Day 5 of the 500 words 30 days: A day I will never forget.

Today’s lesson is about describing a day I will never forget. Do it as a free write in my morning pages and early. I am early, not as early as some days but it is still early and I’m alone, awake in the house. Mark is at work and Chloe is sleeping. I am thinking hard and quickly while I type for that one memorable day. I feel my mind wants to write about grief but I don’t feel ready yet. But when can I be safe to talk about these things? My life began on that day. From that moment all time became arranged by before that date or after that date. Before that day is still important. We all lived back then. We grew and struggled and loved and fought. We were sick and we got well. We had a vibrant full and precarious life back then. But that day changed it all for us since now we had to know what it was like to lose one of ourselves to cancer. It began in the early hours of the night as I lay on her, holding onto her wax like form. Something in me died as well. The pain came out of my mouth. Months and years of holding onto my emotions came out. She was as beautiful in death as she had been in life. But then here was her body finished, worn out broken and spent. Taken off and left behind like a garment. This body that I had cared for and cherished. I lay on top of her now that she was finished with it and had gone where I could not follow. Oh, how I longed to go with her. Or I could take her place and then she could continue to live and be the life of the party. Keeping her siblings in order and being the brightness in the lives of her friends. I left her there. Her husband was waiting for me to leave him alone with her. He was broken. I thought I knew a lot about things until this moment. He said he would take care of things. The others were waiting to take me home where I could sleep. For them it was over now and they were all exhausted. The trance had begun. I don’t know how to explain it but there was nothing on my inside. I was moving and talking but I was gone on the inside. Nothing could have prepared me for this just as nothing can really prepare us for the joy at new life. And it is very hard to describe the insides when you look at that little one, so fragile and so helpless yet so alive, in your arms. That ability to create a whole new human is beyond spiritual. The loss of that one no matter how many years later is unquestionably the most difficult challenge of all. Yet it isn’t a challenge. That was not the right word. It is task. No it’s not a task either. Event. Thing that happened to me. Well actually it happened to her, my beautiful daughter. But it also happened to me because a piece of me died with her. With every child born is a new creation inside of me. A new part who now loves this one and nurtures and hopes and teaches and cherishes. The physical care and the emotional care. All of it becomes a part of who I am. Like an island in the soul of Riley in the movie “Inside Out”. Each of my children are an island, a part of me. Yet not so fragile as the islands in Riley. Much more permanent than that. Each of my children have a whole section of my control room. The switchboard belongs to them. It is what connects us together. As the child grows that part of the switchboard changes and each change is painful and challenging. Then one dies. And that part of the switchboard is now silent. That silence fills my head. Fills my soul as though it were the only switchboard in the control room. All the other boards have become dim and my attention is riveted on the silence. It is as though I don’t exist. I don’t know how to walk or eat or when to sleep. How to do all the things I ever did. I turn my back to the rest of the room and wait for the silence to end. I take tons of pictures. I post them to her face book page and read and reread her emails to me. I want to set her up on the walls of my house but I’m becoming weak and my joints ache. I can’t dress properly or even take my showers. I can’t go into the store to buy food or all the other places I used to go. When I see another human my mouth opens and her life comes gushing out. How wonderful she was, how courageous, how beautiful and smart. I slept the rest of that day until late afternoon. The struggle for Debbie is over. She is safe in her eternal place. I came downstairs and the place was full of people. My children, my friends, my in-laws. Friends had come and set up a table covered with food. I could not eat. My mother came escorted by the local sheriff. My mother is in her eighties so we were concerned. I went down the driveway to see what was going on. She was in tears. She was so small and lonely looking. The sheriff had found her to deliver to her the most difficult news she had received yet. My father died that day in New York. In a car accident not his fault. He had been hit when a car did not stop at a stop sign. He was going home to Canada. He was in his eighties. He had brought her to the airport in New York so that she could be here with me. The details pressed into my head but the room was taken up with the silence and I had no room for more. But my mother needed me. My brother, who was with us, and I helped my mother make arrangements and get on a plane to go back to her home where my sister is. She looked at me before she left. I knew it would be the last time I would see her. “I have to bury my daughter,” I said. “You have to go and take care of Dad.” She wanted to stay but knew that she had to go. And so the darkness settled in over me. The darkness of taking care of the things in front of me while the inside is completely silent. This darkness settled in. Yet, after nearly five years the light has begun to shine again for me. I am writing my way through. Finding healing in the little things.