so my sister could trash it in those short years. Oh, and not hydrating enough in the process. So when the blood came, it reminded me of a miscarriage. And the diagnosis reminded me of pregnancy. Yeah, that's another fun trigger. Brings everything back, so I have to stare at it. 

[The nurse comes in-source]

And when I went to talk face-to-face with that same nurse who sent me the misdirected text, she didn't know my history either. She expressed sympathy but no knowledge of my 16+ miscarriages. Trigger.  One would hope that your doctor's office and any reps thereof would get the memo on stuff like this. It's easy to trigger someone when you blunder into a person's health history unprepared.  I'm trying not to get bitter about the little things. It would just be nice if someone did her research. But if one hasn't gone through it, it's hard to know what a landmine such a history is. I try to remember that. It can just be hard some days. 

Remembering September 11th

[Date-source]

A week ago, we remembered the events of September 11th. To many now, it seems a historic event, something that occurred so long ago, sometimes before their birth or when they were too little to understand. Or it could have been something that happened around the world from them.  It was a distant, long ago thing.  

[Twin Towers--source]

But many of us remember exactly where we were when we heard the planes hit the Twin Towers in New York City. I was just waking up to get ready for work at a government clinic.  My mom told me that a plane had hit the tower.  I could only imagine it was a small teaching plane that had an accident.  How wrong I was. It felt very personal not just because a similar clinic experienced a bomb threat that day or because we listened to the news all day and recited with shock when we heard they'd traced the events back to a country from which we'd never considered the possibility of an attack.  

[Frantic calls-source]

My personal connection was that I went to college two hours north of the City. I was absolutely positive someone I knew must have gone down in the attack that day.  I tried to call friends I'd just left behind three years before, but all phone lines were jammed with people desperate to hear news from friends and family.  Later, I learned friends of friends had gone down, but no one I knew personally died that day as far as I know. But it still hit too close to home.  

[Ground Zero-source]

I saw the Twin Towers before they went down, when I was still going to college, and again the year after the attack, when they were still clearing up the debris. seeing it like that was like going to a funeral of someone I knew but not well.  The solemnity of the events hung over me as I looked out over the place of death of so many.  It seemed so unreal. 

[Moment of unity-source]

And for one brief moment, it felt like people from all over world, of all political stripes, were united with an acknowledgment of the tragedy.  The unity didn't last, but it was nice while it did.  Every year, we watch videos that remind us of the events of that day. Every year, it feels like it just happened a short time ago, the fear and urgency a current affair.  I love to hear stories of heroism and miracles of that day.  It overwhelms me to think of how many were lost that day, how many lost friends and family, but also how many could have been there to die but who weren't for whatever reason.  

[Unhealed would-source]

It still feels like an unhealed wound in history, a senseless tragedy that changed the world but not always for the good.  I guess it's like any loss.  We can decide how to react and what we learn from the events of that day.  For some, it means nothing.  For some, it means everything and changed everything.  It's worth remembering simply so it doesn't get repeated.  But is there some overall universal meaning in the loss, grief and death that day?  It depends on whom you ask. I just know I will never forget.  

When Your Greatest Fear Takes Another Shape

[My former greatest fear--source]

My greatest fear used to be spiders. However, after I lost my closest brother and my baby and had 16+ miscarriages in a row, I learned there are much, much worse things to fear than (most) spiders. All spiders can usually do is give you physical pain. Emotional pain that comes with the loss of family members makes a mere spider bite, even one that lands you in the hospital, trivial by comparison. A spider may leave holes in your flesh that will most likely heal. The world-shaking loss of loved ones hollows you out and leaves no part of your world untouched. 

[My Disney Princess: Source]

For 12 years, my greatest fear has been to lose a family member. People talk about helicopter parenting derisively with reason. But my husband and I became predator drone parents to defend ourselves from ever dealing with that kind of catastrophic loss. All of the emotional scarring of loss was made much, much worse when CPS attempted to destroy my family with false accusations that tried to tear us apart. That, alone, is a very long, ugly story some would find farfetched, and some would nod along to because they've had their own experiences with that kind of nightmare. It doesn't help that my brain became a worthless fog after my catastrophic losses. I understand brain fog is pretty normal. That's right. I've become Marlin and Dory from Finding Nemo. I don't recommend it. It's stressful and frankly terrifying. It's exhausting to live in a world where not just loss but any kind of loss becomes a very real possibility at any time. 

[Another kind of loss--source]

So when a family member recently nuked their family with the big D, becoming far more destructive than necessary without careful thought to the consequences, I felt like a brand new black hole tore into my carefully duct-taped semi-comfortable reality. The way this family member destroyed their family brought threats of CPS way too close to home. It's a long, ugly story that has only begun. There are not likely to be any winners, only losers.  And it brought back all the pain, all the trauma of my past.  Worst of all? We come away from it wondering how many family members may be lost to this black hole. The fears and traumas that seemed carefully buried have reared their ugly heads again.  

[Heartfelt prayer--source]

Just thinking about it leaves me in shock. I don't know how to emotionally tread through this minefield. I didn't cause it, but I have only begun to ponder what consequences these events may have. All I can do is pray for all involved and hope that's enough to bring a miracle. 

Memories of My Friend Who Succumbed to Suicide

 

[My angel friend--source]

25ish years ago, I had a sweet, angelic friend from Russia whom I met in college. Nobody knows for sure why she hung herself from her bedsheet in her dorm room. We had guesses. Even today, thinking about her brings tears. Maybe more now that I know loss, catastrophic loss that rocks the world and leaves it shattered. At the time, I lived in a world wherein it couldn't happen to me. You can read below the reflections I recorded shortly after, in free verse poetic form. 

[A field of death--source]

Now that I lost my father-in-law, my closest brother, my four-month-old baby (all in the course of six months), and 15-16 miscarried babies, I know it CAN happen to me, to anyone. The idea that it can't happen to you is a false shield, an artificial wall to make those who sit behind it feel safe. There is no such thing as it can't happen to me. Anything at any time can happen to anyone. I try to make the moments count, so when those things do happen, I will have fewer regrets. I don't go to funerals if I can help it because I've wept through too many. And the memories and grief all come back when I have no choice but to go. I can mourn with those that mourn without making myself go there, relive it all. 

[Mourning with empathy--source]

I remember my innocence to loss then, what it was like to hide behind the false wall of it can't happen to me. I really didn't know how to mourn with those that mourn because I didn't know what mourning even meant. I didn't have empathy, only sympathy, pity. Now, I get it but wish I didn't, but loss has given me the empathy I never wanted. I still weep over the memories, but my personal ache for her loss is all but forgotten. Instead, I weep for those who still mourn her on a deeper level. So I relive it through this poem and remember that her family will have a chance to hold their daughter again, just as I will hold mine. There is hope for Victoria, victory over death. One day. 

[A Tree that symbolizes loss: source]

A Tree for Victoria

Flashing lights and sirens
Whip past my peripheral vision
In the cold of the morning.
A premonition--
Brief, foreboding--
Charged through my mind
In free association with the
Ambulance:

Will a friend ride away in that?
Will the banshee on wheels
Claim someone I know?
And just as quickly,
I scoffed the thought away, saying
No. Not likely.
My world doesn't turn like that.

[The ambulance--source]

I arrived
At the dried-blood tinted
Dorm building,
And the premonition recurred.
No, not just recurred
But sent tremors through my mind
Shaking my universe.
The same red light
Flashed its way across
The building...

MY building...

Making it bleed red light. 

The banshee siren
Echoed back
From its brick surface
In a tone of finality.
The cold, white ambulance
Pulled away
And I saw nothing
But the pale, ghostly faces
Of students staring through
A nearly impenetrable cloud
Of mourning-black exhaust.
The cold sting of the earlier premonition
Began to penetrate
The haze of impossibility.

[A crowd of strangers--source]

I walked through
The handful of strangers
Lining the street

And into the building
That until that morning always felt
Safe.

I joined the silent tableau
Of friends, acquaintances
Embracing each other
Or just staring out into the out-of-place

Cheerful pink walls of the lobby.

The hollow gazes
Of united pain
Amplified my premonition into reality.

A friend--
The one who hailed the ambulance,
And the one whose fate
I had feared for when I first saw the ambulance--
Met me to tell me of another.
She spoke the name of another friend,
the name of the corpse in the ambulance.

Victoria.

[Golden-haired Angel--source]

An image of her smiling face,
gentle, always cheerful
With a halo of golden hair
Perpetually restrained by a headband
Swam into my mind.
Our lives hadn't overlapped
As much as they could have,
Should have.
We had shared
Once
Breakfast in the cafeteria,
Pancakes, sausage.
I recalled multiple scenes
Of clumsy tennis games
Laughingly played together.
We often stayed after, and struggled
To improve together, to no avail.
We always talked and laughed as we walked back.
No more than that.
I didn't know her well,
But I had thought I knew her well enough
Never to imagine...
Victoria? It couldn't be.
Not smiling
Angelic
Victoria.

But the somber faces
Left no room for denial.

Her best friend had found her,
Dangling like a Christmas ornament
At the end
Of rope, painstakingly plaited
From the remains of a baby blue sheet.
A scream
Had split the early morning hours
When she was found.

 

[When her World Collapsed-source]

The weekend before,
Victoria had fallen downstairs
And had broken nothing.
Friends explained to me
Accepting bones relax,
And fall without resistance.
A body that tightens in fear of the fall
Shatters
Like a porcelain doll
When it hits.
Victoria had taken flight,
Embraced the fall,
Embraced death.
Her death wish saved her life.
Some wondered if this had been the source
Of her idea.

I didn't hear until after.
Nor did I know
That her friends--
Her real friends--
Had been on watch.
Someone had suspected.
Flags always go up somewhere.
Why hadn't I known?

[A Noose Woven of Sheets--source]

The cold facts remained:

Her best friend had been the first on-site;
Two others cut her sheet
To pull her down,
One hoping she lived,
The other already knowing,
Recognizing the purple bloating
Of the features,
Permanent scars in the mind.

During our last walk together
Along a path through the trees,
She had told me she struggled
With the language,
With her classes,
Mostly English papers.
I'd offered to help

To put my major to use.
But she'd never asked,
And I'd never insisted.
Russia had been very different,
She told me.
Not at all like liberal Vassar.
Laws and rules
That had structured her reality,
Held her life in place--
Like her headband for her hair--
Had disappeared,
Leaving behind...vagueness,
A nebulous cloud of expectation.

But still, I had no idea.

Guilt that I hadn't known, done more
Weighed almost as much on my mind
As the shadow of sadness did on us all.

[Letters from Russia: Source]

Later gossip taught me things I
Never knew. Some things, I never
Wanted to know
About a cruel family
Who rebuffed Victoria's letters
Begging for an opportunity to go home,
And a crueler reception to meet those
Who returned to Russia as a failure in American schools--
Condemned to life in a factory
A gray existence.
But these were second-hand explanations,
No way to really know
If the real guilt fell
On the place
That taught her the rules of life
Or on the place that took those rules away
Or something else.

Suicides come in threes,
I heard.
So my other friends still weren't safe.

[A Memorial I Did not Attend--source]

I didn't attend the ceremony,
Not a real funeral, since her body was shipped home
To Russia.
A remembering. An outpouring of love
From her closest friends.
I don't know for sure
Why I didn't go.
I told people I was busy, and really I was.
But that wasn't really it.
Perhaps I didn't feel like I belonged,
Didn't feel like I had earned the right
To be there.

[Reflections on Her Tree--source]

But I went to see the tree
They planted, several steps off the path,
The very path we had walked together.
Some said they hid the tree in embarrassment,
That she was lucky to get a tree at all
As a memorial for a suicide.
The plaque said nothing but a name and dates,
Dates too close together.
You'd only find it if you were looking
And only know why
Or at least guess
If you had been there,
Had known her.

The irony of her name,
Of my earlier premonition,
Of the whys and the theories
Of the unknown
Final reason that would drive
A person that far
That young
Plagued me,
Saddened me,
Made me fear for others
In that October gloom.

But no one else
Followed her example.
We all remembered
How the suicide affected us,
Whether we knew her well or not--
Those who dropped out;
Those who couldn't walk her hall
Without remembering;
Her good friend who jumped drunkenly from the balcony
Thinking she could fly,
Like Victoria,
But instead broke both legs.

[Ghost Stories-source]

For years, ghost stories
Will be told to frighten freshmen,
Stories of the girl who hung herself
By her own bed sheet.
But those of us who knew her
Will remember
Victoria's angelic face
And cherish life, hers and ours
Just a little more
Every time we see--
Or remember--
Her tree. 

Survival on Her Death Date

[Ghost town-source]

As usual, we all took off for a trip to be anywhere but home on the anniversary of Alli's death. When we do this, we can more easily take our minds off the significance of that date. We decided to go to a ghost town, appropriate for the purpose. We wanted to revisit Virginia City, Montana, on which my husband wants to write a book, but with gas prices being through the roof, we ended up at a charming, rebuilt pioneer town in Idaho instead. It did not have the right creepy vibe, and there were too many people involved on the tour for my daughter to enjoy it like she wanted to. However, the rest of us were suitably impressed. Some of the houses reminded me of my grandpa's house. The mercantile there especially felt just like a store my grandpa's family ran from almost a century ago until a couple of decades ago.  

[Ice cream to cover tears. Source]

We did wander through the nearby Lava Hotsprings, a charming tiny tourist town like one my daughter has created as the basis for her stories and plotlines. We enjoyed ice cream and a small-town diner. It was a nice, inexpensive getaway, so we didn't have to ponder who wasn't there, or probably was there that we couldn't see.  She would have been 12. 

[Remembering Alli]

Most of our little trip, I was able to keep it together. I lost it a little bit when my mom called and cried with me. I started to break down a couple of times over the course of the day. But my real breakdown came after we got home, and I trotted out her baby book. I went into more detail than I usually do for my boy, telling him things he'd never heard about Alli and about his relationship with her. It wasn't until we got to the images of the cold, waxen face of my previously vibrant baby and the pictures of the tiny coffin that I collapsed entirely. Instead of awkwardly offering me a drink of water to stop me from crying in his usual panic mode, my teenager showed a lot more emotional maturity when he just held me while I sobbed. My husband rubbed my back until the storm passed. My boy later pointed out we all need these times to break down, to give into the grief.  I'm thankful they were there, and I'm thankful to know we will hold our angel again. In the meantime, dates like this still hurt.