LaurieWrites

Ring

I signed up for Ali Edwards's 31 Things, and promptly began skipping all of the daily emails, reducing their loveliness to the guilt of that which I ignore in my inbox that I actually ask for (which is different than my disdain for the cascade of crap that I don't ever ask for, ever.) I have a sick cycle of obsession with daily prompts and online courses that I sign up for and perpetually forget about and run out of time for and blow off -- especially the ones I pay for. But I've been interested in Ali's work forever (although I honestly have zero interest in scrapbooking -- it's more the documentation aspect of her vibe that I like) so I thought I'd try it again. 

I'm going to start with Day One and make my way through as I can. I'm going to discard the ones I don't care about, too, which should make things easier and less stressful for me. But I hate to discard anything, so we'll see how that goes, too. Welcome to my latest exercise in working out my codependence AND weird combination of slacker-overachiever issues on the internet.

Day one asked us to write about jewelry that was important to us. That was pretty easy. 

*****************************************************************************

My grandmother was the opposite of a fancy or affected person, not in any way concerned with clothing beyond being more than presentable for church and social functions. At home, she wore ancient clothing and recycled in her own way before it was a community mandate, out of economic, rather than environmental necessity. She did not easily buy herself new things. She got her hair cut in a utilitarian manner, and did not dye it after she turned 50. As for jewelry, she wore a wedding band, and that was pretty much it, although she'd wear a necklace, from time to time, and a mother's ring that didn't quite fit over her large-ish knuckles. 

In her ancient armoire, a light blue plastic baby wipes box held several rings, from a time before she was a wife and mother, along with a cameo necklace. Her father gave them to her, she said, for various occasions. I remember taking them out often when I would nose around in her stuff as a child. 

Sometime in my early 20s, she decided to gift these pieces out to her four granddaughters. I received this one. 

It is the only important thing I own. 

I mean this sincerely. I care about other material things. My car, my computers (losing those would suck), my cameras (that would suck more), my tv and my clothing and all of the other stuff that I rely on to make my life go along. But this is the only irreplaceable thing I own. 

We could talk about the irony -- that I am the unmarried, oldest child, and it is a vintage engagement ring that people pay big bucks for now. That it's cracked in the back. That I never wear it, and yet still have carted it along with me through every move, every life transition, riding in my purse in the front seat of a Chevy Cavalier and a Honda Civic and a big old moving truck and Volkswagen Beetle, along with a battered knock-off first edition of Leaves of Grass, the only other thing that I will not trust to movers. I have taken it out from time to time and worn it to feel closer to her, to my life force, to something, flicking my thumb across its broken back in an odd, comforting gesture.

Mostly it lives in my bedside table drawer, in a ring box from Naples that held a long-lost cameo that I think ended up with my great-grandmother. If I lost it, I would die inside. I thought I did, once, ashamed to speak of it for months, carrying the tiny tragedy in the back of my mind, until my mother asked me one day if I wanted grandma's ring back in my own stuff, that she had moved it into her drawer for safekeeping when I moved, that we had forgotten to make the transaction at the end of the moving chaos.

I breathed. The world was put back solid. 

I have no idea how much it's worth. I've been asked a couple of times to check that out and I don't want to. I don't care. I don't want to know it's worth a lot in case that weighs it down, and to tell me it's worth nothing is pointless, because no dollars make a difference in that context. 

If I ever get married, in the the spiritual or legal sense or both, I know that I will adopt it as my outward symbol of that occasion and I will wear it. It will transfer all of its super powers to the hope of love and depth and longevity of that relationship, and it will absorb all of the momentum and meaning of that happening in my life, because I know it can do that now, like nothing I could buy in a store after all of this time.

And if I don't, I'm not sure what will happen, and I don't really feel compelled to blurt that out right now. I feel like it is somehow time to claim it, though. I need to trust myself, that I don't need to leave it in a drawer, and to trust it, that it doesn't have to stay there. The days of this life go by faster and faster, and leaving anything locked up until the next thing happens or doesn't seems to be the ultimate folly, the fear-based action, the delay of joy when I don't have any to spare.

The day she gave it to me, I was in shock. I didn't feel worthy. But she always wanted things out of their boxes. She wanted us to have what we needed and what she seemed to think we deserved, so it's way past high time to channel that energy and assign elsewhere.

It is the only important thing I own.  

Falls

I knew this weekend might be hard. I've been struggling with some anxiety-slash-existential crisising that tends to be worse around holidays that mean a lot of social and family stuff going on. So I did what I don't want to do at all when that's happening (because I never said I was normal, what?) and I started reaching out to make some plans to be with some, you know, other human beings.

My friend Jen likes to hike and look at leaves and climb things, and in fact works to teach little children to enjoy these things as well. These are things I'm not prone to doing at all usually when left to my own devices, but that means it's good for me to get off my ass and do it, I just need a little help figuring out where to go, apparently. Maryland, in spite of an unfair reputation as DC's phantom limb plus Baltimore (which I love, too) is really quite beautiful, and there are some mountainy places within an hour of my house. 

We went here: 

I sat on a rock at the bottom of a place near there, while she did that: 

There are days when I would be willing to push myself to go up there, too. Yesterday I felt kind of like a jerk that it was not one of those days, but I also knew that I wasn't feeling so strong. I hadn't slept much. I needed peace more than adrenaline right now, enjoyment rather than mastery of my surroundings (Fancy!), and plus I'd already walked a lot on the Cliffs Trail, so whatever.

I also got it that what I was thinking of mostly as I sat there at the bottom of those falls, rather than the accomplishment of scaling the rocks and seeing the little water pools and colorful, poorly-placed tattoos of those high-schoolers up there up close, was how many more calories I'd burn doing that rather than sitting right there on my rapidly-expanding ass. I've got some body image stuff going on right now, heyyyyyyy, and I really need to show it who's alpha or I'll end up 'round the mental bend and I do not need that right now for any other reason. 

Anyway, this day altogether at the end of it was a completely soul- and mind-clearing experience, all of those things you may like to think are dirty lies that people tell you about hiking and camping (which I have still never done) but they really aren't. The weather was perfect and I got time to spend with a friend and talk through the stuff going on in our lives, when I wasn't wheezing and leaning against a rock hoping I wouldn't die as she said "YOU wanted to take the CLIFFS TRAIL, LAURIE WHITE. When they FIND US just REMEMBER THAT."  

Plus I put my dirty, unpedicured feet into this, you guys: 

Look at this at your feet and tell me you don't see Nature Jesus. Go ahead. 

I also learned the origin of the phrase "blaze a trail," so, linguistics! Idiomatic studies!

Please don't tell me if this isn't true, because it would ruin me. 

Then I saw goats on the highway on the way back, and  I got to yell "GOATS!" because honestly, I pathetically love goats and if I had an animal farm it would be a goat farm, even though I know that making that crazy expensive cheese is a fat load of work that I don't really want to do, so I'd be, like, a social media writer person with goats, and I don't know if that would be the best idea.  

I was kind of done in emotionally at that point. How much can a nature-starved suburban person take in a day before leaves start to sprout from your brain? It was like that time I had an art hangover in Florence, except everything was mostly green and not Catholic and gilt and boobs. That is until we passed a huge spray-painted sign that said "BIKER BASH" in front of a highway bar called Fat Daddy's, because this weekend is Rolling Thunder in DC (I skipped going this year, but if you're ever in DC on Memorial Day Weekend, you should go. This is where I tell you why. It's pretty great.) And we joked about going in, but I was only half-joking, one because bikers are generally nice and fun guys who are way less creepy than your average guy in a bar, true story, and they will never, ever judge you for how much beer you drink (that is how you tell a fake biker from a real one: beer judgment.) And two because I was imagining somehow being a bit player or maybe the main girl (AU REVOIR SIMONE!) in a reenactment of the Pee-Wee's Big Adventure Tequila scene, which is some fine cinema with which I hope you are acquainted.

Afterwards, there was beer, and these perfect little bloody Mary oyster shooters, because the best kind of naturalist friend is the one who knows her not-quite-so-naturalist-friend quite well. 

I hate this picture of me, but I am happy in it, so there, so here it is, killing me softly, living on my internet website. 

After two of these I ended up reeling off all of the ways in which Jen needed a social media strategy and dammit, she was going to have a blog, because there had to be other people on the internet who were as interested in showing children and even people like me who really don't care about leaves and plants and general woodland life.  

I am just dim enough to need days like this to remind me that things in my life that are troubling me look different, and often not as overwhelming, when I change my scenery with some purpose. They were still there, they were still things that were concerning me or that I had framed as problems that I needed to solve with my imperfect little mind, but I was in motion. I was taking pictures because I like to, which is something I forget to do an awful lot for someone who loves to do it so much. I wasn't sitting still and fretting in my living room or in my car or wherever else I like to turn over to the bad neighborhoods in my mind. 

I wasn't panicking and missing the present. I was moving my body in a healthy way. I don't know when this became such a remarkable occurrence, honestly. 

I basically need to get outside more often. 

At what cost who knows?

Adrienne Rich died last month. Friends of mine talked and  wrote about it more eloquently than I could at the time, but for some reason I kept this little lady with the enormous brain and talent and reach (who knows where her words went, who they saved, what they do?) on my mind, remembered seeing her long ago when my sister shepherded her around a reading at Georgetown and I went down to hear. I remembered out of nowhere a long-buried sense of revelation then, of feeling like I was staring into a new mirror, a person who stood matter of factly at a podium and spoke, in what were, to me, deep, yet entirely accessible truths. 

I had buried it like I'd buried so much in these years so I could be what I thought I was supposed to be instead, shape-shifting to attempt to please an ultimately unpleasable person, in the blind act of crafting what I imagined as an acceptable life, until two years ago or so when everything on the surface started cracking for real and I began through pain and depression and necessity and night after dark night of the soul to come back to a self I knew deep down I'd never fully owned. (I don't think now that I knew how. I think I needed to work a little harder at it first, needed some help I hadn't found yet.) 

So after her death I started reading Adrienne Rich's words late at night through a brand new time of not entirely easy transition for me. She has a lot of words, thankfully, so I had that much to work with.

There is so much I could have latched onto, really, and I do not reject complexity out of hand, although I call bullshit on affectation pretty quickly. I can be bought for cheap, though, with lines like "language uncommon and agile as truth" and "her wounds came from the same source as her power."

But then she said it was only a door. Either you will go through it, or you won't. I read that at first, time and time again on Twitter because Twitterlandia loves its repetition, and thought "Duh, no shit it's a door. It's only a door." And then, this is a door, I'd read and think about how what I was crawling through (because poetry has to lodge somewhere personal, right? It's so...weird.) felt like so much broken glass and beg to differ with that blanket statement. But really, if I adjusted the aperture and fixed the focus, which are always wise things to do when the light and movement shift, she was right. I wasn't on my knees. I was luckier than that. This was just another room I was looking into in this personal fun house, a space beyond where I'd been. 

This was only a door. 

And if I didn't go through it, she said, this now dead person I believed for no reason other than it seemed like a good idea? If at the last I let myself be overcome by the fear I expected to set the terms? I'd be okay, really.

 But if you don't, much will blind you/much will evade you/at what cost who knows?

Dammit. 

Her wounds came from the same source as her power. 

What could blind and evade me was my greatest fear, beyond the short-term risk, I guess. I couldn't quantify the cost to counterpoint the monetary loss so far, and that was a huge problem, remains a problem. It's scary. I don't even know the extent of the credits and debits. I slipped some paperwork into an envelope and sent it off today, gagging on the decimal points and percentages, terrified of the consequences, understanding for the first time, really, what I was giving up in real life terms, as bad as a lot of it was, as pressing as the need to leave it. 

Back at home I try to knit together an inbox that doesn't make any sense yet, to craft something that will support me from nothing, to hope that my skills and will and connections and track record will lead to something more than me and a couch and columns of credits and debits. 

It's not even a week. It's still only a door, a large and an amorphous and a scary one, but a door all the same. It makes no promises. If you go through it, there is always, a gifted poet once wrote, the risk of remembering your name.

This post is because of and in large part is a reflection of the genius words of Adrienne Rich. Please go buy one of her books, or go read Amy Turn Sharp's Poem a day for a year, or buy somebody's chapbook, or do something nice for a scared person. I'll be giving back for my whole life all that has been sent my way, so it's nice to have some company.  

Birth

I've been following along with the story of a new person born last week. I know his grandmas, and I've been privileged to follow his story online, as he was born and lived his first days, and it touched me so much. He was so loved even before he got here, it was a nice touchstone amid some upheaval for me, and honestly, I'm not touched frequently with that kind of circle-of-life energy. All of mine in recent years has been watching elders pass, with no replacement of babies and new life to take their place, and as much as I loved those people (even my poor little old dog, because I did love him, so much) it's hard to have that kind of energy without a counterpoint. I also don't live among children now, or pregnant women, or that many people, honestly, so it was nice to even see it from a distance.

Tonight I saw a picture of this tiny person meeting one of his grandmas for the first time, and I broke down in a way that I'm glad no one saw besides me. I cried and cried and cried. I took a bath and then a shower to wash my hair, and then I cried again. It came up from somewhere deep inside of me when I saw an image of him meeting someone who I knew at first glance would catch a grenade for him, but more likely would just sit there holding him, providing for him, showing him what love was in eyes and song and hands. It ignited a conscious longing for deep connection, appreciation for the pure love I saw in what I was looking at, fear of never finding it, gratitude that a tiny human could experience that kind of devotion in a world where it's so needed.

It was a lot tonight. I have had several days of internal work and struggle, of letting go and rationalization, and it was a difficult, clearing, healing cry. I never turned the tv on again tonight. I sat here instead and wanted to talk about all of this to my little blank blog box, because it is in the face of the most fearful times in life that I know for sure that the good and deep things I'm seeing is the stuff that matters.

Photo by Schmutzie. Used with permission.

And even when I'm so afraid that feelings like I saw in images tonight won't touch me, personally, again or maybe ever, it was good to know today that they -- and my reaction -- existed. It was good to know I could take it all in, even partially, at a distance, when normally I am so busy talking myself out of needs and feelings and the right -- yes, the right, it appears -- to human connection.When so often I feel on the outside looking in, not really a part of any system or community, but an observer. A child and a sister and a friend, for sure, but on some primal level lacking, no one's mom, no one's partner, no one's provider, no one's end of the day.

These are the voids that frighten me, for whatever reason. These are the spaces of deepest longing for me now.

We function regardless, I know, because I do. I understand my value. I don't feel worthless, I'm not sorry I passed over options that could have led me to that and left me holding the tragically wrong cards, either. I'm just being honest about what hits me in the hardest places. Because I think it is that desire for better, that acknowledgement of where the wounds are inside of us, of what we desire and what keeps us from it, especially, that helps us be better, that helps me be better, anyway. And on days like today even more, I appreciate the people who have shared their stories with me online, even when I didn't like them, even when they have been uncomfortable for me, because it is this kind of access that so often instructs me, that gives me a view I'd never have otherwise. I see a brand new baby in the embrace of a grandmother in an airport and I say yes, this is it. This is one of the things that truly matter.

I hope I am a little bit different tomorrow. I hope I am a little bit better. I hope I can hold on with less denial and shame, with more courage and intention, to what I might want from this life I am not only crafting for myself, but that I am allowing others to participate in, too. Because I'm at a place where I am still so flawed and afraid and road-worn, but also ready, by necessity and desire, to be better at that part.

On Stilts and Fire and Walking Through It and On Them

Here I am with a man on stilts:

This is my last week at work forever, and I'm doing things like crying through a two-hour Glee doubleheader, so I've come to this as my visual touchstone.

(Thanks to Deb Rox for the photo of me and my pretend carny husband. All that background needs is a clown pushing a hoop with a stick and maybe a miserable elephant or two, to go with the seaside vehicle. Also, blown up bigger it looks like I'm in danger of snapping his stilts-twig leg, what with my stance there. Later on he made me almost eat fire in front of an entire beach lounge full of people, so maybe I did hurt him. CAH-RAFTY, CARNY MAN.

(Seriously? The guy on stilts was very nice. We were instant friends, in my mind, which is obvious because I look entirely comfortable with him, no?)

You know what, this story is freaking me out in the retelling. I am super not into being on fire and I was really close to his fire sticks and it appears almost happy about it from the pictures. (I go to Florida and lose my fool mind.)

Oh. My. God. I just said all of those things and they are true. HELLO NARNIA, I'M HOME.

Anyway, so yes, I quit my job in March, not with the stated goal of joining a resort carnival, but life is funny. Back then, it felt like May was forever away and would therefore never come, and I'd sit there in my sensible chair in my windowless office pondering the decision I'd made, lalala, I'm a decision maker, forever, looky here at me, but nothing will happen because la. 

Well, hello, calendar and reality-challenged people, i.e., me: May is here. Friday is almost here. Here is almost here. And I'm putting the talents I took to South Beach to use by posting photos of myself with stilts man, because how else would I remember that I almost ate fire unless I did this instead of other productive things?

I don't know what is going to happen, which in some ways I'm totally fine with and in others? Well, we do not want to talk to those others, because they are crazy banshees with snakes for hair who want my heart on a mismatched Pier One plate.

I'm ready to give something else to the space I occupy. I'm ready to let other, so much better, stuff in. If I could tell you, y'all, all that has happened to me within the past six months without boring you to tears and you charging me a co-pay? It's been a lot, inside and out. And it's weird and it's hard and it's making me cry what may seem to be an unhealthy amount at Glee because I think it's supposed to. Transformation that requires slashing through years of settling and rationalizing and denial with a cup of coffee and a keyboard and my own flawed interpersonal skills instead of with a sharp machete? Not easy.

 And yet I believe that all of it -- ALL OF THE ALL OF IT -- has happened in this way over the past two years to manifest what my meditation teacher used to say was the power I had that I refused to acknowledge, that I didn't know how to channel or let out of its size-14 cage. She used to make me put both my feet flat on the floor to try to feel it, not to fidget, to swing one leg up over the other and disconnect, which is my usual posture. She told me to feel it in a way that should have creeped me out but didn't. You are solid. You have to sit in it. You don't even know. Put your feet on the ground and feel it.

I couldn't manage it yet, because my brain is a complicated system of roadblocks and puffy clouds, so it had to show up in an ER this past December in the form of almost stroke-level scary vital signs, and a kind and directive nurse who along with an apparent solid grasp of needles and math told me that fear and stress that deep probably had come out in pressure that high. We can kill ourselves with our own minds, I believe this now.

It's not like I buy it all yet, or even most of it. Power looks very different to me than this way that I feel. I just finally came to a point where I knew I had to change, and so I've been putting one foot and one word in front of the other for six months like I have a plan, when really I'm just a walking, talking Mad Lib, with a sense of humor and a constant willingness to try new things as my fill-in-the-blanks.

This has been a particularly challenging week inside of my skull, as I let the ending of something big into my mind, as I go through the process of shutting it down (while trying not to starve the concurrent growing things, the good, the new.)

Old patterns, electrical currents in my emotional grid, are rising up from beneath my skin, and I'm pissed off about that. I haven't been my best self, at all, and I have felt badly about that in the way I always do when extra stressed, when instead of letting it just wash over me and out the door, as I'm learning, I've been gathering it in subconsciously, stoking it with worry, the ultimate waste of time.

But I can learn. I know what to do when I'm at the end of the particular rope. I had the good sense to talk through a lot of it with people I trust last night, and then I peeking at my shamrocks that I have somehow managed not to kill for more than a year now. Even when they're sleeping you can see a tiny one shooting up now that I've given them a much bigger pot and a space by the door with sun, and that thrilled me more than anything in recent memory. It's always a mystery, what you find to keep you going, what makes you feel competent, after years of telling yourself you kill every green thing you touch so don't bother.

I hate when metaphors happen accidentally. Like hammers to the head, they are.

 I still wonder who in the hell I think I am, walking into an unknown with a questionable net. But what I do know is that I have lived for three years in a state of constant panic, low-grade mostly, but still. I have spent days convinced that this was all there is, my performance declining, my attitude getting ever worse. 

It just  didn't work for me anymore, so it had to change. I wouldn't be sitting here without the patience of friends who have helped me see the other, less self-loathing side, that said maybe the space I was in wasn't working for me as much as I wasn't working for it. It's a lot simpler when you stop insisting it's so complicated.

And what's the worry? That I'll starve now? I have been starving for a long, long time. There are other ways to be broke. There are other ways to die. I didn't want the way it was happening to me to be the final story, for me. And I'm pretty sure that if I hadn't made that decision way back in March, and had what even I'll acknowledge took enormous courage to follow through on? I wouldn't have answered the query that took me on the trip to a place with a blazing sun and a super moon, where I totally almost ate fire.

I'm kind of glad I didn't miss this. I'm looking forward to the rest.

 

*Sarah or Deb took this picture on my camera. I don't remember which. Thanks for catching it, and me.

**Also! I don't want to forget to thank Honda for bringing the amazing -- and for me, life-changing, because this picture will hang on my office wall forever as a symbol of when everything changed for me -- white party to life.  I am a very happy CRV owner with a beloved Civic in my past. I really appreciate it when cool brands I can support without reservation support what we're doing as writers and photographers online to change our own worlds, and hopefully our larger one.

Laugh at the Trouble of Parting

This Mother's Day, I'm working with Clever Girls in support of Macy's Heart of Haiti to shine a light on the "trade, not aid" program, which provides sustainable income to Haitian artisans struggling to rebuild their lives and support their families after the 2010 earthquake.

A few days before my grandmother died, I saw her for what I'm pretty sure now I knew would be the last time.  It was late in the evening, in the last days of December. My own mother drove us to the nursing home on the way home from a family reunion, where I sat by her bed under the flourescent bulbs and wept and couldn't stop. She stroked my hand with her one good one, bewildered. 

"Whatsa mattah? Whatsa mattah? Don't cry. It's okay. Don't cry. Why you cryin'?" 

"Because you're so sick," I said. "And I can't help you. I don't know what to do."

More to the point, I told her the truth, finally: that I did not know what I would do when she left me. I told her there weren't enough tears for her. At 38, with a mother there to support me and the wherewithal to do whatever I needed to, really, to get by, I just did not know what I would do without her 85 pounds of awesome and her overall input in my physical world. I did not know how to live without her, because I'd never had to. She existed in my life from infancy as an ally and an advocate, for various reasons and in various ways. They never tell you at the beginning about this part at the end. 

I wasn't supposed to tell her these things. She was frail and sick and often confused, her body and her spirit finally caving in to rest after more than a decade of recovery and relapse from a massive stroke and God knows how many mini-strokes in the daily mix. She had never gotten over her anger at losing her physical abilities or her independence, but she showed remarkable flexibility in moving around and adapting to what were sometimes really hard transitions.

I showed up for visits to the various facilities she needed to adjust to as her care needs changed with snacks she didn't want, clothing she wouldn't wear, and an obsessive desire to fix her television that she brushed off in favor of the crappy local news channel. We talked surface stuff, mostly, things she wanted to hear about and know, a work schedule that she said was too grueling even if I told her it was no big deal, and how could I even explain the internet to her as a time-waster? (When I started working in senior services, she'd concluded that I was a doctor for old people. She bragged to the unimpressed residents at her dining table that I was a doctor. I corrected her a couple of times and then I gave up.) I'd sat with her in ERs a couple of times, done some bush league elder advocacy that didn't compare to the stuff my parents dealt with daily when it came to hospital and assisted living and nursing home staff and back again. I cried on elevators and in my car when I left, but I did not let her see it, not ever, until this cold night at almost the end. 

I really should have known better than to stress out a dying person. It seems like with all my years of counseling training, I'd have picked this up in one of the manuals, and yet there I was, dripping tears on her bed sheet. I fail end of life in my own family. 

However, my grandmother did that night what I've learned over my conscious lifetime that moms do. I learned this mostly from her, and from my own mother, her daughter-in-law, with some other data from my aunts, my friends with kids or even without who possess maternal energy that lights the world, from my childhood stories of Mary that are my strongest mythical tie to Catholicism. I quite simply believe that Marie White stopped her own hastening dying process to attend to me. Her eyes cleared and she looked at me and she told me that  this was a real shame, yes, but I would be okay. She transmitted to me with her eyes and with her touch a desire to stay and stop my pitiful sadness that was as strong as it was impossible. 

She obviously would never have left me if she had a choice, and beyond me she would have chosen not to die at all, because she liked being alive in a practical, curious way, as well as the way of a caregiver. I actually believe that she stayed alive through as many health setbacks and eating problems and winter colds and crazy surgeries because not only did she not want to leave her family, she just didn't think that she should, or that it was a good idea. And this all sounds as crazy and woo-woo to me on one level as it sounds completely rational on every other. It is the very heart of love. And if one has been lucky enough to be loved, and protected, and fought for like that, I'm not sure what else you need. 

My grandmother would have thought that talking about being a parent was ridiculous, honestly, like talking about air or groceries or the veracity of the Holy Trinity. Some things were and that was that. Her dad died pretty young and her brother was killed in World War II, she took care of her sister and pitched in for her mom. In her world of duty you did what you did and you got what you got and what she got was four sons and seven grandchildren and that was okay too.

Yes, she worked her butt off. No, I cannot speak to her dreams and inner thoughts, but from all appearances she really liked her kids and the grandchildren when we came along. She would have always rather been with us than not. She liked helping children learn and being a parent and a coach (although not always the most tactful sort) came rather naturally to her. I think she would look back at me from whatever beyond she's in to say that this is a whole bunch of goings on for something that made a certain amount of sense at the time, that of course I cried that night, of course it was a real shame that she had to go, because she'd have much rather stayed here. As the Irish funeral prayer my sister found for her funeral program says,

"All is well. Nothing is hurt; nothing is lost.
One brief moment and all will be as it was before.
How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting,  when we meet again."

She believed that. I didn't, so much. Now I do because I like the concept, nothing more, and whenever I read these words, which is admittedly often, I smile. 

I did not go back to see her after I left the room that night, and she died a few days later. I have felt great guilt at various times since that I didn't witness her passing closer to the time, but I've come to the conclusion that we finished our business that night. It was the exchange that we needed to have to mark the end of a profound human relationship. It left space for everyone else to have their time, to say what they needed, or not. I'm pretty sure our parting words that last night were the usual mishmash -- be careful, I'll see you soon, come by when you can. 

One brief moment, and all will be as it was before. 

When my family drifted out of the funeral home the last night, I hung around until my uncle said that I had to go, that I needed to leave my grandmother sometime. I conceded and did this, but although I was grateful for the nudge, I really was, he wasn't exactly correct. As I move through the world I know all of the hype is true: I never will leave her, and she will never be gone from me. My Kubler-Ross stages of grief have moved in waves for three years, they've gone out for brunch together, picked up hobbies and gone on a few beach vacations by now. But when you aren't ever left by a person in the truest sense of never leaving, you're much less inclined to do it yourself (unless you have a personality disorder or are just not the grateful sort, I guess. I'm talking best case scenarios here.) It's the best kind of luck and the only thing about love I've ever needed to learn. That, and that when you're a mom or someone like it, you'll try to take a break from a process as arduous as dying to attend to what an overgrown weeping kid needs, I guess because you've never ever ignored anything she needed before, so why start now?

I know I've been loved like that. I don't need to ask for more.  

Thank you to Macy's Heart of Haiti for sponsoring my participation in this “Share Your Heart" promotion. I was selected for this sponsorship by the Clever Girls Collective. All opinions expressed here are my own.