Two Years Four Months

(From my journal and recording of my grief 10/2012)

Two years four months…

Its two years and four months almost to the day, a Tuesday. She died on a Tuesday.

Suddenly last night as if it was that day I asked Ted, “Did they have to wait for a coroner?”

“What?” he seemed confused.

 “For Mandy? Did you have to wait for a coroner to come?”

“Oh, yes.” He said, “They couldn't move her until one came. It took a while; they got there soon after I left.”

“You left?” I was surprised, not upset really, but surprised.

“I wanted to get home for you. I was afraid that someone would call and you would find out that way.”

“So did the emt’s pronounce her or how does that work?”

“Yeah, they pronounced her, but then couldn't move her so they called the coroner and waited.”

“So people were like walking around her the whole time?”

“They covered her up.”

“Yeah, I know, but people walking around her must have known they were walking around a dead body.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

Tears and hurt welled up and spilled down my cheeks. I hadn't really thought about her body until then, until two years and four months later. Once it started my mind couldn't help but follow her body on the rest of its journey. From the ground in front of the interstate rest area into the ambulance, or did the coroner come with one of those long black cars. Did they put her in there and take her somewhere?

I am glad that she wasn't really there, that she was already gone from her body, but I do wonder if she was still attached enough to see or know or watch what happened.

I guess I don’t really know where they took her, someplace where they take bodies and put them in a cold place, cold enough so to preserve things, at least temporarily. She wasn't there long, wherever that was.  Not more than a couple hours because I got the call that they would not be doing an autopsy, that there was no legal or medical reason to do one, but they did want to know how I felt about that.

I told them how I felt. I told him that something was wrong with her and that she was on her way home from Boston, from seeing a specialist because something was wrong inside her head, that she kept going blind and that her sed rate was over 100 and that maybe that is what happened to her.

He was very kind and very polite but he said, “Yes, but that doesn't matter. It still isn't a legal or medical reason to do an autopsy so the state won’t authorize one in your daughters case.”

What do you say? What can you say? I was crying, a voice inside my head was screaming, ‘what do you mean? She’s thirty-five years old. She dropped dead in a parking lot. What do you mean natural cause? No legal or medical reason to find out what made her die?’ but being the well-mannered, laid back conformist that I am I just muttered, “I understand.”

“… with her size and her hypertension…”

What hypertension? I didn’t know about hypertension? I did know about her size, of course I knew how large she was. I knew about her asthma, her breathing difficulties, the fact that she used oxygen. I knew a lot of things about her condition, her life, her medications, but I didn't know about hypertension, was that blood pressure? Why didn't I know about this? How could I not know?

“It’s being considered natural…”

“I see, okay.” I heard myself saying into the phone.

He continued, which surprised me. He wanted to know which funeral home we wanted to use. I told him the name of the only one I knew. “Alright then,” his voice continued, “You’ll be hearing from them shortly, probably tonight.”

“Alright, thank you.” I said, then he was gone and I pushed the off button on the phone without actually finding out where she was.

I found out from the man at the funeral home that her body had left the big city in New Hampshire and was being transported to Claremont, New Hampshire, just twenty minutes from us, “then,” he said, “We’ll be going over later tonight to bring her here.”

He asked about seeing us to make arrangements and questioned whether we will be wanting to see her.

Ten o’clock Wednesday morning was set for me to see her body, for us to make arrangements for her remains – remains that which stays here after the essence, the spirit, the soul has left. I knew about remains and that they need to be taken care of. More than ten years earlier we had to make decisions about Danny’s remains.

The journey of her body didn't end that Wednesday morning. Wednesday afternoon it traveled back to Claremont where it waited for three days to be cremated. In the state of NH a body can’t be cremated for three days, then on Friday, according to the certificate of cremation her body was cremated on that day then traveled, now ash in the urn back to Vermont where we held her services on the following Monday, after which we carried her ashes in the urn home which still sits on a shelf in the living room. Danny’s ashes are on the top of the roll top desk along with photos and a few mementos.

Speaking her Name

Speaking Her Name

Last weekend Mandy’s graduating class celebrated their twenty year anniversary. I didn’t know until the day of the parade that they had painted a large sign which they attached to the float:

  

“SHS ‘94’ Remembers Mandy Foster”

They spoke her name. They spoke it all the way through the streets of town and in that I felt somehow comforted, somehow validated…

Mandy didn't actually graduate with her class. School was a nightmare for her. School, which, I've always thought of as my great savior, the one thing that was safe and constant, the place where I knew the rules and could count on them. The place of great adventure where letters and numbers made sense, more sense than anything had before that. School, the place I loved and revered was the very same place that was a place of fear and torture for Mandy.

The only good year she had was the year that she was in the group home. I visited her school program once while she was there. It was a special off site school where Mandy thrived. The teachers, the kids they all loved her. She was popular. She was able to succeed both socially and academically.

I wished we lived in Burlington so when she came home she could still attend school there, but we didn't and she couldn't, so when she left the group home it was back to public school in Springfield where after some brief success in the special program in middle school she moved on to the high school where she fell apart all over again.

But, here they were -  the class she grew up with claiming her and remembering her. I felt Mandy come to me in the moments when I first heard the news. I felt her in my chest, not on the left side like usual, but just off center and to the right, a tiny little tickle. She was pleased, not so much for herself, but for me – she was pleased that I was pleased.

I suspect that they have no ego’s in the afterlife. It feels like that to me, like Danny and Mandy are pure spirit and that it is connection to spirit that makes me able to feel her at all. It’s that little tickle in my chest, other times a warmth or fullness in my heart or that secret smile that I feel in my throat that lets me know how close they really are.

She doesn't really speak to me with words, but rather with signs and physical reactions. I can feel her in a hundred ways, but that took almost two years and even then the occasions were far and few between. Over the last two years her presence in my life is more regular, more constant.

The theme on the float was Disney castle. No one could have known the significance of that, but it is… very significant.

Early on in Mandy’s life she conjured up a castle in her mind. It didn’t look exactly like the Disney Castle but was very close to it. She called it her Safe Place. She went there whenever things became too threatening or too overwhelming for her, which was quite often.

She wrote about it with regularity and described it as a place where children could go to play and grow. It was safe for children because nothing could hurt them there, nothing at all could come through to harm or threaten them in any way.

She described green fields, rainbows, large stone castle walls and plenty of animals including a unicorn or two.

Besides the sunny playful place for children there was a place inside, a room where she could go to find peace and comfort and safety.

Over the years some professionals and some relatives thought it was a bad idea to encourage the belief and escape to the Safe Place, but I never had the heart or the stomach to try and take it away from her. Why would I? How could I?

In my early thirties I found the Safe Place for hurt and damaged children inside myself. It too is a castle and came about while working on my first book Kunda Mountain – a not so fictional work of fiction that is in a constant state of editing.

Like Mandy I know for sure that the castles are not here in the physical way – however real in the way meditation and visualizations are.  For Mandy, the castle was her safe place and I always supported that. I even made her a fabric wall hanging with a castle in the middle. I still have it. I packed it with some of her other precious things.

Even though I know the Disney Castle float was not the replica of her safe place castle, it was close enough to make me smile inside. 

Grief is Exhausting

Grief is Exhausting

Grief is grief and it does what it does. Ever present in my life now, the river that flows from left to right through all the minutes of my life its waters are dark and deep. It would seem that days like today, the day after the fourth anniversary of Mandy’s death the cumulative effect is - exhaustion.

And so that’s how I woke up today. My first thought was that I was too tired to do this anymore. “Four years of this is enough, although it was phrased in my mind more like a question which asked, Isn't four years of this enough?”

So I laid in bed for several more hours – exhausted, worn down, worn out thinking about how deeply tired I really am.

I've been tired before. Thirty-five years Mandy’s mother I’ve known exhausted. In the last few years of her life she grew more and more afraid to be alone, afraid of everything real or imagined.

There were nights, many of them, when she called from her bed two, three, four o’clock in the morning.

“I know its two o’clock… I’m sorry… I know you need to sleep, but I’m scared. I can’t sleep. I’m so scared.”

Groggy, I picked up the phone. With my eyes still closed I held the phone to my face and waited for her to get through the fear.

“Okay, Mom. I’m okay now. I’ll try to sleep. I love you.”

Five, ten, fifteen minutes later the phone rang. Over and over for another hour or sometimes two or three she tried to stop calling me until finally the phone went quiet and I hoped against hope that she was really sleeping. I tossed and turned, sat up in bed and listened to see if she was really pacing or crying or on the phone with someone else.

By that time in my life I thought I understood tired. I thought I knew what worn out really was. Before Mandy died and I started on this journey I thought I understood a lot of things. I couldn’t have been more wrong. 

Beginning Year Four

Its a few days from year four since Mandy died. I'm starting this blog because it feels like I might be able to write now. I'm not yet sure about the exact nature of my writing. I know that I will write about this grief - the journey of grieving... I'm still attached and committed to writing the story of Mandy, Mandy's life, her mental illness, her role as daughter, friend and most certainly about her light that shone brightly in the world.

For today I'm inspired to write based on reading some posts in an online group I'm in. The parents were posting one after another about how they feel guilt whenever they begin to feel happy or excited. They feel like they are betraying their dead children by not being in that painful place of grieving.

What I know about my own grief is that it is forever changing. I've learned that grief is many things in many forms... its pain and sadness, regret and reflection, wishes and prayers. It's a process, which is somehow familiar to me, yet I've had to learn how to access that familiarity. It's here deep inside me, hidden until now when I need it.

Early on I screamed inside my head, "I don't know how to do this. I don't know how to be the mother of a dead daughter."

In response, another voice, also inside my head whispered in earnest, "Yes you do. You do know how. You've done this before."

There in that moment, a moment that was to be repeated dozens of times; I knew it was true. I followed that whisper back to something familiar at my center, my core, my soul. So there at what I've come to call the soul level I did know how to do this. I still didn't want to and for most of the early days I cried out again and again, "I don't know how to do this."

Finally, in resolve, I just sighed and repeated to myself, "Yes you do. You've done this before. You do know it and understand it."

It's grief and it does what it does. The journey of grief is different for every single person who experiences it, yet in some ways it is the same. Whenever I hear the grief stricken describe the terrible pain in their chest, the cutting, the slicing pain that sucks the breath right out of them I know it, I feel it, I understand it and I cry all over again.

For the purposes of the blog I feel free to write without too much format, editing or worry about structure. It's not entirely free sense I'm still thinking about it, trying to abandon it for the blog... just to write without rules, without trying to understand the outcome until it's time to understand the outcome...

So, the subject of guilt as a resolve to honoring my dead daughter...

I know what they mean. The first time it happened to me I was shocked by it. In the beginning, for all those weeks that pile up on the backs of more weeks I did not, could not - feel the pleasure of smiling. I did smile often during those times, but always pasted on, always for them, the others whom I passed in the grocery or on the street. I know it was pasted, that it came from some place of knowing it was the right thing to do, the thing expected... I tried smiling at myself in the mirror to see if it looked alright, because on the inside I worried that it looked 'wrong', odd in some way that would frighten or bother others.

What if it frightened them, the pasted smile of a mother grieving the death of her daughter?

The mirror exercise was more telling than I would have imagined. The only other time I looked in a mirror in that deep way was when I entered a psych unit of hospital suffering from an emotional collapse. It was the same day that Mandy was transported to a therapeutic group home in the northern part of the state.

Ted had taken her. I couldn't. All I wanted to do was fix her, to do whatever a mother is supposed to do in order for their child to be healthy and safe and well... that term 'well being' that's what I wanted but could not provide for her.

So, Ted took her to the group home and Cindy, one of my grown up foster children took me to the unit. I turned to Cindy as she was leaving. She looked all pale and afraid even though on the outside she was brave and firm and reassuring. I'm not sure if I actually spoke aloud or just inside my head but I whispered, "It's alright. I've come here to die."

I was asked dozens of questions by a therapist. I'm not sure why I answered any of them. I felt all flat inside, like that flat line you see on one of those heart machines in hospitals. Inside I could only see and feel that long flat line. I wasn't sure how my heart was still beating at all or really more importantly why it wasn't registering on the line. No bumps, no bleeps, no sound, no vibration... nothing... just a long flat line that ran off into infinity.

At the end of those questions the therapist, a young woman whose name I don't remember looked directly at me and said, "You do tell people what you need. They just don't listen.?" I couldn't tell if it was a question or a statement, but it made a bump on the line... my chest rose up and filled with air.

It was true and it mattered. I did tell people things, important things. Things that mattered. I didn't know and still am not sure if they don't listen or just can't understand, but either way it was true that I did know what I needed and in that moment when she saw that in me, when she imparted that she understood that fact something changed. The long flat line rippled along and didn't go flat again until June 8, 2010, some twenty years later when Mandy at age thirty five dropped dead in a parking lot.

But, I find that I've digressed. The point about the mirror, the intentional staring into a mirror, in both cases bathroom mirrors, not only are they large, but well lighted and most importantly the distance between me and the mirror is close - close up so I could quite literally see directly into my own eyes.

During that hospital stay my regular therapist came to see me. At a point in our conversation she said, "I never noticed before but when you are really upset your eyes turn green."

After she left I went into my bathroom, took my glasses off and looked for the green color of my usual hazel eyes. She was right they were green, very green... green and swollen from crying, green and hollow - haunted, familiar... I'd seen this before... the green, the swelling, the crying - silently so no one would hear me - and - haunted, haunted just like this...but I couldn't connect with when or where I'd seen it before so I looked away and went about the business of getting out of the unit and home...

Then - twenty years later, twenty-two to be exact I stood in front of my bathroom mirror, this time in my own home. I went to examine my smile, my pasted on smile, to make sure it wasn't frightening, but before I could do that I was drawn to see my eyes first. They weren't green this time... they were dark. No green, no hazel, just huge black centers that consumed what would usually be green or hazel. The skin around was drawn and sagging, swollen, but sagging - the difference I suppose between early thirties and mid-fifties.

I stared into those dark circles, noted the silent tears running down the lines of my face. I searched for something familiar there, anything... but there was nothing... just nothing staring back at me.

When I shifted my gaze down to the rest of my face I found my painted smile. It looked fine. Not happy. Not even friendly - I remember thinking how it didn't look friendly, but then who would expect friendly at a time like this. It was stiff, but not grotesque, not frightening so having passed my test I gave myself permission to just use that one. I used it for eighteen months, give or take a day or two.

So, the first time a real smile sprung into my heart and showed up on my face it was a shock, the kind that startles you and yes sparked the question that the parents are asking, "Do I dishonor my child by feeling again? Feeling old familiar things that I felt before they died? Before the horrific searing pain that wiped out every other possible feeling. Does it mean that I don't really love them or miss them as much as I thought I did, if I feel anything that resembles happy or peaceful or excitement?

Immediately I knew that it didn't mean that at all, it didn't mean that I didn't love her or that I didn't care or that it was okay that she was dead. I knew it, but it wasn't that simple, so I found myself thinking about it, pondering it and examining it in an attempt to become comfortable with it. It was what I prayed for. I prayed for a way to 'be' in the world post Mandy's being dead that would allow me to think of her without the intense mind-bending pain.

So this was it. This was balance returning. This was how I would come to 'be' in the world. I was to find that different forms of happiness would co-exist with mourning and grief. I say this because so far, now just hours away from four years since she died I feel 'grief' is ever present at my core, at the base of my very being.

Other feelings including excitement, joy and peace seem to hoover above that core of missing and longing.

This is, I believe, the way it is supposed to be. This is, I believe, the new normal, the way it will be for me through eternity.