• Coffee

    I have an old friend from college who settled with her family roughly in the same community that we live in. She and I have maintained our friendship to some extent since the 1980’s. I wouldn’t say that we are close friends, but we text and we get together every once in a while. Of course, we are Facebook friends as well. 

    She seems to have a remarkable capacity to collect and gather people around her, new people, and generate a lot of friendships with women wherever she goes. I don’t know if these are lasting friendships, or mere acquaintanceships, but she’s always highly social, reaching out and collecting other women for coffee and a hike or some such thing.

    Since Sarah died, I’ve kind of lost my social “chip,” and have little feeling or ability to socialize with new people. The idea of socializing in groups is frightening, and meeting and interacting with new people who don’t know my story, or don’t know what’s happened to me, causes great anxiety. Either I have to push past my pain and be sparkly and fun, which makes me feel guilty, or I’m remote and quiet, which makes me feel odd and quirky. Either way, it feels like an ordeal.

    I do end up spending a lot of time by myself. Yes, I could jump on the coffee date and hike, or whatever else is going on, but it just feels like to much. It feels like Polly would miss me to much, and wonder where I am. And that makes me think that Sarah would miss me too much, and wonder where I am.

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  • Queries

    Around Christmas when I had some time off, I got caught up in the idea of publishing a book from these blog entries. The first thing you have to do when you want to publish a book, apparently, is find a literary agent. But back up – to find a literary agent, you have to write a really savvy and eye-catching query letter that sells you, your book, and explains its potential market in a few short paragraphs.

    I’ve never been good at “selling.” I’m always the creative liaison, the idea person, the person who works on underlying themes and puts information together. When I worked for a law firm, partners pounded into our heads the idea of client relations, client marketing of our firm’s “products,” and landing client accounts. The whole idea made me feel like I was chewing on ground glass and I was not a successful “rainmaker.”

    Drafting query letters to literary agents “selling” my work about something as profoundly shocking as my child’s sudden death struck me as slightly impossible. Either I wrote something like a Ladies Home Journal “My Problem and How I Solved It” piece, or I wrote a glib, sassypants letter that had no real heart and soul. Or I described a “Tragedy of the Month” that no one could bear.

    I ended up sending about three short letters out to agents, and feeling pretty dreadful about the whole process. This was in January, and I haven’t heard a damn thing in return. That’s to be expected, I suppose.

    The whole thing caused me such anxiety that afterward, I decided to drop it. I just start writing again, not with any thought of shaping my blog entries toward publication, but just to have an outlet for my feelings. I need that. For me.

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  • Holidays

    Holidays

    We are coming up on the double whammy of Valentine’s Day and Sarah’s birthday on February 20th. Preparing for and getting through both of these holidays was always a little difficult, and it still feels hard. Sarah loved them both. I would help her choose a valentine theme and either buy boxed valentines or make homemade valentines with her for her friends and teachers. Everyone would get a piece of candy with their valentine, of course, and she got to choose what kind of candy. Max and I would send her valentines as well, usually with Minnie Mouse or Minions on them. 

    For her birthday, we would help her choose a theme as well. Horses. Minions. Minecraft. Sid the Science Kid. The Wiggles. The Doodlebops. Clifford the Big Red Dog. There had to be a family party and a school party and a friend party. And presents. A big cake.

    The really difficult thing is how to celebrate these holidays since her death. I may have mentioned the extra large balloon we bought her last year on her birthday. It’s still in her bedroom, still filled with helium. We see the fact that it has not deflated at all as a sign of her presence.

    Yesterday I shopped for birthday and Valentine’s Day cards for her. I was in Five Below, her favorite store. The clerk asked me if I had found everything I need, the way they are trained to. I felt like asking if they had a section for gifts for Dead Children. But I resisted.

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  • Body Issues

    I started Weight Watchers again yesterday, or as they refer to themselves, WW. It feels like the hundredth time, and while it’s comfortable and comforting to return to this “way of eating,” it makes me sad too that I’ve basically been struggling with weight and body image on and off since I was eight years old. I’m so used to thinking that restricting my eating = control = good person, and eating what I want = out of control = bad person.

    I got on the scale yesterday morning and I really expected that I had gained just massive amounts of weight since Sarah had died. I mentally prepared myself to think that I weighed a shocking amount. But the reality is that I have gained about fifteen pounds. I’m actually down a few pounds from last summer. I don’t know how that happened.

    I read an article online by a nutritionist who said that when her clients go on a diet, she asks them how much weight they intend to gain. Because diets ultimately, she believes, make people gain weight in the long run. It’s hard to keep the weight off and then you yo-yo and gain weight. I do see her point.

    Even if I lose those fifteen pounds, I know I will still be very critical of my body. The only time I really loved my body was when I was pregnant with Sarah. I loved my pregnant physique. I felt very happy and content with what my body was all about. It was a lovely time.

  • Remote

    What’s the matter with kids today? I feel like Sarah hasn’t been around much lately, except for her really lovely birthday message. She’s a bit distant, a tiny bit remote, maybe off doing something fun and not thinking about us.

    I always worried that I wasn’t paying enough attention to her. When she was a baby, I wasn’t reading her ten books a day like I was supposed to. I let her watch TV. I didn’t take hours and hours of walks with her.

    I try to concentrate on the ways I was a good mom for Sarah and got her unique needs met. I was a tireless and sometimes ferocious advocate for her. I took her to so many therapies and activities.

    I’m the one who stays home now and watches TV, I work of course, but I seem to spend my free hours with the tube. And Sarah’s out in the world somewhere, doing the work that she’s doing now.

  • Support

    Max made the comment the other day regarding our grieving process that he wishes I had more support. He benefits from having a number of people in his AA meeting that have dead children, and they check in with him regularly and talk about Sarah, and give him good support. He’s offered to introduce me to them. I met some of them at the funeral and shiva, and they are nice people, but I don’t feel like establishing ties to them. It’s too much work.

    I guess I have a hard time with relationships right now. I’m not able to deal with small talk, and I feel a lot of impatience and boredom with other people, which isn’t their fault. But I also feel impatience and boredom when I’m by myself as well. 

    I want support, but I’m not sure how that would look. I guess just approaching me as Sarah’s mom, and talking about what a wonderful girl she was. I do hear from people who let me know that they think about Sarah and me every day, and that feels good. Silent support is reassuring.

    I’m not going to pretend I’m an easy person to deal with right now. I’m a handful. When you catch me on a day when my anger and my guilt and my depression and my crazy and everything else are at maximum surge, I can hardly look at other people. 

    But most days I manage a facade of normalcy. I’m fully oriented to time, place, and person. I’m napping less. I’m staying up later. I went to the eye doctor and the dentist last week. I’m taking care of me.

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  • Making Space

    We went to our grief support group meeting last night. It was an interesting meeting, for the most part. Max and I had missed the last two meetings, in December and January. We traveled in early December, and in January went to my uncle’s funeral in Pittsburgh. It was a long time to go without our grief group.

    The group discussion always starts off with a topic, but that topic evolves into whatever people end up talking about. Usually the “heavy hitters,” the people who talk at almost every meeting, start out. A lot of times we hear long stories from them that we’ve heard many times before, about how their children died and who their children were.Although it’s hard to listen to the same stories (for me at least), the group makes space.

    Eventually we moved to a topic I thought was interesting. How can we continue to parent our children now that they are dead? How do we best challenge the people in our lives to make space for our ongoing parenting relationship with our children?

    I’m not sure the people in my life recognize my ongoing parenting relationship with Sarah. They do say things like “You’ll always be Sarah’s mother” but they don’t know how uniquely difficult it is to parent a dead child. To make sure she is still happy and safe. To expect to hear from her, but give her distance at the same time to start her new life.

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  • Multiverse

    I still get a bit of a shock and a disappointment when I look at the photos on my iPhone and realize there are no new photos of Sarah. There are photos of the trips Max and I have taken since Sarah died, but I’m not a big photographer. Most of the photos on my phone were always of Sarah. She was such a good subject, always smiling, and she loved to have her picture taken. 

    Max kind of has a grimace on his face when he has to have his picture taken. Like me, he’s self-conscious. At Max’s parents’ home there are high school graduation photos of him and his four brothers on display, large 8 by 10 photos in frames. His four brothers took fairly nice photos and smiled, but the one of him has a little sneer or smirk on his face. It’s an odd photo. The lighting is off and he looks much swarthier than he actually is. It’s hard to recognize him.

    I always tell Max I wish I had known him as a teenager, but he says I wouldn’t have liked him, he was a stoner and a not-very-nice guy. He didn’t really develop into the intellectual and thoughtful person he is until he entered alcohol rehab at age 19. It’s amazing how much people change in their teenage years.

    I can’t help but wonder how much Sarah would have changed in the last 17 months. How she would look, what would her interests be now? Would her physical decline have accelerated? Would she still be the same happy wonderful girl? If I had stayed home in August, would she have died anyway? Died again another time? And who would I be today? There’s no way to answer these questions.

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  • Birthday

    Today is my birthday. When I came downstairs early this morning, after I made my coffee and wandered into my study, I noticed that my computer keyboard was lit up. I bought myself a keyboard with light-up keys a few months ago and I love it. It really makes typing and blogging much easier in the early morning before the sun comes up.

    Usually I have to strike a key for the keyboard to light up, but it was lit this morning when I walked into the room. This is the keyboard for my regular computer. Next to it is my laptop for work. The mouse for my laptop was upside down, and the red light was lighting up a little picture of Sarah that I have on my desk. The picture was all aglow.

    Probably I knocked over the mouse last night when I plugged in my Kindle and left it on my desk to charge. I’m not sure why my keyboard was lit up. There’s probably some explanation.

    But I like to think Sarah was wishing me Happy Birthday. She loved birthdays so much. Thank you sweet girl.

  • Lucky

    There’s a way I have of looking at my life story where I seem to give myself a kind of downer presentation as the Bad Luck Kid. That I’m always kind of unlucky. That if bad things happen, that if someone got the goose egg, it was me. This way of ruminating on my life ends up making me depressed, but it’s a groove I just seem to fall into. It’s not a good routine for me. 

    I was lucky to get pregnant as soon as I wanted, as fast as I wanted, when I was 41.

    I was lucky to have Sarah for sixteen years, five months, and 28 days. I was lucky to find good doctors and teachers and aides and helpers for her. I was so lucky that she was a beautiful, happy child.

    I was lucky to find our house here in the neighborhood we wanted to live in, to have our low bid accepted in the middle of this crazy real estate market.

    I was lucky to find a job that I like to do, to work and take care of my family at the same time.

    I was lucky to have a husband who is a great dad and a great human being.

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