The First Year Without Sarah

Yesterday I got into a bit of a kerfuffle work-wise because I drafted a memo going to many of the Powers That Be at the office. I received a complaint from one of the cc’s that I had messed up her title and that of one of her underlings. Titles can be a touchy and confusing subject in the federal government, where there’s not much bandwith between the deputy assistant general counsel for underarm deodorant and the chief associate counsel for deodorant. Or some such. Anyway. I still can’t quite figure out what was wrong with my rendition of the title in question, which I copied straight from her signature line, but maybe it was her placement within the list of cc’s. I’ve gotten into hot water before for placing people in a cc list when they felt they should have been on the “to” line, and that was a highly delicate situation that required all my skill and diplomacy to manage. (“A grievous error has occurred…”)

Personally I don’t use my title in internal email communications and I think the whole thing is silly, but if that’s what you bring to the table, then that’s what is important to you. I try to accept people as they are, short of bigotry and cruelty.

My mom didn’t have any capacity for accepting people the way they are, and I think it made her very unhappy ultimately. She was always trying to change my father, my brother, and me and she would often tell me I needed to change things about Max or Sarah. You need to get Max to start driving. Wouldn’t it be easier for me to just accept him the way he is, Mom? Or I needed to go down to Gallaudet University and get an elite team of therapists to use sign language to communicate with Sarah. Mom, Sarah isn’t deaf, she’s nonverbal. She can hear and understand everything we say.

But despite my philosophy, I couldn’t accept my mother, not really. I kept trying to change her, to put her in time outs, to see if she would be nicer to my family. That wasn’t going to happen. She never did change. She got worse, actually, as she deteriorated mentally.

I’m coming up on the first anniversary of Sarah’s death in August and the second anniversary of my mom’s death in September. I think my mom spent the last thirty years of her life very unhappy, for many reasons. I really don’t want to be unhappy for the next thirty or however many years. I want to be able to accept this situation, to accept Sarah’s death, to grow, to find meaning and have more life left. That has to happen.

I’ve been reading the book I borrowed from The Compassionate Friend lending library. Meditations for the Bereaved Parent, Copy #3. It has some pretty good stories where parents talk about the screwed-up way they felt after their children died. Yesterday I read one “Meditation” in which a mother whose son died in the 1970’s explained that you will spend a long time thinking and wondering and hoping that your child is well cared-for. Like I have with Sarah. She equated this to the mothering drive in us never really dying.

Of course, as with about half these Meditations, she then went on to say that we should lay these fears to rest because God/Christ was the best babysitter of all and our children are being exquisitely cared for in Heaven. I had no idea that JC was running a babysitting service that had capacity for special needs and/or medically fragile children. Is he on the approved list of caretakers for Maryland Developmental Disabilities Administration? If so, Max and I would have taken more date nights and perhaps gone out to eat more often by ourselves.

I know I am unbearably snarky about these sort of religious platitudes, which seem to comfort a lot of people. I wish sometimes I could just believe that Sarah is an angel in heaven, that “God has a plan for all of us,” that “everything happens for a reason,” but those sorts of homely bits of folk wisdom have never appealed to me. If God is such a great babysitter, where was he the night Sarah died, when I was away from home? Couldn’t he have been more vigilant? I’m definitely leaving him a negative rating on Care.com and I may file a complaint with the DDA.

It would be good to have someone to blame and hold responsible. A target for all our negative feelings and anger. Last night Max and I were watching Breaking Bad again. We are almost at the show’s finale. In the episode we watched, Jesse, who has been depressed, withdrawn, and apathetic for months, finally just explodes and goes and burns Walt’s house down. “There’s the anger behind all that depression” I said to Max. We wondered jokingly whether arson had been tested as a therapy for depression, and laughed about burning down a random house in the neighborhood to make ourselves feel better. Just being silly of course.