We’re headed out in the morning for our first Christmas up north in lots of years.

I can’t specifically remember which year it was, the last time we did Christmas up north.

I do remember we had Z with us.  We rented rooms at an otherwise empty hotel and had parties in the hallway and took over their main conference room with our food.

Z got a Microsoft Surface that year.  I still have it.  It’s in my office.  With the rest of her life.

10 years ago, I was spending my last Christmas with Joe.  We knew what was coming up.  We knew it was going to be the last Christmas with him.

I don’t remember what we did.  Or where we were.

It was the first of many shitty holidays.  There was a 5-year window where they were upgraded to bittersweet.

I’m still getting unreasonably mad at things and unsuspecting people that don’t deserve it (apologies to the Amazon business lady that was trying to best to do her job)

But time marches along, holidays don’t stop just because I feel like opting out.

It’s walking into the wind, head-down.

I’ll laugh and have a good time.  I’ll see my siblings twice this year(!) because of this Christmas.  We’ll follow through with our grand plans.

My heart will ache for every second we’re there.

Merry Christmas.

“If you could have one meal with any person, living or dead, who would it be with?”. I’ve matured since this question was first posed to me. I’m older, wiser. So, now I know the proper question is “If you could have one meal with any person, living or dead, with whom would it be?”. See? Much wiser.

We, the sad parents of the world, are riddled with guilt. It’s one of the things we carry. What more could I have done? Could I have loved more? Were there different decisions that would have changed anything? No. The answer is always no.

And, honestly, I don’t feel guilt about that. I’m not in a position where the overall circumstances of Z’s departure would be different because of my actions.

I mean sure, there is the butterfly effect. If I’d have turned right when I turned left on any given day then maybe she’d be here. But I did the best I could with our lives. When I was making them, I was reasonably sure I was doing the best I could with what I had.

I’ve opted out of guilt because this load? It’s already too much. It’s almost more than I can take. I know my limits and one day I might break. I know this about me. So, to alleviate that possible eventuality, I opt out of recreational guilt. It’s not for me.

I’d much rather spend my time being sad than guilty. At least with sadness, I listen to my heart. Why make this worse? Adding guilt will not change anything. I mean if I could put on the worst hair-shirt guilt and wear it for the rest of my life in exchange for the life of my daughter, I’d do it in a heartbeat. But I can’t. This is not an offered option. So, I won’t.

Without consulting the archives, I’m pretty sure I’ve talked about surviving-parent guilt before. It is such a part of our lives. It’s always there. A.L.W.A.Y.S.

“If you could have dinner with any person, living or dead, with whom would it be?”

It wouldn’t be Z. It wouldn’t be Joe.

I can’t. I can’t do that. I can’t re-live the fresh hell that was the aftermath of their deaths. I can’t do that to myself. I can’t do that again.

And this is the thing, what is it? I feel so, so guilty over this. I hate it. While I was on my writing hiatus, I brought it up in my sad parent group one night. This horrible answer to this stupid thing that won’t ever happen. It’s physically impossible for someone to give me one magical night with those that I love that have gone before me. It is not a thing.

Yet I feel so bad. I can’t shake the guilt to the answer of the invented question that has no meaning.

When Z first passed away, I’d invented a memory – I knew it was invented and it was horrible. But I pressed on and I got over it. And then I had a brief pause and then my brain started tormenting me with this fun, new invention.

I eventually bargained myself down. If offered a single meal with Joe or Izzy, I would pass. But if I got to have a meal with them annually, I’d do it.

I bargained myself out of the guilt and misery of my own making.

This is the brain of a bereaved parent. If we decide to eschew the guilt, we will still find a way to torture ourselves ad infinitum. That is just the way it is. So much ugly in the aftermath of trauma.

Zero stars. Do not recommend.

I chose to grocery shop when everyone else in the state of Michigan also does their grocery shopping. Also, it seems we all use the exact same grocer. Which is super-fun for me since crowds are not a thing I want to be part of. And still, Sunday evening, I put on my finest near-homeless chic, threw on my favorite Red-Wings puff-ball hat and jumped in the car to head to my least favorite place. Jay was driving.

Someone did us wrong in the parking lot and I was insta-pissed™. I took off my seat belt, opened the door and my puff-ball hat and I were going to fight a lady in the parking lot. Jay (the levelheaded) started driving away with my door open and my right foot on the ground trying to calm me down. He drove very slowly to a parking spot (probably to give that lady a decent head-start) and I jumped out of the car and walked briskly toward the store while yelling back to Alex to grab the reusable shopping bags (because I’m hot-headed, not an animal). If he wasn’t going to let me fight in the parking lot, I was going to take it inside.

I did not find my intended target. Also, interestingly, I spend less money at the grocery store when I’m mad.

The first Christmas after Joe passed and then the first Christmas after Z was gone, I battled my feelings. Both of those Christmases I was head-down walking into the wind with all of my might. I was going to make everything perfect and no one would notice anything was amiss. I was on a mission and no one was going to stop me.

Stage 1 – Denial.

Last year was so much worse than the first Christmas without Z. I was gutted. I’d spent Christmas in Houghton Lake and my Aunt and Uncle had prepared a room and wanted us to stay. I couldn’t. I was barely hanging on. I couldn’t deny the missing people. I didn’t have the energy to put up a fight. I was emotionally bloodied and beaten. I don’t particularly remember the special goings-on the second Christmas after Joe died. It was just so lonely and lost and gloomy.

Stage 2 – Pain.

Today I sent an email to Jay complaining that my socks were falling down in my new boots. He replied to me that he’d herd Bombas socks were really good. I quick jumped on their website and saw they were $20 a pair. We have a limited spend budget for each other and I saw the price tag on those socks and again, I was insta-pissed™. Why would he even joke about spending $20 on socks? That’s not funny. I had to take an office-lap™ to cool my temper.

Later this morning I found out a supplier dropped a bunch of treats for the office in the breakroom. I went and found a dark-chocolate no-bake cookie. Be still my heart. I took a bite. It was not a no-bake. It was a shaved coconut cluster. One guess what happened… insta-pissed™

Stage 3 – Anger.

The Seven stages of grief don’t ever come in any particular order. They are just seven things that happen. All seven can happen in the same day, in random order or they can spread out, they might time-out (giving a breather to the constant, overwhelming emotion) or they can roll, one after another, into your life. They aren’t neat and tidy. They just are.

Luckily, I can suss them out in their published order at Christmas. I didn’t even realize a pattern was emerging until I was trying to introspect my anger this season. I did a quick google search on the stages of grief and the first three fell into a years-long focus.

Here I am – 2 weeks from Christmas, staring down my own emotional outbursts and irrational behavior now that my chill seems to have vacated the premises.

I’m mad. I’m mad that Joe has missed so much. I’m mad that Z won’t be talking about graduation soon. I’m mad that neither of them will see this new decade we’re starting without them. I’m angry about the asparagus I forgot to eat after I cooked it last night and I’m still upset my socks won’t stay up in my boots and I’m mad I can’t buy myself a new truck right now and I’m mad there is pet hair everywhere and I’m mad the cheap wine I purchased Saturday isn’t that great and all of these mads are substitutes for the real mad that I am.

Stage 3 – Anger.

Zero Stars. (And I can’t stress this enough)… Do Not Recommend.

My puff-ball hat and I will fight you.

We’ve spent this Christmas opening a lot of family google docs. It’s really a much easier way to share information rather than try to send a million emails back and forth. Plus, some people like to send non-essential information and then no one really knows what’s up.

Google docs cuts that business out. One doc. Put essential information next to your name. Bam. Parties are organized. Food is provided. Good times are had by all.

Late last week my brother called me in a panic (so much a sense of urgency that I didn’t recognize his voice on the phone). Z was asking permission to get into the google doc he’d just started for his family. None of us knew he’d started it, it wasn’t published, but there was a little pink notification that Z’s email was requesting permission to edit the google doc.

He found out later something weird happened in that my dad was doing something and something else happened and then yahoo existed and it automatically logged back into Z’s email on my dad’s computer and then google docs happened and they got together and notifications emerged.

I don’t know… techy-techy things happened.

For my brother, though, it was there in blazing pink. Z wanted in on his spreadsheet.

I called it a wink from heaven.

Shortly after Z passed and everyone was back at their homes, I had a couple of days to myself before I went back to work. I sat on the couch and googled “Why did my daughter die?”. I knew nothing would happen, there is no magic website that will give me answers to the universe. I knew I wasn’t going to get a resolution, but I needed to ask a third party this question and I needed to have that 3^rd party answer me without giving me a stupid affirmation about God’s plan and time and healing. I wanted someone to tell me something that made sense.

Obviously, I got back nonsense.

Google doesn’t know why Z died or why Joe died or why anything bad happens to anyone. Google is an electric business of switches and fibers (a series of tubes??) organized to give us information that we can use in whatever way we’d like.

Google won’t give me the answers I’m looking for. Google’s answers won’t make my soul happy, nor the grief abate. Google can help me with math, it can not make crisis of the heart subside.

But still, I wonder how many people have sat at their phone or computer looking for the same resolution I did. How many people with tear-stained, flushed cheeks tried to get the answers they needed from something that doesn’t have the capacity to understand what that means. I’m certain I’m not alone in painful google searches, begging for relief and sanity.

What happened on that google doc for that brief second when everything seemed status quo was allow the electronic switching to speak straight to my brother’s heart. For a second he got to see her name pop up and request permission to enter his Christmas planning.

She’s part of Christmas planning.

Sometimes chaos aligns exactly right and what we need most appears.

Sometimes chaos gives you no answer at all and leaves you doing google searches for answers that will never make you whole.

Zero Stars. Do not recommend.

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” is, according to the website sparknotes.com, an important quote from The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

A book about a guy that will spend his life digging at his past, trying to make what was lost become part of the present.

I know about such things.  I spend all my free time trying to reconcile what was with what is.  It never balances properly.  A terrible hobby and a waste of my energy.

My uncle Manuel passed away a week-ish ago.  He lived his entire life in Argentina and I’d only ever met him once.  I mean it was a long meeting – I spent nearly a month with he and my aunt at their home in Argentina, so it was a pretty significant meeting.  I remember we went out on a yacht with some of their friends on a river.  My memory doesn’t currently produce the name of the river, but I do remember this:

The current was incredible.  The fastest passage of water and time I’ve ever personally witnessed.

The owners of the yacht threw a rope off the stern so we could try to swim upstream.  I jumped in and by the time I surfaced, I nearly passed the rope.  I grabbed it and swam with everything I had in me to reach the boat.  I was 18 at the time and not in terrible shape and still couldn’t do it.  I gained some ground, but not enough to be proud of.

Manuel did the same swim and he made it back to the boat.   From my perspective, he roared out of the river and his arms were able to propel him back like some sort of Phelpsian sea beast.

I never made it back to the boat under swim power alone.  I had to pull myself back along the rope.  It was such a great day and I wish I could remember more of it.

I was sorry to hear Manuel passed away – but he’d lived well into his 90s.  He left behind so many people that loved him.

The days I have spent swimming against the current and the 9 years without Joe and the 2 years without Z I remember so painfully clearly how often I tried to put my boat against the current – my heart borne back ceaselessly into the past.  I want to do the impossible – I want so badly to reach across time and pull them back.  Pull them to my present.  Every molecule in my body (because the body remembers) eternally reaches for the past.

But I can’t, can I?  It’s just not something my body can do.  I didn’t have the power to swim against the current of the river and I don’t have the power to get them back. But still I try.

I lay awake at night thinking of them and I am borne back ceaselessly into the past.

 

Zero stars.  Do not recommend.

While I was binge listening to short biographies last week, I learned about a peculiar habit of Sarah Winchester (of Winchester gun fame). When she donated money to charity in her own name, it was typically a small amount of money – paltry sums considering her wealth. We’re talking like $10 and $100 donations from someone that had millions. But she was secretly super generous – she donated millions and millions anonymously to charities she loved. Never in her own name.

I don’t donate millions of anything. I just don’t have millions. Except pet hairs around my house. But I do over-tip, and I do give money to corner panhandlers. I buy extra gifts and send things on the side to people I know need it. I had to come clean a couple of weeks ago to Jay and tell him that I have been sending bi-weekly shipments of goods to someone that really needs it for the past several months and there is no end in sight… so, you know, just an FYI about where our money is going. He really didn’t have a say in the matter.

You’d think that one of the side effects of losing a child is spending less money. No more clothes or shoes or books. No tuition payments. No car insurance or phone bills. But really, I’ve found that is not the case for anyone that I know that’s lost a child.

Just like the love that never dies, that stream of money doesn’t quit. Except now instead of fretting about our budgets and how we’re going to keep all the kids in good financial order, we start giving it away.

I mean, I know lots of sad parents that do it for our children, but I don’t know of anyone that makes a “thing” out of it. We just become relentless, secret givers. Dollars to you and books to you and shoes to you and all these things just happen.

And time – we give so much of our time away. Time that we wouldn’t have had before that suddenly becomes so… available. We give it to projects and people and occupation for our hearts.

I’ve turned into a giver and I’m probably not doing it for selfless reasons. I think it’s just a habit I acquired over the 18.83 years I took care of my child. Just like I don’t stop loving her, I don’t stop spending on her either. It’s just redirected.

Redirection seems to be a theme both emotionally and financially.

Sara Winchester was emotionally devastated when she lost her baby and then her husband. She didn’t know what to do with herself and became tragically restless and just meandered through life without real direction.

I’m pretty sure that when she donated anonymously, she didn’t per her name on it because it wasn’t her money. She donated $100 for herself. The millions she donated was the money that belong to someone else.

The same with me, this money and stuff I give away is supposed to go to someone else. So, I make sure it goes to someone else. It’s what I do for them (my child and my husband) quietly and in my heart.

I don’t tell you this to be all “look at me! I’m a generous giver” – I share this because it’s a side-effect-quirk of loss. It’s just something that happens. And I’m here to share the weird.

0 stars. Do not recommend.