Sunday, January 29, 2017

The Last 42

And so it has begun...that sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, somewhere between the rush of joy and pride I felt that Jake has turned another year older and the heartbreak upon realizing, as if for the very first time (this happens every single year), that Cory never will.  Her birthday is now just weeks away.  My anxiety shows its face in the scribbled side margins of my papers where I have repeatedly calculated how old she would be on any given day and it also manifests itself in the physical symptoms of the cursed "Wolf Teeth" phenomenon, the one in which I constantly clench and unclench my jaw with the dismaying perception that my teeth are growing too large for my mouth.  (Today she would be 23 years, 11 months, and 6 days, and please excuse me while I go look in the mirror at my teeth for the tenth time today).

In comparison to past years, I am doing pretty good with this impending "difficult date".  I have missed no time at work and have needed no walk in counseling appointments.  Fingers crossed, I will make it through without any crisis type situations.

I spent awhile going through pictures of Cory the other day, though, and found one that upset me greatly.  It was one of the last photos taken of Cory and her little brother before the accident.  It seems like there should be tons, but those last few months were a busy time with Cory feeling better, socializing more, and me taking classes at night.  I can remember so specifically cutting my time short with her to work on research papers or get my required reading done.  I'd give anything today to have those hours back.  Even the night before she died, I left her watching a movie with Jake and Tim in the living room to hole up in my room with my papers and books.  The last chance I had to watch a movie with her and I gave it up.  Unbelievable.

 I can remember, though, too, how proud she was when I crowed over an "A" paper or read her some of my teacher's comments and how she said, "Man, Mom, I wish I could be as good of a student as you."  "You can, Cory.  You are." I'd tell her, all the while hoping she was watching closely as I hunched over my books and fretted over two points here or there.  Because they follow the examples we set, right?

But back to the picture...
I was able to pull the date and discover it was taken six weeks before the accident.  I looked at the smile on her face and the shine in her eyes and quite felt like throwing up.  Forty two days left to live? Out of the little over seven thousand that she got to have? Desperately, I searched my memory banks, trying to remember what those last forty two days had been like.  Did she have more good days than bad?  Did she laugh a lot?  Did she get to eat any of her favorite meals?  Did she get enough hugs from me?

I cried over this picture, over the look on her face, and over what I couldn't remember about those last six weeks for a long time.  Eventually, I turned on some music for awhile, switched over to Netflix at some point, went to talk to Jake, got out my art supplies, and stopped beating myself up.  Or at least took a break from it.

 "The will to save a life is not the power to stop a death."

Cory, I would've done anything I could to give you more days.  I hope I made you feel loved and cherished for the ones you had.


Tuesday, January 3, 2017

Hold the Confetti

Here it is, another year.  I had to stay off social media on New Year's Eve and New Year's Day.  The jubilant outcries were just so foreign.  I couldn't join in without feeling like a liar or the worst sort of fake.

This new year?  I can survive. I think I've got that part worked out.  But, I am terrified...terrified...of her becoming smaller in the frame of my future.  All the new stuff crowds her.

As time marches forward, and these years just fan out, one after another, effortlessly, it would seem, although trudging through them is excruciating, the gulf between us seems to get larger and larger.  I live in fear of the day she will have been dead longer than she was alive, as if the tipping of that scale will negate her very existence (and it's only fifteen years away, if I live that long!)   Is that irrational?  Maybe, but it doesn't feel that way.

Rationally, I suppose, she will never be any farther from me than the day her heart stopped beating.  That was the moment the world stopped for me and never rightly began again.  Sure it moves, but everyone marches along in line so fast, and I seem to shuffle along, never going fast enough or jauntily enough to suit those around me, most of whom have been lucky enough to not have their pace disturbed in quite the same way.

Here's the thing:  each day that goes by, there are moments where she should be, but isn't.  And yes, it's the right thing to make new memories with my remaining child and my family members, but it's scary as all hell, too.  They pile up, the new songs and the new movies, the books and the world events, and if  I wrote them all down, ripped them out of my journal, and laid them at my feet, eventually I wouldn't be able to see the ground for all that paper piled up around me, let alone be able to remember with crystal clear accuracy the time before all of it happened, when she filled my world, when her voice was one I heard every day and her face one I saw every night before I went to sleep.

I want that recollection to remain intact.   I need it.

I'm supposed to feel proud of all the new stuff I did this holiday season, right?  After all,  I did put up the tree and baked the cookies and cooked a couple of  holiday dishes.  I went to Christmas Eve and Christmas day without any meds.
 But it's not over.  It'll never be over.  There is no fucking finish line.  I check off all my neat little boxes and then the blasted thing just starts all over again.  This grief thing is a sorry ass business.  And I'm not as progressive as I might lead you to believe.

See, I still haven't taken her coats off the coat rack in the entry way by the back door. It's going on five years now.   I thought about about it awhile back for a split second and felt like such a traitor I could barely live with myself.  So I left them right where they hung.
 But let's be realistic, she doesn't need those coats to be there... I do.

Because in the light of all this lovely progress that has everyone so pleased with me, there will be the moments that still bend my knees when I think of her in any small fashion...the line of a song, something on tv, a conversation...and there will come, most likely, another moment like the one last night, when it was raining and I got up to put the dog out, during which I broke out sobbing as I opened the back door, for no other reason than my child is dead and it is almost too much to bear.  I shut the back door, still crying, and turned to her coats, hugged them and tried to smell them- futile since her scent has long since departed them- but it didn't stop me from trying...trying so hard to recreate that feeling of having her precious body in my arms.  After I'd let go and stepped back, I searched her pockets, hoping to find a note in her handwriting that I'd missed by not being brave enough to look before, but finding candy wrappers instead, which I nevertheless cried over considerably.  If that doesn't say desperation, I don't know what does.

It's almost too much to bear.  Yet I am bearing it.  The pain is so great sometimes I think I will die but then I realize I may not and that's even worse.  It's a stretch of hell, not a happy new year, all masks aside and truth be told.  Of course, I'll keep going for her little brother but I'll pass on the streamers and party blowers, thanks all the same.

Logically, I should put the coats away.  But grief isn't logical at all.
Logically, she doesn't get any further away with the more time that passes, but it sure feels that way.
It sure does.





Sunday, January 1, 2017

Sink My Boat

Of course it was Jacob who went down to the basement with me, hand in hand, to retrieve one of Cory's Christmas ornaments, per Dr. Z's homework assignment.  How appropriate that it would be Jake to help me through this horrid errand, as we have suffered through the loss of the biggest person in our worlds together...me with a million words to say about it and him wanting to say none at all...yet, somehow, we have held each other up.

So, I already knew which one I wanted to put on our little tree that was looking less Charlie Brownish once Jake and I had given ourselves permission to give it a little love and care.  I wanted the little circle ornament that Cory had made for me at my Mom's daycare when she was about two.  It featured a candid photo of a tiny Coy Girl with her signature Pebbles ponytail off to one side, wearing little denim jeans with ruffles and a pink flower printed sweatshirt.  To top off this adorable ensemble, she had ventured into the dress up box and came out with a football helmet that she pulled jauntily over her head with a look of infinite pride because nothing toughens up an overly sweet girly look like a piece of athletic equipment.  Duly noted, Cory.

I had already decided not to look at or for any thing else, but instead use my grief-stricken tunnel vision for that one ornament and get out before I had a complete mental breakdown beside my fourteen year old in my dusty basement.

Isn't it funny how we plan every move so painstakingly just to watch shit blow up in our faces?

My heart started hammering a little too fast when the ornament box wasn't with the other Christmas decorations.  It began beating faster once I discovered the tubs of Christmas decorations were in various places in the basement instead of all together the way they are supposed to be.  Jake and I, having watched many episodes of Law & Order SVU began a grid search.  We covered every inch and came up with nothing.  All the ornaments had been stored together in a Rubbermaid ornament storage box- the clear kind with the lock-down side handles.  It couldn't have just walked away.  The sinking feeling began before I even texted Tim to ask him where he had put them.  Why were all the little hairs on the back of my neck standing up?  Why was I so certain the ornaments were gone?

/Which, in the end, they were-
over twenty five years of ornaments.  The Precious Moments expectant mommy ornament my first bosses had gotten me when I found out I was pregnant with Cory- the one that Bob broke in a rage and I glued carefully back together...because that girl?  She was a survivor.  Gone.

The Baby's First Christmas engraved ornament from Things Remembered that was a gift from Bill.  Gone.

All the ornaments Cory made for me through the years at daycare, Sunday school, and grade school:  school pics glued to foam snowflakes, the popsicle stick Rudoph, the lop-sided, glitter laden little kid creations.  Gone.

All the ones that Jacob made, too- foam stockings with his name spelled out in glitter at the top, 3-D snowflake foam sculptures, school pics glued to predictable Christmas shapes- his shy smile making them glow.  Gone.

The picture ornaments Cory, Jake, and I had picked out together at Target during much happier, healthier days.  I remember the exact day and errand. I remember their hands, smaller, when they took them down off the racks.  "Can we get this one, Mom?"   Gone.

A few of the plain bulbs that had to be twenty five years old now, tireless soldiers, first hung on a tree at Elm Street in the apartment I shared with Bob, but pulled out every year to put on every subsequent Christmas tree.  Gone.

The pet ornaments carefully chosen to represent family members no longer with us.  Church.  Sassy.  Oliver.  Romeo.  Boo-Kitty.  Gone.

A special ornament given to me from my Mom, if I remember correctly, a year or so after I left home under not the best terms.  Gone.

The handful of ornaments Bob's mom had sent to Cory when she was little and the two newer ones she'd sent to Cory and Jake when Bob came back into our lives.  Those ornaments meant something to me.  Even they were short-lived, there were moments of glorious happiness for my little family.  I wanted to hold those moments in my hands always.

Twenty five years of my life.  So many changes.  My family.  My families, actually.  My dead child's life- her straggling letters and her toothless grin.

 Can you understand the enormity of my despair?  My rage at such a careless mistake has passed...finally... and now I am just sick to my stomach.