Paperwork

I'm finally getting around to some much needed de-cluttering.  I spend an evening last week sorting through the horrid landing ground of a small shelving unit in my dining room.   Everything on it should've been filed away or thrown away sometime in the last four years, but the shock and trauma of Cory's death, followed by debilitating depression prevailed. Go through papers?  I struggled to pay bills and cook meals.  But since those things have been going better lately, I finally faced the stacks.

I had to stop two or three times during the process, and slip away to watch something funny on youtube or joke with Jake.  In those stacks were the following items, each a horror to stumble across:  the police report of the accident, the receipt for Cory's plot at the cemetery, the detailed funeral bill, the quote for her monument, including the many e-mails back and forth with the designer about frost lines and installation, and something I'd never laid eyes on before...her death certificate.  Looking at that single piece of paper challenged every bit of progress I've made in the seven months.  I wanted to run away, straight out my back door and into the street, but I didn't.  I wanted to go gulp down a handful of Ativan, but surprising, even to me, I didn't.  I went to the safe haven of my room, took some deep breaths, distracted myself, and came back.

Not gonna lie to you- I harbored some of the same crazy thoughts as I did so...coming back and back and back again to the police report to the driver's name and address.  Whenever anyone kindly tells me I'm strong to have survived losing my child, I think maybe the strong part comes in when I resist the urge to go hunt that woman down.

And finally at the very bottom of the last shelf were a couple of non-official papers that wrung my heart until it dripped.  One was an I.O.U.  typewritten declaring that Cory Mansfield owed Jacob Mansfield owed three dollars, due at the end of March, with a dollar per week interest charges to be incurred with late payment.  They had both signed it.  I just bawled.

What could be worse?
 I found a spiral bound single subject notebook covered with Cory's careful print that listed all the plans for her nineteenth birthday party, had just months before the accident.  I smiled as I sobbed to see she started out with a list of over fifty guests:  childhood friends, current friends, church members, past and current teachers, and family.  I'm sure I quite crushed her bubble when I said the budget would require cutting it down to her closest handful of friends.  When told that, she decided on an American Girl doll tea party.  A few pages farther, I found a few different outfits down to tights and shoes that her doll might wear and various hairstyles.  In the end, she'd realized not everyone she had invited owned an American Girl doll, and subsequently switched the theme to a Twilight party.

She asked for little.  She wanted to include everyone.  As I scanned over the list again, I was pretty sure everyone she'd originally set out to invite to the celebration had ended up coming to her funeral,..absolutely no consolation.  Did I screw up again?  Should I have found a way to throw a huge blowout for her nineteenth birthday?  I sure wish I had, considering it was the last birthday party she would ever had and the last chance to be surrounded by all those people she cared about.  Amazing on how time produces all sorts of new things to feel guilty about and the pot of regret just grows and stews.

That was all I could handle in one setting and the shelves were empty.  The next day I looked at the wooden bench under the dining room windows that had become Cory's locker.  I lifted it, glimpsed a peek at all her school supplies, folders, and notebooks, and shut it back with a bang.  Nope.  Not going there.  Not ready.

Instead I cleared away some of miscellaneous items that keep collecting on the top.  Once those were gone, I stood and looked at her pink purse, not moved since the day she walked out my back door.  I looked at it for a really long time, walking over and peeking down inside, jerking my eyes away as if my retinas were burn right out if I lingered too long.  I tried to go through it once or twice since the accident, and fled in horror each time.  This day was no different.  Eventually I called Jake in and asked him what he thought...should it stay right where it was?  Should we move it?  If so, where?  I explained I didn't want, couldn't bear, actually, the thought of "putting her away".  He nodded silently.  We discussed at length how we felt ready to try to make our environment more orderly but we don't want her to be, in any way, not present in our everyday lives.  The "carry in your heart" stuff is lovely and all, but I'm a concrete sorta person- I need an object I can touch.  I need to lay my hands on the fact that she was here, that she was mine.  So in the end, we agreed on this:  we'd take her dozen scarves or so off the nearby coat tree, move them to her room, and hang her pink purse on the coat tree instead.

Feeling most disloyal, I picked it up and moved it approximately one foot from its original resting place.  I waited to see what I felt after it was done and watched Jake's face carefully.  "She's ok with that, Mom."  he said.  Jake, who never cries...who I don't remember seeing cry much since the funeral at all, teared up and hugged me hard.  How appropriate that this small but significant decision belong to us two and that we have equal say.  She had lived with us and shared our lives more closely than she shared any one else's.  We'd had a front seat to the best times and the worst times, some more scary than anything that should ever happen to a child, a teenager, or an adult.  She was ours. Our Cory Girl.

I looked over at her purse hung on the coat tree and decided it was ok.  Of course, I realize I just did that hoarder's trick of moving stuff from one space to another without really getting rid of anything, but maybe that's ok, too. Maybe in this case, any movement is more important than the distance travelled.

Lay Me Down

We buried Cory four years ago today.

I've felt some relief having had her death day pass six days ago.  Some of the weight slipped off my chest.  Then I opened my Facebook today and a flood of memories popped up, one on them reminding me that it is the eleventh of July and just what significance that date will always hold for me.  I don't count it down like I do the day of her death.  It somehow always takes me by surprise.  

They say you don't remember days, you remember moments.  But buddy, I remember so much of this particular day, so many moments- 

I couldn't sleep a single wink the night before...how do you sleep the night before you bury your child?  Tim ran around the house that morning a nervous wreck, practicing his speech and asking me over and over again how old was Cory when we met...was she four?  Four, right?  Jacob in his shirt and tie, looking so small lost, his eyes eating up his face. One of the most painful moments of my life:  watching them shut the lid of her casket.  How did this happen?  How did we get here?  Feeling outside my body at the cemetery as I watched my nephews carrying her casket from the hearse to the grave site.  The final words, of which I remember none, that were spoken, nor who said them, only the fierce panic as the clock counted down the minutes until they would put my baby down there in the dark.  Feeling disassociated again at the funeral luncheon as people around me ate and talked and laughed quietly. Food being pressed on me that I refused. Our snap decision to have sparklers outside the luncheon for everyone because she had died on the fifth and our fourth had been busy, and we'd neglected to get sparklers for the kids...I held onto a sparkler someone handed me, realizing maybe for the very first time that this was real and not a nightmare.  I held onto that sparkler feeling like I might just fall off the face of the earth; my pain was too great and my mind couldn't cope. At one point everything around me faded away, everyone seemed to disappear and the volume of the world turned down low enough for me to hear the blood pumping in my ears.   I 'm still here, still alive, while she's not.  How is that fair?  Setting my alarm to nap an hour when we got home and getting right back up to go check on her at the cemetery.  Going there and seeing her plot filled in with fresh dirt...it bent my body over with the brutal truth of it all.  That turned earth was just too honest.  But still my mind tried to reject the blatant evidence..  I remember wanting to shush everyone who stood beside me.  I was listening for her.  Maybe this had all been some horrible mistake.

Mostly when I first woke up this morning, I relived this day in a five minute reel in my head.  The feelings were as genuine as the day they first happened, and as my mom would say,  the tears just rolled.  I'll go on about my day now, and take comfort in Jake and my dog.  I'll do my chores and make dinner.  I'll smile and laugh because it's ok to be sad, but it's ok to be happy, too.  What I remember  most about this day every time it comes around, what is undeniable, is that the eleventh of July, 2012, is the day so much color was taken out of my world.  Putting it back?  It's a crap job, there's never enough to get it completely restored, and I can't do it alone.  Good thing I have family and friends to help, and I just do the best I can.

My Hypocrisy

So look...

I got really frustrated with Jacob yesterday...sweet, mild-mannered, easy-going Jacob.  I know.  I can't believe it, either.  He has to be the most compliant fourteen year old out there.

We'll take the sexist PMS thing right off the table.  Maybe we'll replace it with the fact that this particular week of the year I am pretty much an unpredictable grab bag of strong emotions.

What happened?

Well, Jake and I went to grab some dinner at Subway the other night.  I have been trying to go grocery shopping for about five days now.  How do you try, but fail, at something so simple as going grocery shopping?  It's the same as anything else, you procrastinate.  With Cory's death date looming, the last things in the free world that I want to be doing are grocery shopping and/or cooking dinner since these activities prompted the errand that put her in harm's way.

I made a joke the other day to my sister about it:  I'm just gonna embrace it and eat my way through the fifth of July, one restaurant at a time.  Where else can I run to?  Italy is not in the budget this year.  So even though it's not very affordable and not particularly healthy,  Jake and I have been eating out night after night after night, always with my weak promise to hit the store the next day and make enchiladas for dinner at home like a good mother.
  There are worse ways to cope, trust me.

So back to Subway.  I was halfway through having my sandwich made when I realized the handsome young man preparing it was Cory's friend's little brother.  I can't believe I didn't recognize him at first, but his hair was tied back and he looks like a young man now and not a boy.  Sure enough, when I glanced down at the hands preparing my food, there was a purple Cory bracelet around one wrist.  She is not forgotten.

This one single act massaged some salve onto my bleeding heart, and I felt better for the first time in days...the last time being when I noticed that my nephew had worn his Cory bracelet in his wedding pictures.  She is not forgotten.

And while I sometimes think perusing Facebook just makes me feel worse...a playground of all the happy people with their weddings and babies, the posts and pictures from Cory's friends have started to pop up.  She is not forgotten.

But back to Jake and Subway- I asked Jake once again why he doesn't wear Cory's bracelet.  He shrugged at first, then said, "They're too big."  If you haven't seen Jake lately, he's as tall as I am.  Maybe the bracelet was too big four years ago, but I doubted it to be true now.  I took one off my wrist and had him try it on.  He humored me, demonstrating how it fell down over his hand if his arm hung down slack.  I showed him how mine did the the same exact thing; we are a slim-wrist people.  He handed it back to me, saying maybe he would wear it later.

"Is it because it's purple?  Are you afraid people will say it's girly?"  I pressed.

"Maybe."  he answered.  I answered this with a canned speech about gender-bias and then laid out all the examples of strong males in his life who wear the purple proudly.

He listened, but didn't respond, and certainly didn't ask for a bracelet.

So that hole in my heart just got bigger.  When I feel like Cory isn't being being seen, I go into fight mode.  I pointed out that I didn't think the nice young man at the counter even knew Cory very well, but her death and her life had obviously touched him.  "You were her brother, Jake.  So what if someone asks what the purple bracelet is for?  It will give you a chance to say her name and tell them about her.  Don't you want to do that?"

As he does in almost all conflicts of opinion, Jake went silent.  His message was clear.  No, he didn't want to say her name, and he didn't want to talk about her.

Since I struggle so deeply to understand this, I just went ahead and made things worse by saying, "Jacob, if things were reversed, if you had died, and Cory were here, don't you think she'd wear your bracelet?"

Monstrous, I know.

I am the first one to call shit on someone telling me how to grieve.  The ones who tell me to move on, move forward, do this do that, stop dwelling...what do I say to them?  You have no right.  You have no idea what you would do if it happened to you.  So obviously I'm a complete hypocrite, because I can't make that stick when it comes to someone else.

And Jake's not the only one.  I don't understand why Tim doesn't go to the cemetery unless I prompt it.  It used to hurt me deeply that Cory's biological father didn't post pictures and memories of her often on Facebook.  To me, it looked like his life just went on, with little interruption.  To this day, I don't know if he's been to her grave, at all.  One of Cory's cousins hasn't been either, to my knowledge, and it remains a steady, raw ache.  See her.  Acknowledge her.  

Like it or not, the way our culture handles grief has shaped my views.  I fight many of them, but some remain. Pay your respects.

But is that any better than the "be strong", "move on", "stoic in public, crying is for private" crap I abhor?

I don't like it, and I will always be hurt for her- when people don't speak of her, show outward signs of their grief, show up to her grave,,, but it's really not my place to dictate.  How would I like it if someone told me I had to go to the cemetery every day or else that meant I didn't love her?  I held myself steady to that expectation for months after the accident and it nearly burnt me out.  When the crisis worker told me that I should stop going so often, that it meant nothing about my love for her or my ability to mother, that was freeing.  Going there every day to her final resting place would surely have driven me to suicide years ago.

For me, I hate going to the cemetery, but I could never not go.  There is an undeniable pull to visit the place where her precious bones lay.  There is little comfort in running my hands over the letters of her name, in letting my tears wet the grass above where she lies, in kissing her monument when I leave-it will never measure to kissing her face, not even the cold marble it had become the last time I saw her -, but all the same, I couldn't imagine not doing those things.

But maybe Jacob can't imagine being asked about his sister in math class and having to trot out the horrific story, becoming teary and vulnerable in front of  his peers.  That doesn't mean he doesn't love her and miss her deeply.  The bracelet?  It's a lovely gesture, and it makes my heart smile every time I see someone wearing one.  But Jacob?  He has nothing to prove.