Tag Archives: grief

I Cried for a Bird

The bird was dead in the morning
And I sobbed.

Though I hadn’t cried in weeks,
Not for my country,
Or Palestinians,
Or immigrants imprisoned,
Or the attack on the NEH that funds my life’s work.

But for a bird, I cried
For a grackle, who would have grown up to harass my ubiquity of sparrows.

I sobbed for that little black bird
As I buried her in the apple mint,
As I fed the dogs,
As I brewed my coffee,
I sobbed.

Though I hadn’t cried in weeks,
Not for my besieged government,
Or atrocities in Sudan,
Or the erasure of our history,
Or the politics of cruelty that threatens our democracy.

I cried for a bird.

The bird was dead in the morning,
And I sobbed.

The Bird by Stacy Lynn (mixed media)

Mack Day (no. 11)

She is still here, my Mack. She resides in my heart. She dances daily in my thoughts. She is every four-leaf clover. I tell her all the big stuff and the hard stuff and the stuff about which I know not what to do. Her good spirit laughs with me, cheers me on, and gives me courage in the dark. I will always need her, like I need water and air and doughnuts.

Mack Day, her birthday, is always a bad day and a good day. My tears and longing for her are more bitter, but I also celebrate her joy of being a leprechaun, quarter Irish and born on St. Patrick’s Day. As I have done eleven years now, I will take Mack Day to grieve my girl and to give myself space and a little extra grace. To sob alone and feel in my bones the loss of her. To eat something decadent for her. To belly laugh at least once for her.

This year is a discombobulating year of contrasts for me, and I have been thrown off balance.

As a historian supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, my livelihood, health benefits, and life’s work are in jeopardy. The assault on American democracy, the dismantling of our government, and the turning away of our country’s core values are making me physically and emotionally unwell. As a voter, what is happening enrages me. As a woman and a mother, I am horrified. As a human being who cares about the vulnerable people among us, I am terrified. And as a historian of American history, I am profoundly sad.

If Mack were here today, she would have wisdom for me to better navigate my anger, horror, terror, and sadness. She had this way of diffusing catastrophe, of redirecting negativity, and soothing anxiety. Her wit and her silly songs could walk me back from every ledge.

As I am missing her ever so keenly in this difficult historical moment, so too is her absence a fresh heartbreak as I meet my own personal, triumphant moment. I would do anything to have Mack with me to celebrate in April the publication of my new book Loving Lincoln, the deeply personal and most important creative achievement of my life. Oh my, would she have loved the cover of this book. It would have produced one of her famous cackles, and she would have been so proud of her Momma Bear and the book, giddy that her kindergarten drawing of Abraham Lincoln was published within it. I can hear her voice in her favorite refrain, “Lincoln is dead, mom, you know that, right?”  

There are few things in this mortal life we can control. While I must face this Mack Day alone, I will go forth into the sunshine as best I can, with Mack’s good cheer in tow. I will let the tears flow (sorry, my dear girl), but I will also raise a Guinness. To Mackenzie Kathleen McDermott, I am grateful you were here. I was damned lucky to have such a daughter, a bright light who touched the lives of every person who knew her.

As I have always done, I will hug Mack’s spirit close to my heart, keep her quiet wisdom in my mind, and let her joy put the spring in my step. But perhaps during this year—this unbalanced, terrible, joyful year—I will find new ways for Mack to guide me, to inspire me, and to sally me forth through all the darkness and all of the light. And no matter what happens to me or my job or my country, I will endeavor to be good and to be true. To locate a new and lasting peace of mind. To honor Mack’s faith in me. To do justice to all she was and all she taught me.

Cheers and peace and happy Mack Day.

Mack poking fun of the scholarly nature of my first book, The Jury in Lincoln’s America, in 2012.

Dissonance

Recently I began a new project that combines writing and painting. Since I am a comfortable writer but a novice, unskilled painter, I planned to write a series of short essays and then illustrate them with watercolor. My therapist suggested that I experiment with the reverse, paint first and then write an essay. It was a terrifying prospect, so I put it off until  two weeks ago when I had an idea for a safe test, a photograph of myself doing a cartwheel in my yoga garden.

The painting is ridiculous, much like the photograph, which I thought would provoke a funny essay about how bad I am at painting, how weird it is that I like being physically upside down, and how unusual it is to be a 57-year-old woman who can and frequently does turn cartwheels. But it was not a humorous essay, even as my right humerus bone in the painting is a hoot of disproportion. The essay had nothing at all to do with my joy of cartwheels and the good rush of blood to my head. The words that came out of me instead were an emotional outpouring of how upside down I have felt all this year. Not the good kind of upside down, like a downward dog or a cartwheel, but a bad upside down like discombobulated. Dizzy. Dazed and confused. The kind of upside down that makes me want to vomit.

Grief and loneliness and the uncertainty of this damned, crazy world always make me feel sideways. Feeling sideways is just life. Nothing special about me. We all have forces that knock us askew. I have learned to balance the kind of sideways that life inflicts upon me. I counter it with creative and calm remedies I daily employ to stay upright. I practice yoga. I write. I paint. I walk, cuddle my dogs, and watch birds. Yet all during this productive year, this contented, creative, cathartic year, a new and different force threatened my uprightness. Numbers. Stupid numbers. All in my head, but these seemingly real numbers had done a number on my equilibrium; 10, 30, 57, and 80 had turned me upside down.

Mack should have turned 30 in March, and on October 7, 2024, she will be gone 10 years. Mack has been gone half the time she was here on this earth, and it is a fact that astounds me. I cannot bear it. The truth of it has been impossible to face, and spending the past twelve months being the age my dad was when he died made it more difficult. Being 57 has been like having an anvil of death hanging from a thread above my head. My dad should have turned 80 this year, and though I know so well the sharp edges of living, year after year after year, without my daughter, I want to see 80. I need to keep Mack’s memories for so much longer than a decade.

A week after painting and writing the upside-down essay, I sat at my laptop to write this annual blog post to commemorate the anniversary of Mack’s death. I couldn’t do it. I was worked up by what the painting-first, writing-second process had unearthed and unleashed. It is not at all a bad thing to examine my emotions but looking for answers to my upside down made it hard to find the words to express my state of disorientation, my fear of the numbers.

But while I was stumbling and struggling to right myself, I got an unexpected email. A watercolor of mine was accepted for publication in a quirky online journal called Waves. It was a self-portrait I had done while recovering from the deep removal of skin cancer from my ear. I painted it to find humor in my fear about the plastic surgery I would have to repair the damage. The issue of Waves in which “My Left Ear” appears is entitled “Dissonance.”

Dissonance. Yes, that is precisely what I was feeling.

Dissonance: the lack of harmony among musical notes.

Dissonance explained my year, my numbers, and my false belief that I was upside down in a bad way. Some notes of my life this past year have been lovely chimes out of creative flurry, the completion of a new book, professional accomplishment, and the establishment of new friendships. Other notes clunked from fear, exhaustion, and physical pain. The note of those damned numbers clanked. The note of no yoga for five weeks of convalescence honked like an injured goose. The note of my trepidation of a new project I wasn’t sure I had the talent to do justice thumped a little too deeply to be good bass. And grief, oh my dear constant grief, is always an unharmonious whisper.

Dissonance is awkward and unpleasant, but it makes you long for melody. It makes you want to hear and see and feel your life differently. I had lost my tune. My song was, indeed, dissonant, but I was still singing.

In painting, perspective is one of the hardest skills to master, much as perspective in real life is almost always hard learned. Recasting my year as dissonance didn’t erase the worry that had plagued me, nor did it give me hope that the next year of my life will be harmonious or even a little less dissonant. It didn’t help me figure out how to write about what it means to me that I’ve passed ten years without Mack, either. A perspective of dissonance does, however, give me back my beautiful and necessary upside down, my downward dogs and my cartwheels. Oddly, too, the idea of dissonance is a gentle reminder that I am only human.

A definition of dissonance might also have soothed my dread of those dastardly numbers.

No.

No, actually, as Mack’s spirit is reminding me as I write this, it is just that the year of awful numbers will soon come to an end. After breathing and sobbing through another October 7, I will turn 58 on October 9, and then I will fall sideways into whatever future starts for me on October 10.

There is precious little we can control. Life will blow us off our feet in terrible and beautiful directions we cannot predetermine. Dissonance is just the range of all emotions, the far and wide of the good, and the depth of the sorrow that life gives us. Dissonance keeps us awake and alive. It helps us appreciate the precious melodies. Mack is alive for me in my dissonance and in my melody. She is with me in the joyful upside down. She will be with me ever still, going forward, laughing at my ridiculous paintings, teasing me out of the dark hours, and singing be back into tune so I can keep her stories and continue writing and painting my own.

On painting Mack: I find it very painful to paint her face and to imagine her in watercolor. Watercolor is like a dream, and I long to paint her alive. I have tried and failed to capture her lovely spirit. When I paint anything else, I am fearless, but painting Mack opens a vulnerability that is terrifying. But, when I am brave, I will keep trying to do her justice. My painting, after all, is not art, it is therapy. It will remain a work in progress, just like me.

Never 30

Mack should have turned 30 this year, but the world will pass another Mack-Day St. Patrick’s Day without her. I cannot picture Mack at 30, and it has cracked my broken heart wide open.

Mack in 5th Grade, 2004.

When Mack comes to me, tempting me to eat two donuts or telling me to be silly and stop it with the fretting, she is 10-years-old. Her freckled-face is dirty and grinning, her knees are scraped, her basketball shorts are five sizes too big, and her eyes are sparkling with mischief.

When I summon Mack for a chat, she is 20-years-old. Her hair is cropped short, her perfect eyebrows are framing the beautiful face she has only just grown into, and although her posture is casual cool, the cast of her gaze, straight into my eyes, is seriously wise.

When Mack comes to me or I summon her, she is never 30.

Mack and Me, 2014.

Mack will never be 30.

In October 2024, I will have known this fact for ten terrible years, but the truth of it hit me like blunt force trauma to my chest three months ago when the first of Mack’s best friends turned 30. Up until then, I was always able to imagine Mack living a life in her twenties, traveling, learning new things about herself, making new friends, and finding her professional path. Before three months ago, I could write stories of a life Mack might be living if the cosmos had given her the time she deserved. I could picture her as a junior writer for a sitcom, living a flip-flop life in Los Angeles with a St. Bernard and a Pomeranian, just a Mack-short walk from the beach.

Yet as time passed, I began losing the plot of every story I was writing for her. And now I have lost the plot entirely. Mack will never be 30. Not in life. Not in my stories. Not even in my dreams. I knew this failure of imagining would happen. I knew that time would buff out the sharpness of the future I envisioned for Mack as I coped with the loss of her. I knew it would be impossible to see any lines of time etched upon her beautiful face. I knew it. I knew it. I know it.

Mack will never be 30.

Recently, when I was walking my dog in the quiet of morning, listening to the birds and feeling the sun and the breeze upon on my face, I caught a glance of my reflection in a shop window. There was light all around me. My face was joy. My eyes sparkled. I was carefree, and it startled me. I had not been searching for joy or for peace when I set out on my morning walk, but both had found me.

The reflection I saw that day was not the face of a grieving, aging, lonely 57-year-old woman. It was the face of a 10-year-old, carefree girl. It was the face of a confident, easy-going, 20-year-old woman. It was the face of a bittersweet but hopeful middle-aged woman capable of finding simple joys and locating a moment of inner peace.

The 30-year-old Mack is not here. But the 10-year-old Mack is here. The 20-year-old Mack is here. I am here, too. And I will just have to do enough living for the lot of us. The spirits of that mischievous, fearless child and that grounded young woman will guide me, give me strength, and lead me ever onward to bloom joy and to paint my sparkle.

My two reasons for being: Mack and Savannah, 2004.

Out of Words

I have not been writing much this year. I am not quite myself, and I feel a little adrift.  Writing has always been my creative outlet, and since my daughter died my emotional release valve. Writing is how I understand the world, process pain, document joy, try out crazy ideas, and express thoughts I could never say out loud. It is frustrating to lose a tool that keeps me sane, but it occurred to me the other day that there is a good reason why writing is eluding me. I know why it took me the better part of a day to write a blog post for work and why when I sit down to write in the evening the blinking cursor stares me down.

I am out of words.

Writing is giving me a holiday because my brain is tired. I spent the last half of 2022 and all of 2023 preparing a 900-page edited volume for the Jane Addams Papers and writing my own book about women and Abraham Lincoln. Of course I am out of words. I used them all up!

And it is true I am not quite myself without them. I am adrift. But I am only a little adrift, which is to me, to quote Lincoln, a matter of profound wonder. I have been doing okay without writing for these first two months of 2024. I have been calmly weathering my missing words because I have a second tool to keep me sane. Watercolor.

Last July, my therapist suggested watercolor. We are working on my obsession with control and the anxiety that overtakes me when I don’t have it. She believed watercolor might help me feel the power of letting go, that learning to go with the flow of the water and the color making their own way across the paper might show me how calming it can be to loosen my grip. As a bonus, she was certain watercolor could compliment my writing.

I was skeptical. I am an old dog and afraid of new tricks. I assumed painting would frustrate me. I am not artistic, I said. I can’t draw, I said. Failure will make me sad, I said.

On my first day of painting, I ate all those stupid, doubting, self-defeating words.  And I have been painting ever since, completing, thus far, nearly 100 small watercolors. I do let the water and the color have a say, and I love the imperfect paths and the unexpected visions they reveal to me. I admit I try to control the water and the color more than my therapist would like, but I am learning to let go, becoming chill with imperfection, and laughing all the way. When I sit down to paint, I am as calm as I am when I sit down on my yoga mat. For a half hour or so I express myself in color instead of words; and there is so much joy in every silly, little painting I produce. In fact, I laugh deeper down in my belly at my failures.

I haven’t been writing this year, this is true. But I have been painting. And I am learning that expression is sometimes silent. I am discovering that painting is another way for me to understand the world. In my watercolors, I have documented joy, tried out a couple of crazy ideas, expressed some thoughts I could never say out loud or even write, and processed a lot of pain about by daughter, my dad, and my dog. Painting has become a part of my soul.

But enough already, missing words. I want to pursue the idea that watercolor might compliment my writing. Come back now please. I need to write. I feel you close as I write this post, and I want you back. Now, please. I want to introduce you to watercolor.

It Is Not Just the Birthdays

It is not just the birthdays.

Pulling on a warm, cozy sweatshirt from the dryer on a winter day can do it. Sunshine on my face. A Jeep Wrangler passing me by on the street. The sound of laughter, far, far off in the distance. The color of Cool Blue Raspberry Gatorade. An ordinary Tuesday can do it.

Pepper, who was her dog first, can do it. Does it most days these days, now that she is fifteen and her health is failing. Bug barking at the FedEx truck idling in front of the house can do it. Can do it despite never knowing the girl I lost. Can do it because she will never know the way that girl loved animals.

It is not just the birthdays.

The old days and the new days can do it. Joy or longing. The known or the unknown. The love or the loss can do it, and the yet to be found will do it, too.  

Everything, anything, and nothing at all can breathe a memory to life. And every memory has the power to undo me. Or to soothe me. Or to bring me peace. No particular time, setting, or frame of mind makes me more or less susceptible to the undoing or to the soothing. And goddess knows my grief has never followed any rules to bring me peace. 

It is not just the birthdays. 

But it is the birthdays.

The birthdays and the death days and the holidays. Milestones are a cumulative burden upon the hearts of the grieving.

On March 17, 2023, the day Mackenzie would have turned 29, I face another milestone. Another birthday, another her day, another Mack Day. And all I can do is lean the way the memories make me. All I can do is surrender. Bending is so much easier than breaking.

Maybe this year I will be lucky. Maybe this year the memories will arrive gently, possessed with the kindness to soothe me as well as the grace to bring me peace.

My Father’s Hands (but not his soda)

I have my father’s hands. My knubby-knuckled fingers upon my keyboard are his knubby-knuckled fingers, our pinkies, inward crooked, brave in their stretch to meet the A and the L. My manner of typing is just like his was, my short fingers tapping furiously like the bones of ancients punching out words that refuse to be quiet. The backs of my small but sturdy hands, are, like his, bony and painted by prominent veins, weathered and textured with life. Since my father died, when he was barely 57 as I will turn myself this year, I have not wished for the smooth perfection of the model hands in skin cream advertisements. My hands are far more lovely, freckled with memories of my father.  

Shared, these hands of ours, like our flagrant foreheads, forceful minds, and fierce opinions, delivered through thin lips, not pursed so much as certain in the forthrightness of the words they breathe. I miss my dad, especially since Mack died, the loss of them entangled in a knotty central ache that resides in my solar plexus. Whereas Mack’s spirit sits upon my shoulder every day pointing me in the direction of joy, my dad’s spirit rides shotgun on my conscience. Mack reminds me to giggle in the present, and my dad reminds me to do right and plan for the future.

Every year since Jim Pratt left this earth, I have honored his joyful life by drinking a Pepsi on his birthday. He was passionate about Pepsi, a Pepsi zealot really, preaching its virtues over godless sodas like the Dr. Pepper I favored as a child, although it was not allowed in our household where Pepsi was religion. Even though I no longer drink soda (my dad called it pop), and despite the fact that I observe a tradition of no-sugar Januarys, for love of him I have a Pepsi every January 17. It has been my Pepsi-for-Pops tradition.

Although I have my father’s hands and his forehead, I do not share his love of Pepsi. I never have. I hate it, in fact. It is too sweet, too syrupy, or too something I’m not sure what. My dad was right about a lot of things—like the wonder of words and baseball and candy and ice-cream drumsticks and showing off while shooting pool. (Thanks to my dad, I can still make a great shot with the cue stick behind my back, my ass perched up on the edge of the pool table).

But my dad was wrong about Pepsi, poor dear. And after twenty-two years of consuming 250 calories of the wretched liquid in no-sugar Januarys, I’ve decided to alter the tradition to make it a more palatable one for me. I will still break the sugar fast and have a soda in honor of my dear old dad, loved and missed like the dickens. But henceforth it will be a delicious Dr. Pepper that I consume. I trust my father will appreciate the sentiment of my continued sugar-fast-breaking-soda toast to him on his birthday and also approve of his daughter’s newfound sugary beverage independence.

A Pop for my Pops, a new tradition that honors us both.

October 7

In late September 2019, I was emerging from the dense fog of grief, but I was still wobbly with heartbreak, and I was terrified. I was facing a new life on my own, packing and preparing to close on a new house in a new town at the end of the month. Change is a challenge in the best of circumstances. It can uncomfortably bend or break us even when we are strong and well-prepared. It is risky and daunting when you are grieving. It had taken every grain of grit I could collect from the ruins of my old life to set in motion this plan for building a new one. Even small things like a superficial papercut from a cardboard packing box could provoke an anxiety attack. I was a wreck that month, and before I moved I knew I needed to calm my nerves and find my courage.

So the weekend before I was scheduled to close on the house, I drove from St. Louis to outstate Missouri to visit some old friends from my Springfield days. Kurt and Alicia are two of my most calming influences, and I needed to soak up their good sense and soothing natures. I was relaxing on their beautiful deck, just settling in for a peaceful weekend, when my realtor called to tell me that he needed to push back my closing by one week, a minor glitch regarding the title. He said the closing was now scheduled for October 7.

October 7.

I sucked in my breath.

“No…No….No,” I whispered into the phone. “I can’t do October 7.” I told him I’d have to check my calendar and call him back.

Oh, Mack, how I miss your face.

I could not possibly start the new life I was planning on the very day my old life fell apart. October 7, 2014, was the day my darling Mack was taken from me, and every October 7 since had been a horrible reenactment of that nightmare of a day. October 7 was not just a day on the calendar. It could not be scheduled or rescheduled. It was a memory, a misery, a mark in angry, black Sharpie upon a terrible page of my life.

Kurt calmed me down, and then I called Savannah. My savvy and sassy elder daughter is my joy and my salvation. She is the reason I keep breathing, and she was my inspiration for taking hold of my life and making this plan for moving forward. I told her the realtor wanted to reschedule my closing for October 7. She sucked in her breath, and then she sighed. “Oh, my God, Mom, they want me to start my new job on October 7. Maybe we both need to say yes. Maybe Mackenzie wants us to remake this day.”

And so we did.

On October 7, 2019, Savannah started her exciting and better paying new job at a tech start-up in Chicago, and I closed on my charming 1919 bungalow and moved into my new life. It has not been an easy path for me. Learning to live alone, to maintain an old house on my own, and to build a new life in a very small town has been a struggle. The pandemic also interrupted my adjustment, of course, and I am still plagued with doubt and anxiety. However, I have made some great strides here in this old house and new life. I have discovered hidden talents, developed new skills, and collected a lot more grit in this effort. Most importantly, I have accepted my new life and my new self as a collective work in progress, an unpredictable journey upon bumpy roads with glorious scenery as far as my eyes can see.

I have survived three October 7s in my cozy, quiet bungalow. This year, I will survive a fourth. I will, if I am lucky, survive many more. October 7 remains more than a date on a calendar. It will always be a memory and a misery, marking the passing of my beautiful girl. But now it also marks the moment I began curating my own peace in my own place in honor of both my daughters. Savannah inspired this remaking of October 7, and Mack’s spirit may well have engineered it.

On every October 7 for the rest of my life, I will relive a mother’s nightmare and feel the loss of Mack more keenly. I will also give myself permission, with a happy license from Mack, to acknowledge every October 7 as the first day of my bold beginning. I have come to believe that all dates on a calendar are more than dates on a calendar. In the end, every day we breathe is momentous, and no date over the course of a lifetime is all darkness or all light. Each date of the year in every year of every life is a collection of stories, snippets of who we are and all we have experienced in our lovely and fragile human existence. Dates on a calendar make up an index of our history, marking our memories in time.

Write, Rest, Repeat

I am a writer. And writers write. That’s what we do.

I put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard nearly every day of my life. In my profession as a scholarly editor, I write annotations and blog posts. As a historian, I write articles and books. As a grieving mother, I blog my emotions. As a wannabe poet, I assemble words in pretty collections of my feelings and observations. As a diarist, I release my pain and share my joy on the pages of a journal. I share my wit (ha ha) and wisdom (ha ha ha) on Instagram. And true to the old-fashioned soul I am, I pen handwritten letters to my friends.

Along with my flesh and my bones, I am words. Words are me. Writing steers the ship of my life across both smooth and roiling waters.

Currently, I am working on a book project. A biography of Abraham Lincoln told through the biographies of the women in his life. I am telling the stories of his mother, his lovers, his wife, his female friends, and some of the women who were his legal clients and political constituents. I am seeing Lincoln through these women’s eyes, as well as through my own, which are cast in the light and the shadow of being a woman myself. I can write this new biography of Abraham Lincoln. I edited Lincoln’s papers for twenty years, published widely on his life and times, and wrote a biography of Mary Lincoln. I have the Lincoln chops to complete this project, and I have the advance contract to prove it. However, this book project is a challenging one. It is personal. The doubts creep in, and I get scared. The fear of failing a brilliant idea, my unique perspective, and my creative approach to tired old narrative biography beats a cacophonous rhythm inside my chest.

I am a writer, yes, I know. Writers write, and that is what I am doing. But writing is hard. It tests your mettle. It is not always catharsis. It can also be a pesky task or a wretched responsibility. At times it is a chore much like washing the dishes. There are some days you get on with it and wash the damn dishes. There are some days you need to let the dishes stack up and go outside to play in the sun.

When the fears and the doubts push aside the confidence and determination it is time for a break. All writers know this is true, even as it is hard to admit it and give yourself permission to do it. I denied my need for a break for a month or so, head down and straining against the reality of it before fessing up and throwing up my hands, prescribing myself a two-week rest. A hiatus. A vacation I never take, but a vacation that was as imperative as air. Stepping away and going away would be deep breathing.

I spent the second week of my book vacation in Washington, D.C., where I communed with the spirit of Mr. Lincoln on the National Mall and at Ford’s Theatre. I spent time with family and friends, enjoyed great food, walked my legs every day to happy exhaustion, and consumed beautiful cocktails and gallons of sweet sunshine. Most nourishing to my writer’s heart and my ever-grieving soul was serving as moderator for the Lincoln Ideas Forum on Grief and Loss at President Lincoln’s Cottage. Mack’s spirit was with me, and so was Abraham Lincoln’s. The public program made me good nervous, allowed me to talk about Mack, evoked cleansing tears, sealed a new friendship, and introduced me to four people who know as well as a I do that grief is the flipside of love, that it is natural and universal, and that in our grief-averse society we all need to do better bearing witness to the suffering of others.

I spent two weeks tending to my heart and my brain and my body. I’ve communed and connected and breathed. I am refreshed and revived. The doubts and the fears are moving away, making room for the full bloom of confidence and determination. It is time to return to the book. To get back to work. To put my fingers to the keyboard.

I took time to sit among the tulips in the sunshine.

Now it is time, again, to write.

Eight Birthdays

Eight birthdays throb in the marrow of my bones, the combined power of a birth and a death propelling the mallet that makes for such pounding.

I am a shell, standing in the sounding sea of sorrow, the pulsing all memory and ache and longing. Still…I…am…standing.

Great love means great grief, and my grit is that I know it. I will not release my death grip on the former and so I cannot forsake the life in my white knuckles.

How does a mother withstand the violent timbre of one birthday, or two birthdays, or eight fucking birthdays? How do I stand this booming echo, bone deep and crushing, I ask every morning of the sun.

To stand is enough, answers the warmth on my skin. To weather is to gain strength against the bitter winds.

Because, there is only beauty in the life we give and the love we know and there can be no death in that human truth.

I am alive, and she is alive. In my breath. In my veins. In the blood beating through a heart half hers.

Resting my mind’s eye on her face, her freckles can dance to the throbbing in my bones.

The dancing recalls her laughter, which composes its sweet symphony upon the painful pounding.

Her laughter is a joyful, infectious giggle,

Demanding…commanding…compelling

An answer. She always refused to laugh alone.

You are here, I whisper. I hear you. I feel your joyful life.

Sorrow is not the whole of me, my darling girl. Because of you, I know laughter, too.