First things first- thank you for all the nice things said and for checking in about my daughter’s friend. She is now out of the hospital and back home.

This week my daughter’s friend and her mom came by with a huge basket of flowers and candy and candles and gifts and a beautiful note, from both of them, thanking us for everything. It was good to see my daughter’s friend. It was a weird first meeting with her mom. It didn’t feel like we were meeting for the first time but, in fact, we were.

My daughter’s friend apologized to my daughter for putting her through all of this. She also thanked her for saving her life that night. And for everything.

It was good.

After they left I just had this overwhelming thankfulness. We got one. In a universe where tragedy can be around every corner, it wasn’t, this time. This time everybody lived.

Everybody.

Lived.

This.

Time.

I’m well aware they don’t always, you know? I’m so thankful.

My daughter is doing better too. She continues to craft and play music and draw and sew. That flow state of creation… it may be the only real cure to sorrow and pain, I’m starting to think. That creativity isn’t just some silly little thing we do for fun, but that it is actually built into us as a means to survival.

It has been for me. It is for her.

I break no new ground with this thought, don’t I know it.

the “tortured artist” is a trope for a reason, after all.

---

This all happened on Sunday night three weeks ago- my daughter’s friend attempting suicide, that is.

On the Friday before it happened my youngest was having a sleepover with a friend and so it was just my middle daughter and I at the house. We ate dinner and watched a couple of shows, I wrote for a while, and then we were winding down at 10pm, each in our own rooms and I just thought… man. I need to talk with her. The last time we had a heart to heart she had said she felt bad because she couldn’t ever feel my husband around and it came to me I had something new to add to that conversation.

I asked her if she wanted to sit with me outside and we looked at the full moon and stars and I asked her if she could see the Pleiades. She looked (it’s where Orion is pointing) and she said no. I told her that I got the Pleiades as a tattoo because it’s special when you see it because unlike Orion, the Pleiades isn’t always visible. When the moon is bright (like that night) or there is a haze in the sky that reflects the city lights, or even if I don’t have my contacts in… I can’t see the Pleiades. That I went years there where my vision got bad but before I got glasses where I couldn’t see it. But whether you see it or not, it was there.

You see where this is going.

I told her that just because she couldn’t feel her dad around… that that didn’t prove he wasn’t there. I told her that I couldn’t always feel him either. Only sometimes. When the conditions were right. This seemed to help her.

She then talked about how she’s felt this overwhelming sense of guilt that she isn’t doing enough in her grief. She kept repeating- “his life mattered, Mom.” She thought she wasn’t doing enough to show him that, that she needed to do some grand gesture to make it clear to him and the universe that he was important. That she felt guilty she didn’t have the energy or bandwidth for it, and so felt she was going through each day not celebrating her dad’s life at all.

We then talked about if it is the big gestures or the little gestures that make us feel the most loved- and of course it’s the little gestures. The little ones are the ones that matter. So I assured her that the little gestures are the ones that would make him feel loved by us now. I told her that I keep a flower next to his side of the bed, and write to him nightly, etc. as small gestures that I do. And so she didn’t need to learn all his songs and build this giant memorial of effort to him, she could just strum his guitar nightly, briefly, and think of him… and that would be enough.

It was a good talk.

---

The next day (Saturday) I let her sleep in and I took my youngest and her cousins out to a craft thing in town. About an hour into it my middle daughter calls me crying. I was alarmed and ask what’s wrong… nothing, it turned out. They were happy tears.

She said she woke up and went out to the hammock. Beautiful late morning, cool breeze, and she said the talk we’d had the night before had helped and she felt at peace for the first time since he’d died. She looks up in the tree above her… to see a mockingbird and a male cardinal hopping around the tree playing with each other. Not chasing, not squawking, just bouncing around each other in play. She watches for a while and the cardinal flew off around the corner of the house.

(Just a reminder here it was a cardinal and a mockingbird I saw the night after he died too- I got pretty damn big tattoos of them to make sure I always remember them and what they meant. I digress.)

She says she got up immediately to follow the cardinal and that she knew it was going to be on my husband’s BBQ pit before she rounded the corner. And that’s where it was. It was looking right at her.

She walked up to it and it looked at her for a while and then it flew from there to the basketball goal. She and my husband used to play basketball all the time. It looked at her again, for a long time. And then flew off.

That’s when she called me crying and said she knew he was okay, and that she got her signs, and she was so, so thankful. She kept repeating that she knew he was okay now.

I’d never seen a mockingbird do anything but chase off other birds. And I’d never seen any bird, cardinal or otherwise, on my husband’s barbecue pit or on the basketball goal.

This happened on Saturday.

Sunday was when her friend tried to kill herself.

It was one of the things I was mad about, in the week afterwards. That my daughter barely got one day of respite from emotional pain before having it crash down on her again from a different direction.

My therapist told me to look at it another way and that feeling that connection with her dad the day before had to have helped get her through the pain of her friend’s attempt. And that the peace she felt on Saturday wasn’t gone.

I’ve hung onto that.

---

Anyway.

In other things, I remember my mom telling me once, in the before time, how much she pitied me because I just seemed so busy, alllllllll the time.

One- fuck you lady, that isn’t a nice thing to tell someone- that you pity them. (She was really really good at statements like that- like she stayed up all night sharpening the edges of the comments she was going to drop into conversations.)

And two…. sometimes it felt busy but we were happy, you know? I was happy. There was nothing there to pity.

It was a very odd thing to have said.

And even now. Man. If she could see me now she’d probably say the same thing. And she’d still be fundamentally wrong about how she was looking at it.

I am so busy now. Mentally, emotional, physically… like yeah, and all of that in the midst of grief. It’s just me over here constantly fitting in folding 3 baskets of laundry and cleaning the kitchen and nope, I need to hold off on the dishes, let me run outside and mow the front lawn before it gets dark actually, because I can do the dishes at night but not the lawn…

On and on and on.

But I am proud about it. I do not pity me. Look at all this survival I am doing! Look at all these things I am capable of! Look at the life I am carving out of the shadows!

I can do it. I am doing it. And here, almost a year ago, I thought just continuing to breathe would kill me.

That great loss is still there, but I have built a life around it that is livable. Like a crater with flowers growing around it. Like an African watering hole with life teeming around the verges of what just looks like an ugly mudpit.

Something like that.

---

I don’t pity me. And I no longer feel that I joined the shittiest club known to man.

This thing, this loss, this grief, this recovery… this is very much a part of the human condition, not apart from it. This thing still makes me part of the collective.

We will all lose. We will all grieve. We like to think this is outside of the plan… but THIS?! This has always been the plan. We will lose the people we love. There are just those of us that have gone through it already and those of us that have not gone through it yet, is all.

A comfort to me may be a threat to you, perhaps is how that reads?

I don’t know.

All I know is that it feels like living a fundamental truth.

The crater is there, and some things I wish had not happened, happened. But I can accept it and with whatever life I have left, I will make sure that life is good and that goodness flows through it. Perhaps that sounds too grand. To me it just sounds like survival is all.

I have planted flowers all around the edges of the crater and I will spend my life tending them.

THAT is what this all feels like.

---

Anyway. There has been so much more going on.

I’ll probably be back tomorrow (ohhh, a teaser!) but for now this feels like a good stopping point, and so I shall.

First I’ll leave you with this other thing that happened in the midst of the last few weeks too:

GOT IT IN ONE!

---

And I’ll just dump in a bunch of random memes and pictures and quotes that resonated because this all felt just a bit too heavy and I don’t want to leave on that note.

Till next time.