Jacob and I

He is amazing, my boy.  I lured him into watching The Walking Dead with me tonight...who can resist the zombie apocalypse?  He kept wanting to fast forward through the commercials whenever possible, which I was beginning to bristle about, thinking he wanted to cut our time together as short as possible.  He turned to me, putting a gentle hand on my arm, and said, "No, no, it's not that.  It's just that I like to enjoy it- seamlessly."

Who is this child?  He is mine, mine, mine.  He may look like Tim but he talks like me.  Small smile of triumph here.

And then, when the show became too emotionally harrowing for us both, we held hands for at least five minutes.  That's who we are when we're together.

Truth Is...

If you are willing to reflect and be honest about it, you'll see things about yourself that make you cringe.  You can acknowledge them and try to change.  Here are mine from this weekend:

I am afraid to give my whole heart to my other child lest he die.  I must not be a coward.  He is deserving of every bit I can give him and shouldn't have to get less because I am scared of losing him.  I have to focus on him right now- today and tomorrow, and every day he is alive.  This doesn't mean I love Cory less or have forgotten her.  She will not be jealous or upset with me in any way.

Tragedies happen to people every day.  I am not special.  I saw on the news about the drunk driver that drove into the crowd at the homecoming parade- four killed and dozens injured, and I felt small and ashamed.  Everyone deals with loss.

Then I read about the woman who fought off two cops and went back into her burning house to rescue her three children.  None of them made it out alive and they were found together:  the infant in her arms and the older boys beside her.   I looked at their pictures and felt so incredibly humbled.

My story is mine and it's important to me.  But everyone has a story.  And some are just as incredibly unfair as mine.

I may still be unable to get where people want me to be on the religion thing, but here is what I do have.  I have so many people in my corner, my family, my friends, my co-workers, loved ones I treasure, even people I've never met in person who live across the world. With that amount of love and support, I have to find a way to be the person Cory called her mom and that Jake can look to as a positive role model.  Who am I to waste all that goodwill?

Buck up, Nick.  Never, ever, ever, ever give up.

She Was Honest, lol

I just turned 42.  I can tell I'm getting old because I only want to listen to the music I liked in high school.  My favorite all time band ever, ever, ever has always been Queensryche, and Cory tolerated this valiantly.  One time while chopping up vegetables, I bent back suddenly at the waist and came up singing some crazy note with my neck tendons bulging.  Cory nearly fell on the floor laughing.  She may have clapped.

All was well until we watched the movie Forgetting Sarah Marshall.  The lead character was a kooky writer whose passion was writing a play for puppet vampires.  Actually the play was a musical.  He sang for the puppets and Cory uncomfortably noted the spooky resemblance of this sound with the theatrical stylings of Geoff Tate from Queensryche.  That was it.  It was just over for me.  There was no denying it.

I just listened to one of my favorite Queensryche songs and had to laugh myself silly.  Cory was right here making her goofy Dracula puppet voice for me.  That child.

All The Cool New Things

I'm failing.  I couldn't keep her alive.  I can't let her die.

 This horrid new normal is determined to break me, or at least bend me to its will.  You will live without a daughter.  You will learn to like at least something about it.  You will.  Not fitting in, yet?  Let's just cut off another chunk of your flesh and try again.  

I don't want to embrace today.  I do not trust tomorrow.  My job is to preserve the world I used to love.  It's all I have.

What is so bad about living in the past, before the sirens and all the gore? Will I really miss out on all the cool new things happening in my post-Cory world?

And really, looking to the future is for fools, is it not?  Why make plans if someone might just die before you get to them?  What is the point?

Will Jake really start high school next year, with the bus stop the very one Cory bopped to every morning?  He might or he might not.  He might die.

And so I cover him with kisses and beg him for hugs, treating him like the ten year old he was and not the nearly fourteen year old he is. I am needy, and I hate it, but I cannot stop myself.  In exchange for his love and the magical way he is just alive every day when I get home,  I try not to let him feel any pain or disappointment, other than the loss of his sister. Chores?  As if.

 You've heard of the breathing allowance?  You don't have to do anything to collect the money but be there, drawing breath?  It's sort of like that between us now, but with the additional expectations of not setting fires or killing anyone.  I can't give him Cory back and so I give him a pass on most everything.  Here, son, let me pick out your outfit to wear.  Better yet, let me bring it to you like a live-in butler.  It's an interesting choice of parenting style.  Cory must be so pissed.

I can feel myself fucking up all over the place- failure at work, failure at home, failure as a parent, failure at relationships- but just keep steam rolling ahead.  Finances?  Fail.  Moderate house-keeping?  Fail.  Closet organization?  (Laughs politely.)  I have two modes of personal appearance:  aging super model (everything goes together and the makeup is on point) and clinically depressed (pillow creases on face and uncombed hair).

So is this success at grieving: being alive, drawing breath, but not really doing anything of value?  Is making things worse for myself and everyone around me what is considered "coping"  and learning to live with my "new normal"?

I'd rather sit back and share a Cory story with someone.  Seeing her face clearly is the one thing I still get right.  Sometimes I can even make other people see her, too.

Why Yes, Bono, I Too, Will Never Have My Heart's Desire

No sleep tonight.
So when you get time...if you want to have an idea of this pain of which I'll never be able to describe accurately.  Go listen to U2's "All I Want Is You".  Listen all the way to the end, and pay attention to the hoarse desperation in Bono's voice as he cries out the words towards the end of the song.  That feeling.  That feeling in which your heart is broken beyond repair is one I used to think I knew.  And maybe I did.  But it is made twofold by death and the inability to contact the other half of your heart, even if just to say you wish things were different.

My Girl,The Queen

Tonight the image came to mind of Cory eating chocolate-chip cookies, which made me unspeakingly sad all at once, and I thought to myself, woman, get ahold of yourself!

Who wants to read about how she used to grab five (exactly five) Chips Ahoy and a cup of milk, and hunker down wherever she felt like to dunk them to her little heart's delight?

Well, I do.  I've got every memory intact, but if I live long enough to have trouble remembering, someone please read me this so I can have that picture in my mind.  I treasure it.

And really?  This is what it is.  A good cookie-eating memory can be the thing that undoes you after a long day of work, keeping your mind busy with the business of the living.  Such is grief.  It doesn't play fair.  And because I'm a list maker at heart, my mind pulled up similar footage of her drinking a soda, eating pizza, soup, seafood, pasta...

She was across my table for many years.  And sometimes, many times, it was just us two.  She made a fabulous dining partner, from the beginning of her life to the end.

Get ahold of myself?  Pshaw.  I am with Queen Victoria on this whole mourning thing.  Did you know that not only did she wear only black for forty years after the death of her beloved, but she also continued to have her servants carry hot water to his chamber every single day for his morning shave?

She wrote this to her daughter after the death of Prince Albert, "How I, who leant on him for all and everything—without whom I did nothing, moved not a finger, arranged not a print or photograph, didn't put on a gown or bonnet if he didn't approve it shall go on, to live, to move, to help myself in difficult moments?"

I feel Queen Victoria.  She gets it.  I bet she had a cookie-eating memory or two of her own.

Raising a Reader

Reading to Cory is one of my favorite memories.  I like to imagine all the board books, story books, chapter books, bits of novels, and one full novel stacked one on top of the other in a teetering pile that reaches the ceiling or maybe fills a room.  I can lay in the dark and pull out her favorites in my mind, one after another, like Jenga.  I can remember her little body curled into the contours of mine, leaning back and getting lost in the story.  Then later, when she was practically a grown up herself, she'd lay down and listen so earnestly, declaring I should do audio books, which cracked me up.

I know if she'd have had children, she'd have read to them, and done all the voices to captivate her listener.  She'd have given them books as gifts.  Always.  They would have prowled bookstores together.
They.

It Can't Be Me; It Has to Be Me

Did I tell you I finally got someone to stay in the kitchen with me the whole time while I cook dinner?  He does it without complaint and never leaves my side until dinner is plated, or in his case, bowled.

My dog, Gizmo, is the best.  These last couple of months that Blue Apron has gotten me cooking again, he has joined me every single time, planted his little bottom on the tile like a good boy, and gave me all the moral support I could ever ask for.  He smiles at me, and flashes me those pretty eyes while he does it, too.  A girl could swoon.

Here's the other thing:  he actually gets excited about the meal I serve up.  He gives me the kind of kudos that Cory used to offer:  physical affection in exchange for soup.  I cook to make him happy and he lavishes on me the appreciation I crave.  It's a beautiful thing.  It reminds me a little of when Cory was sick, too, now that Gizmo is failing.  There, I typed it.  He's failing.

The only thing I can really do to make Gizmo's day is cook for him, and I love to.  It very much reminds me of the steak dinner weekends when cooking for Cory was the only comfort I could provide.  When in doubt...feed.

I'm having the worst time knowing Gizmo won't be with us much longer.  I mean I get that he can't live forever; clocks stop.  I just don't want to be the one.  I really don't.

I don't want him to suffer, of course, but who am I to say that he is all done?  What if what he really wants, if he could tell me, would be one more day...one more car ride, one more cheeseburger, one more bite of Mom's chili, or even the right to die at home surrounded by his humans and his friends, all his familiar smells?

I mean, we don't load the elderly up and take them to be put down because we don't want them to suffer.  If Gizmo wants out of this, his goofy grin and tail that still wags hasn't convinced me yet.  To be fair, he is losing weight, his little face shrinking a bit and his spine becoming more pronounced when I pick him up.  But he's still Gizmo, and don't we all shrink as we age?

Hell, I don't know.  I just can't be the one.  Yet I'd have to be the one.  You see?  I can't be the one because I already feel like I sent Cory to her death on my stupid grocery store errand.  I can't kill her and the dog, too.  He looks at me the same way she used to:  complete trust.  But to the person out there that says, "Nicole, get a hold of yourself.  If he reaches that point, you'll know and you have to do something", I say, I know, I know.  And it couldn't be anyone else to take him there and hold him, either.  It'd have to be me.  I'm his human.  I'd have it no other way.

What's Your Song?

Cory and I had that playlist on our I-tunes called "Beautiful".  I've been listening to it for the last hour painting just one page after another, smiling, even though half the songs were played while she laid in her casket.  They are beautiful songs, and I hope someone knows me and loves me well enough to play my favorite songs at my funeral.

That is all.

More Stuff

And here I am, at the coffee shop once again.

I might as well have used a wheelbarrow to haul all my crap inside:  Art journal, sketch journal, planner, writing journal, menu planner, budget planner (that one makes even me giggle out loud), laptop, 28 fountain pens with various inks, a dozen or so rolls of washi tape, all the stickers my younger self could ever have possibly desired, some stampers, ink pads, watercolor kit, and water brush.  I nearly grabbed my carving tools, and decided to show some restraint...ha.  One may think I have decided to just live here.  And I kinda wish I could.

It's an escape here at my little table by the window.  No one cares if I do indeed have clean hair today, but yesterday's eye makeup on, and I find I can hide really well under one of my many hats.  I throw on some jeans and just run away from it all.  In my Hunter boots.  Of which I have twenty-six pair, because I am one)stupid and two)a hoarder...might as well get some use out of them.  The only things I could manage to do successfully right after Cory died, and  off and on since, are buying things and putting outfits together.  And I did them as if they were my life's work.  Now I have so much stuff, I can't even turn around.  It hurts my brain.  Declutter would be the obvious solution, especially since I've gained at least ten pounds since 2012 so half the shit doesn't even fit anymore- but tell that to someone who is severely depressed and she will just stare back at you blankly.  Do what? Yeah, I'll get to that.   I have dreams about swimming through my hallways in a hazmat suit right before they condemn my house for containing too many pairs of shoes, walkways made impassable.

I'll get on a self-care kick and decide to wear makeup again, buy like 12 lip glosses, and a week later, they're buried in a purse I hardly ever carry because I don't have the energy to change it out.  I used to be one of those crazy broads who switched their purse out every night before work to match their outfit.  I miss that girl sometimes, so I'll buy the purses, but they hang on their hooks, and I carry a Vera Bradley around till the handles look worn.  What the hell?

Yes, I am aware that I sound whiny and lazy.

Depression is harder to fight than you might think.  You can't just snap out of it.  And if nothing else, my anxiety is going to give me back problems.  Today, as I straggled through the cold rainy Sunday morning, with my tote bag, handbag, computer, and books, I felt every bit like that fifth grader that carried fourteen binders in 3 bags to school every day.  Come to think of it, why did no one think that was strange?  I probably should've been put on meds years ago.

The more anxious I am, the more I carry because anxiety seems to be the constant fear of not having enough of something.  Carry it all, and your chances of being disappointed go down?  I look at the people in my life who don't have anxiety and they are light travelers.  My friend, Angie, sports around town with a purse the size of the ones I used to buy Cory for Easter when she was a little girl.  What does she have in there?  A debit card and some dental floss.  Her worries scale down to being able to buy food and maintain good gum health.  Wow.  To be that girl.  I can't even imagine.

She looks equally flabbergasted at some of the crap I pull out of my purse on a daily basis.  I might bring every pen I own on one day and the next show up with the pink plastic baby they gave me at the Crisis Pregnancy Center when I was trying to decide what to do.  Stuffed animals.  Serapes.  There's really no telling.

You see that I acknowledge the oddness of my behavior, but I can't seem to do a damn thing about it.  I'm off the sauce for a minute and just as quickly I'm hunched over a pile of something, muttering to myself that it would be better to have one of every color.  Safer, really.

The outcome is feeling very out of control when what you thought you were doing was a good thing...gathering for the next disaster, because if your child can die while you're making dinner, anything can happen and you must be prepared.

It's comical that I'm supposed to speak at one of the colleges again soon about mindfulness.  Yeah, I have my art, but dude, I am no one to advise, I'm a fricking mess.