Reflections on the year

After Lucy died, the year ended. Suddenly it was 2009. People wished us a better year. Even our daughter's birthday seemed like part of a large slide show of reflections on the year. I wasn't reminded by writing her birth year. But somehow it meant 2009 was a clean slate to fill with Lucy's death. I can't help but contemplate what a profoundly sad, fucked up year we have had. Mourning defined this year from beginning to end. I was lost in a cloud of grief colored with the Lucy crayon. It was a year of bad omens and meaningless symbols. It was a year filled with the challenges of the mundane. And yet, in the sort of cliff notes version of my life, I can see this time line of events. A definite progression through my grief, though it is impossible for me to see the trees through the forest. Changes in me. Changes in my life. Changes in my relationships. I'm not sure how I imagined 2009, but if pressed to imagine a year without one of my children, okay, yeah, sort of like this. Unbearable. Hazy. Lonely. Fucked. My only resolution last year was to survive.

I am still breathing.

I feel like I am cleaning up after an atomic bomb. I cannot make sense of these relationships that have withered away. I look at the dust and cannot tell if it was my safety, my lightness of being or my ability to forgive and forget.  I often have the inclination to pick up everything wholesale and move to the middle of nowhere. It seems far easier to resettle somewhere else, abandon the vestiges of a life I didn't get to live. I have privately contemplated what it would cost to move our entire house on a plot of acreage in the middle of nowhere. I am feeling restless and bitter. I want to go where no one knows me. A magical place where I can reinvent this sadness, retell my story, and make a new community of people who won't disappoint me.

My birthday comes a few days after New Year's. Usually it is the day everyone goes back to school/work. This year is no different. It is a Monday. That is sort of how I see my birthday--a cold, wet Monday. I have traditionally had shitty birthdays. Everyone forgets. My sister bails. And I am left alone, taking myself out for a martini. Now that I have a husband, he takes me out for sushi. The husband and the girl kiss me in the morning and I feel less alone that I ever have in my life. Last year, I lost my voice four days before my birthday. Laryngitis. I don't know if it was from crying too much, or simply a virus, but I couldn't really talk. It was a welcome respite from my continual refrain of "Lucy died. I can't believe Lucy died."

Last year, my sister and I, deep in grief, talked about what to do on our day, Lucy's due date. We decided to relive our childhood birthdays, which were always spent going out for Chinese food and then bowling. Due dates can get emotional the first year, I knew that, so I wanted to just avoid thinking about anything but throwing a ten pound ball as hard as I could. If there were a batting cage, I might have suggested that. Or a smash shack. One year for our birthday, my father bought us bowling balls with our names engraved on them. We didn't bowl that often, but I think it was a time we all loved. I still have and bowl with my ball, even though my fingers swell and welt from the small holes. For 2009, we ate Mexican food and bowled. It was a Sunday. I had no idea what venturing out of the house would be like, or how it would be celebrating anything, let alone my birthday. The day before, a mere twelve days after Lucy died, my mother sent me an email. I guess in the flurry of laryngitis and bowling plans, I never called her with an invitation to our birthday luncheon/bowling, but my sister did. My mother wrote me an email saying she invited herself along, and she now is reconsidering that. She said that she realizes now that we never had a good relationship. She wrote, "I'm sorry you are going through difficult times." She wrote that she has no idea how to support me. 

I had foolishly imagined that one was afforded latitude to grieve. I had no voice, but I called her. I convinced her that I wanted her to come to our birthday. I explained that I thought we did have a good relationship and that I am sick and grieving and it is not personal. I tried to explain that none of this is about her. And I kept thinking, "I cannot believe I am comforting my mother right now. I cannot believe I am having this fucking conversation." There are some defining moments in this year. This was the first little dash on my timeline, I suppose. Something changed in me after that email and conversation. I suppose I realized that life was not going to stop. That even the people that love me unconditionally don't always know how to support me. I realized that I was alone now. No Mami kisses were going to soothe this boo-boo. I was an adult. You find your own comfort when you are an adult.

Nonetheless, we hit the bowling alley at 10am, and rolled a few. My mother showed up and I kissed her. Sam and I played Dance Dance Revolution, even though I was postpartum, breasts filled with milk, fat and sad. I cried when Sam won, but not because he won, but because I was having fun. It felt like what I imagine finding out as an adult that Santa actually exists and he and the elves have invited you to visit their candy cane village feels like. Fun was possible. We ate Mexican food, and for some reason having to deal with one of her children, my sister stayed home for most of the meal while her husband stayed. It is always sort of the fucked up dynamic of my family that someone is not sitting at the table during dinner, and we are staring at an empty chair wondering when they are coming back. I remember being so sad about that, though. Empty chairs. Too many empty chairs. I wanted to scream and cry . I drank a vat of margarita as they put a gigantic Mexican sombrero on my head, sang a stupid Mexican birthday song, and took my picture.

This was my first lesson of my thirty-fifth year--people really only want to see you smiling with a sombrero on your head. I threw the picture out when I got home. I couldn't imagine a time when I would reflect on that birthday, or find it and laugh like some kind of demented newscaster, "Ha, ha ha, look at me. So sad and wacky!"

For my last post, when I was looking for the picture of my gnome environment, I paged through our family pictures for the year. I skipped January, February, even March...and in April, I began. Our new puppy. And pictures of Bea and I painting circles. Photographs of my paintings for my newly established Etsy site. Beatrice jumping in puddles. Fire trucks parked in front of my mother's house on July 4th.  There is my finger mutilated by the hand blender.  A picture of a dead scarab in my office. There was the trip to Panama. Videos of me hiding; the family posing and laughing. I have this inclination to put together a slide show of the traumas and the growth, just to remember something about 2009 besides a profound sense of what was absent from the pictures. I have never broken up with someone and cut them out of photographs, but there was this otherwordly experience, like Lucy was cut out of every picture. There is the hole where Lucy is supposed to be. Right there.

Right here.