TAKING A TIME OUT

Taking a Time Out

January 14, 2011

I am taking a time out.  I have placed myself in a mental corner.  My world consists of two walls that intersect.  That corner is my new world.  In my solitude, mentally curled up in my chair and wrapped in the softest of blankets, I sit and try to figure out what I am feeling.  After emptying my mind of all thought and sinking down into that secret part of me, I allow myself to be bombarded with only emotion.  Or perhaps I should say all the emotion of the past year.  In doing this I have discovered that there are no words.   No words that can properly explain the depth of my feelings - not to myself, nor to the reader.  No words for my sense of loss or lostness.  No way to explain the vastness of the void, the endless drop into emptiness, and that huge place in my heart where there is only hurt and pain.  No way to explain that "thing" - that dark black "thing" - that covers me totally and completely.  The "thing" that drains me of life and the desire to be part of life.

I cannot explain, or understand, why, when I am so loved, that that is not enough.  Why is the impending birth of my new grandson not enough to bring exhilarating excitement and joy to me.  It should.  I don't understand it.  The thought of holding that precious little baby in my arms and cradling his warm body against me should lift me out of this dark place.  This black void that I find myself drifting and floating in.  No light, no air.  The memory of Persephone and Benton's hugs and laughter should do it.  The sweetness and devotion of my darling Brandon should do it.  The deep love of my children and husband and my Mom and sister and brothers and all my extended family and friends should do it.  But nothing does.

If I could close my eyes and drift away forever, I would.  I cannot say that Christian's death is totally responsible; but I cannot say that it is not.  I love each and everyone of my children with all my heart.  This is the part that is so hard to figure out, so hard to understand.  Why when I love so much do I feel so numb, so out of touch.  I just feel so tired and so empty and so weak.

While it is true that I have been physically not well since this Fall, I can no longer tell what is causing this mental and physical failing of my body and mind.  Is it mental? is it physical? is it both?  Or is it because January 18th - the first anniversary of Christian's passing - is just a few days away?  I don't know.  There is no understanding.  There are no words of explanation.  What I must do is ......

Take a Time Out

Ah, sweet solitude

Soft pillow, warm blanket

Cuddle up.  Shut down.

Drop out.  Turn off.

CONTINUANCE OF LIFE: Respect for the Fragility and Importance of Life

It was a warm fall evening.  Soon the sun would be setting and would light up the evening sky with vibrant colors before disappearing behind the rolling Nevada hills.  My mother and I were just beginning to open her sliding glass door so we could step out onto her back patio to enjoy the lights of Las Vegas and the setting sun.  We heard the loud chirps of a bird obviously in distress followed by a loud thud against her living room window.  As we stepped out, we saw a flurry of small downy feathers settling all over her patio and a hawk landing in her neighbor's yard.  While we didn't see the victim, we suspect it was one of the many quails that visited her backyard and roosted in her neighbor's tree.

Understanding the balance of nature means an unconditional acceptance of life and what it brings.  In our human experience the acceptance of what life brings is far more complicated.  During those times when we are wildly and acutely miserable and racked with sorrow, acceptance seems far away if not altogether  impossible.  But they say acceptance is an important step in the grieving process.  I bounce in and out of acceptance.  I know Christian isn't coming back but I'm having a difficult time letting him go.  Sometimes I wonder if I'm keeping him earthbound by not releasing him.  Death and the transition from one plane to another is such a mystery to me.

This I do believe: out of every situation, even one as devastating as the loss of a loved one (especially a child) to suicide, we must at some time in our struggle to go on living, make some positive choices if we intend to live a meaningful life.  For us the statement "there is life after death" takes on a whole new meaning.  How do we go on living after such a loss?

Frederick F. Flack wrote:  "Most people can look back over the years and identify a time and place at which their lives changed significantly.  Whether by accident or design, these are the moments when, because of a readiness within us and a collaboration with events occurring around us, we are forced to seriously reappraise ourselves and the conditions under which we live and to make certain choices that will affect the rest of our lives."

Writing this blog has given me purpose and helped me find my way through the grieving process because it has forced me to evaluate and define the emotions that wash over and threaten to drown me.  By necessity I must then put these emotions into words.  Never easy but necessary if I am to connect with myself and others.   Although at times, as Martin Luther King, Jr., said, "Their meanings can only be articulated by the inaudible language of the heart."

Tragic loss reduces us to the baseline of our existence.  Everything emotionally has been striped away and left us bare.  The only things we can feel are hurt and pain.  We are left with this incredible empty hole in our heart and in our soul and in our lives.  At first we are numb, unable to do anything but breath.  Eventually overwhelming feelings of grief and sorrow bombard our every sense.  Even breathing becomes hard.  As the days, weeks, months, and even years pass we discover that we can and will survive.  What then to do with the rest of our lives?  "You desire to know the art of living, my friend?  It is contained in one phrase:  make use of suffering."  -Henri-Frederic Amiel.  When I first read this quote, I had to stop and think about what it meant.


This is what I decided:  from suffering we are able to really understand the human condition.  We are able to sympathize and have empathy is a way that previously we couldn't.  We have gone through the worst pain and suffering we have ever known.  Don't we now have a responsibility to help others in  a way that only we can?  We can share our experiences and our knowledge with the newly and not so newly affected.  We can hold their hands, hold them up, and give them a place to entrust their "real, raw" emotions and thoughts.  We will give tender hearts all the time and love they need and will never abandon a fellow traveler.  We will travel this road together, side by side.  Through our own loss we have learned to respect the fragility and importance of each individual life.  Each person, each life so dear, so precious.

THE END OF A BEGINNING

A beginning, a very short but magnificent middle, and then the dying begins.  What am I talking about?  What else could it be but life and the life of a flower in particular.  All of this energy goes into the creation of the flower bud.  The bud opens and for a few short days it is in its glory of perfection.  But then, all too quickly, it begins to fade.  Then it withers, its petals fall, and it dies.  So sad.  But for a short time it was awesome and during the growing and dying process, it produced seeds that will fall to the ground and if the conditions are right, life will begin again in the spring or summer of the next year. And that is nature's plan.


To me, it is not the length of one's life that matters (be it animal, flora, or human) but how that life is lived.  At my son, Christian's, memorial service, his friend said that we should not think about how Christian died but how he lived his life.


Sadly while I know this is not true for all children,  it is true of my son and hopefully for the majority of children:  in the beginning they are happy, they are nurtured and loved, and they grow from beautiful children into adventure and knowledge seeking youths and finally into fine young adults.  They are our proud and our joy.  And along the way they leave their imprint not only on us but  on others they come in contact with.  These children give us memories of good times and not so good times but in growing and maturing that is bound to happen - would be oddly wrong if they didn't cause us some heartache and worry.


But OUR children, spouses, brothers, sisters, parents, loved one, and friends are different.  For a variety of reasons, and even though they fought the good fight, their lives were cut short.  Their zest for life faded, their desire to live withered, and they fell to earth.  But unlike flowers, the seeds of their existence have been planted in our hearts, in our minds, and in our souls.  And as long as we live, they will live.  They will live in the spoken word and in the written word of all of that knew them.  But most of all they will live in our hearts and our memories.


Even now after only a year and a few months have past, I realize that there are so many things I am beginning to forget about my first year of living without my beloved child.  Thank goodness I have kept a journal.  It not only helped me sort out my feelings but it gave me a place to vent without being hurtful to others.  As they say, you can't know where you're going if you don't know where you've been.  That first year was spent in a state of numbness.  It is only now in rereading my journal that I understand how far I've come in this journey.  I have become a strong advocate for journaling and would encourage anyone that is going through a loss to start putting your thoughts, feelings, and memories on paper.  It really, really helps.


During a time when I was thinking about how fragile life is, I wrote the following:

I  AM

October 20, 2010

I am the first flower of Spring

I am the early morning dew on blades of grass

I am the starlight in the night sky

I am a shooting star

I am a falling raindrop

I am the dust in dry desert winds

I am the mist off crashing ocean waves

I am the wind that sways the branches of trees

I am a gently falling snowflake

I am a rainbow

I am the clouds overhead

I am the sunlight through trees

I am the light of a candle

I am the smoke from a fire

I am ice, I am snow

I am an echo heard from mountain tops

I am the crash of a tree in the forest

I am a lightening bolt and the roll of thunder

I am the radiating rings caused by a raindrop in a rain barrel

I am light reflecting in the lake at night

I am a moon beam

I am a first kiss.

I am here briefly and then gone forever-

a whisper in the wind.

Dried roses from Christian's Memorial Service

TRAGEDY, DRAMA, COMEDY

November 11, 2010

 Tragedy, Drama, Comedy.  We are all actors in this great play that we call "Life".  We show the world only what we want them to see.  But if only an actor, what is the reality of this thing we call "Life"?

For me, it is this:  Inside each of us there is a soul.  The complexity of the soul is where you will find our true selves and the essence of who we are.  That part of our being where we place our love,  our sadness, our memories - good, bad, and sad ~ All of our pain, our sorrow, our despair,  our grief, our depression.  It is also the place where we store all the anger and hurt we don't want others to know exists.  It is where we place our fears and our shame and our guilt.  It is what makes me exclusively "me".

One day our three year old granddaughter, Persephone, came for a visit.  She arrived while her Papa was still at work.  That evening she heard the front door open and began running down the stairs to greet him.  He called out "Who is it?" and she replied "It is me, myself ... Persephone."  And that is what my soul is.  It is "me, myself ... Linda".  There you will find my strengths, my weaknesses but mostly it is the place where you will find all the things I hold most dear - my children, my husband, my family, my friends, my home, all my sweetest and most cherished memories, my dreams for the future and my respect for the past.  MY FAITH.

I will continue to be an actor in the play of Life; and I will only show you what I want you to see but if you are quiet and look and listen closely, you may be able to peek into my soul.  Where you will find the real me.

William Shakespeare - All the world's a stage

All the world's a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exists and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts.

................................

OCEAN CITY MEMORIES

The boardwalk at sunset - Ocean City, MD

"Seeing with the eye of memory, not the eye of our anatomy, calls up days and seasons past and years gone by."   ~  Allen Lacy

My Mother and Father (Grandma Verity and Grandpa Jack) bought a condo at Ocean City.  One year my Mom's family would go and the next year Grandpa Jack's family got their turn.  Even though there were three bedrooms, there wasn't enough room for me and my five children, my sister Debbie, her husband, and their two daughters (and later their two granddaughters), plus my Mom and Dad.  So that meant I could only bring two of my children and, of course, it was always the youngest two - Christian and Tiffany. My Mother generously purchased our airline tickets or we wouldn't have been able to go at all.  We stopped going to the ocean when Christian was about 11 years old and Tiffany 10.

MEMORIES OF GOING TO OCEAN CITY

Ocean City.  Our joyous escape from the stresses of being a single mom, escape from the stresses of being a child of a single mom.  For just a short time, two weeks, there were no worries about finding the money to pay bills, no long hours at work, no coming home exhausted but still needing to be the mom you all needed.  This was our time to just relax and put worries behind.  No one will ever know how difficult it was for all of us - five children and me.  Never, never enough money for what we needed.  You all sacrificed so much and rarely ever complained.  So Ocean City was the reward.  The thing to look forward to; and knowing our turn was coming made life a little easier and gave us something to look forward to.

You** and I would go off by ourselves and just enjoy being together.  That never happened at home so this, too, was something we looked forward to.

Do you remember how I saved and saved and saved for four years so we all - Stephanie, Bobby, Robyn, you, Tiffany, and me - could go on vacation together.  I had saved $600.00.  A fortune!  We talked about the vacation and where we would go for over a year.  The destination changed many times but the joy in thinking about it and planning it filled many conversations and warmed our hearts and gave excitement to our lives.  Then just weeks before we were going to go, the car broke down.  It took every penny I had saved to fix it.  The entire $600.00.

I cried and cried.  You would hug me and say it was alright but you had tears in your eyes too.  I was thankful I had the money to get the car fixed but that didn't mend our broken hearts or soothe our disappointment.  We never did get that family vacation for all of us. Even now it makes me sad.

Ocean City.  Such happy memories.  When I am sad thinking about you not being here any longer,  my mind goes back to those happy times spent at the beach.  Those memories never fail to cheer me up and in my mind I get to spend time with you all over again.  Holding your hand and looking down into your sweet smiling face.  I miss you so much my precious child.

**Christian