When Grief comes again
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When Grief comes again, you make tea. Or wish longingly that you had it in you to make the tea. You don’t try to chase it away (as if that would ever work). You make room.
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Not like the others
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You can see swimmers behind the people being interviewed—some in bikinis, some in tankinis, some in burkinis, not to mention swim trunks of all imaginable cuts and lengths—you get to understand their confusion. I wished that our world would become a bit more like that beach—that it would be ok to be as we are, that it would phase no one to see each other the way we are each comfortable being seen.
Read MoreSurviving
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Every day, I get out of bed and pretend that I am okay. That it is okay. But the truth is, it still devastates me, three+ years out. Not a day goes by. Starting kindergarten (and milestones) or even when we're just laughing with our kids, I think of all she is missing out on and all the milestones that should have come between birth and death. I know how quickly bad news can happen and shift everything to black. Sometimes I read other stories here and I think, I could not survive that. And then I remember, I did.
Read More17
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Despite my consistency of ritual, my album of photos, my constant urge to collect poems and words that help me hold her close—somehow the inertia of life has swept me away and with it my desperate attempts at reasoning. How is it that a tiresome wave of deadlines, emails, forms and files could distract me from my daughter?
Read MoreMother Earth in spring
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The same spring, irritatingly new every year. Life is back on earth. My baby is not back. She was born in spring, three years ago. Life continues. Despite death. Death continues. Despite life.
Read MoreStray cat sings back
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Nine years later, there’s peace. There really is. People say Time heals and you fantasize about Wile E. Coyote anvils dropping from the sky. What’s-her-name and her however-many Stages of Grief. Denial, begging, anger, acceptance, a neat bow, something-something whatever. Screw you, what’s-your-name. My grief is not linear. But here’s the thing. From a long way up—I’m whispering now—it is, sort of. Grief is not linear. Time doesn’t heal. Not at all. Until it does.
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