After my daughter died all I wanted to do was scream. All the time at everyone. Every passing person with a smile, every church preacher with their offer of salvation and hope, and every happy full family. I would see mothers with their children and my soul would die again. I wanted to be dead myself because the pain of losing a child is excruciating. I mean absolutely horrifying and excruciating and sick and awful. Many, many people tried to offer me advice, “oh you must be on this stage of grief, it will pass”, “you’re not really like this, you’re just grieving”, “don’t worry you will have more children” or one of the hardest “you will see her again one day and she is in a much better place”. What? Although I believe in God, I feel that last statement is what I like to call a “throw statement” It is basically like seeing someone freezing in the cold and instead of bringing them inside one just throws them a warm blanket and walks away. Honestly I have no real fact that I will see my daughter again or any concept of what that would look like- souls without faces and no memory of life on earth? She’s a grown angel now? What? what is it? So none of us really knows, not the boy in the movie who says it’s for real or the girl who draws the paintings-as for me, I don’t believe them-so save it and don’t say it. Now I can say with love in my heart that it is very hard for people who have not experienced loss to know what to say so they end up saying the wrong things a lot of the time-so, I know it is not their fault and these people who said these things are not bad. I am sharing my experience though, on the other side of these statements. I became bitter toward so many people who, for whatever reason, couldn’t really be there. I became bitter to actors in TV shows holding their babies, I became bitter toward people and their “miracles”-I didn’t want to hear it, my miracle died in my arms. What I needed was someone to sit by me and hold me and not say anything, I needed…someone. I guess that someone should have been my husband. But his abuse and anger only increased after her loss. He would have moments of sadness but it quickly turned to rage. I learned to keep quiet about what I was feeling. I stopped crying in front of him, I stopped crying at all. If I needed to I saved it for when I was in the shower, while my son was napping and my husband was at work. I would be on my knees screaming and crying and begging to be put out of my misery, begging for an angel…someone…someone to help me. That light didn’t come so I continued to shove her down like a stowaway in my heart. I put a plastic smile on, brushed my hair long and straight, every lash in place. I kept the house clean. I scrubbed all the ugliness away, all the ugliness that made everyone uncomfortable. I made myself bleed on the inside just to appease the outsiders. I waited til he got high and passed out then I took my place as a guard over my son. I made sure he was breathing in and out, I would stare out the windows from his bedroom and watch for intruders. I would not let anything happen to my son. My “paranoia” only enraged my husband, so after I silently kept watch I would slip back into bed around 5 in the morning and wait til he left for work, so I could fall apart again. This pattern of survival continued and severely worsened compromising my own life. I eventually had to become my own angel and save myself. I did that by leaving my husband and beginning a new battle of survival. So my daughter stayed deep within my chained soul. She was and is buried so far down within me. She seeps out when I start overflowing and becomes like the drops of water spitting out of the boiling kettle, burning my heart.
A year ago (in 16 days it will be a year) my brother died- no warning for that either. It was awful and horrific. My brother is one of the few people on the earth who I feel really understood the depth of the twisted me. So after he died I pretty much wanted to kill myself. The thing about losing someone is that parts of you die too but not all the parts, you only wish they would because it hurts so much just to breathe in a world where they no longer share the same air. His loss on top of the loss of my marriage, survival of traumas and the loss of my daughter, really pushed me to the point of death or surrender. I had to choose surrender because I still have two other amazing children here who desperately need me. I surrendered and finally got help. A few tries in I found someone, a counselor, who truly cares about me, not money but me. So…I’m slowly digging up old graves. I’m saying her name…Isabelle. I am not that plastic face smiling in the storefront window. I am pissed that my life hurts so much and I’m not going to be quiet anymore. And you know what I’ve been told…that’s ok. That’s healthy and normal. It is something I should have done a long time ago. So I don’t save all my tears for the shower, but I don’t stay in bed all day either. I am being guided on a journey I can’t avoid anymore. I am walking through the grief. It is totally terrifying but I am facing it- slowly, but walking in it just the same. And let me tell you it is not a chart of seven stages- it is crazy and messy. It is up and down. It is nightmares and it is dreaming. It is dark and it is frightening. It’s beyond my control and I want to be a control freak. It is crying in the kitchen in the middle of cooking dinner. It is panic in the middle of my class when the teacher says the word cadaver. I think of my daughter- cold and blue at the hospital. It is PTSD when I wake up at 2 in the morning shaking because I feel like it’s happening again- one of my kids is dying and I missed saving them too. It’s a process of healing and forgiving myself. It’s death threats against my own pulse. It is constant questions with no answers. Grief is alive and hell but all I can say is don’t shove it down if possible. I wish I hadn’t but I know I had to. At that time it was my only choice and a soldier doesn’t cry in the battle- he puts on his armor and fights. Now I’m under the shelter and I am grieving and missing my loves. And I am owning it. It is outside the constraint of any type of rules. Remember that. It is a tornado shattering your soul and it is standing in the middle of it and feeling every last thing it throws your way, until the eye of misery begins to subside and we can catch our breath again.
screaming from my deathbed 