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.