We have a giant attic where we live now. One half is carpeted and cozy. Give a hard shove to a wooden door that sticks and you’ll see the other half, with exposed beams and loose floor slats and filled with tubs of memories and stages of our twelve plus years together.  I avoided those storage tubs for years. They were filled with some of the things we kept of our son, Noah, after he died. His “I MARCH TO THE BEAT OF MY OWN DRUM” t-shirt with an alligator on a skateboard. His brown sweater that he’s wearing in my favorite picture of him and my husband, Hal. The big wool throw blanket imprinted with that same picture that I gave Hal for Father’s Day. That’s a tough one. We still haven’t taken it out of the storage tub. Noah used to love to lay on that and laugh and say “Daddy”.

I was looking for the winter decorations box in the attic yesterday. I realized I never even put out the Fall decorations this year when I came upon that box filled with all things Autumn.  I got very sad about the passing of another season without celebrating it with my burlap decorative pumpkins, the scarecrows, the garland of orange and red leaves. Damn it. I missed Fall.

I pulled out some lights, some greenery, some snowflakes, some little ceramic figures to hang on the wreath at the door. And then I found a bag filled with our wedding favors. You know those little wooden toys we’d get as kids? You press the bottom and the dog or cat puppet-like figure would bend and sway and jerk around. Sometimes they’d collapse at the knees or drop down on all four paws. The Bride & Groom toy I found in a catalog were about to bend in every direction.

Marriage is a funny thing. Or more simply, as my friend Kate recently texted to me, #marriageisweird. You are bound together. But you are still separate. You love each other. You would do anything for each other. You annoy the shit out of each other. You wish the other would just go away for a little while. But not too long. Because it doesn’t feel the same when they’re not there. And then they come back. And you’re happy. And then annoyed again.

My husband and I suffered one of the most devastating events a marriage can endure. The loss of a child. We know the statistics. In fact, in my hysteria the same day our son died, I remember actually saying “Couples don’t stay together after a child dies! My husband is going away too! It’s all over!”

But even for couples not living in the shadow of their worst nightmare, #marriageisweird. I pulled a few of these little wooden toys out of the storage tub, still with our names and wedding date tags on them. I remember handwriting them and tying the little blue ribbons on in the living room of our apartment from five apartments ago. I figured our four year old daughter would like playing with them. I also thought maybe a visual and tangible reminder of our actual wedding day, aside from the photos on the wall, may reduce some of the weirdness lately. When we’re both too busy. And nerves are on edge.

I found myself playing with this toy while I watched the coffee drip into the pot this morning. It’s never fast enough these days. I pressed the bottom with my thumb and laughed as the bride smacked the groom in the face. Then I pressed again and watched the groom bend backwards while the bride threw an arm stiffly up in the air. I kept pressing the bottom to see what jerky movements this young couple would do. They came up with every possible combination. They were glued to this base that kept forcing movements and punches and they just kept popping back up.

It was the nature of the toy. It’s how it was designed. What a perfect toy to represent our marriage. We are glued to this base. We will just keep popping back up. Bending but never breaking.

It costs fifty cents to ride this ice cream truck outside the new Food Emporium in town. It only takes quarters, by the way. The first two times we went to this supermarket, I just let her sit in it. I didn’t put any quarters in because:

A. I didn’t have any quarters in my purse.

or…

B. I didn’t want her to only enjoy this ride if the thing was shaking and bouncing with the creepy soundtrack of little kids giggling and yelling for ice cream. I didn’t want every trip to this supermarket to turn into a quest for quarters and subsequent tears if I had a purse full of dimes and pennies and cough drops as usual.

We visited this supermarket after school for the third time the other day. She informed me in the parking lot that “There is a ride in there. Come see!” and I pretended to not know what she was talking about. So the deal was that if Miriam was a good girl while we did our shopping, she could sit in the ice cream truck on the way out.

We went through the produce section identifying all the vegetables she has no plans on eating. We went through the cereal and fruit rollup aisle identifying all the Disney characters and movie merchandising tie-ins. Trolls, Moana, Secret Life of Pets. We counted out 12 yogurts for $10 and she threw them into the shopping cart with such force that I prayed they wouldn’t break with every pitch. None did. Whew.

Miriam put our items onto the conveyor one by one, announcing loudly what everything was. She said hello to the cashier with such excitement that the obviously tired lady couldn’t help but eek out a hello herself. I know what that’s like. The endless parade of people and sometimes you just don’t have a smile for them anymore.

We said goodbye and headed towards the exit. The ice cream truck was ready. Miriam climbed right in as I moved my cart to the side to get out of the way of the people rushing out on this Friday night. I took some pictures of her and texted them to my husband who was still at work. I let her play as long as she liked in the ice cream truck. There really was no reason to rush out. No reason at all. It was cold enough for the ten yogurts and the gallon of milk. I didn’t have to pee. Miriam didn’t have to pee. Like I said, no reason to rush.

I started to dig through my purse for quarters. I wanted to see what this truck could do. I found one quarter and must’ve looked for the second quarter for another ten minutes. I checked every compartment, pocket, and crevice. And all the while I was debating in my head the pros and cons of giving Miriam this ice cream truck upgrade. I made a deal with myself. If I found the second quarter, then it was simply a no brainer. Start the freaking ice cream truck engine! If I didn’t find a second quarter, well then she’d be none the wiser. No gain, no loss. Life stays simple.

And then the second quarter appeared in the coin pocket of my wallet. I never even use the coin pocket of my wallet. The only other thing I keep in there is something called a Kaddish card. It has the Jewish prayer for mourners on it. Hebrew on one side, English on the other. I’ve had this card in my wallet since the day we left the funeral home after my son, Noah, died. I think I just grabbed it off a brochure table and clung to it for dear life ever since. It’s never been taken very far out of my wallet. I like having it there. I like watching its edges fray. It’s like a clock of sorts for me. How time continues from that day.

Every single day does not have to be magical. For me or for Miriam. But it is. Whether I would’ve found the second quarter or not, this trip to Food Emporium would’ve been enough either way. For her and for me. I want her to learn that the ice cream truck doesn’t always have to shake for it to be fun. And sometimes we don’t always find a second quarter.

This explosive thankfulness I have for this second chance at motherhood sometimes gets in the way of Miriam’s need and desire to live a normal life with “bursts” of magical. But the kicker/paradox is that, for me, all of it is magical. The mundane is magical. The unremarkable moments. The ‘we should be doing something educational’ moments. The ‘we should be wearing pants’ moments. It took my four-year old to teach me that everyday does not have to be magical and yet it is.

I put the second quarter in. Miriam was thrilled. The ice cream truck shook and bounced. It was adorable. The soundtrack of the children singing coming from the speakers sounded less creepy. All was good. The yogurt was still cold. The milk was fine. The ride was over. We went home to tell Daddy all about it.

It’s such a delicate balance.

How much good, bad and in-between news can we expose ourselves to everyday without crumbling? How much can we process?

My mother-in-law had a stroke two days ago. News like that has a sound. It sounds like the hum of my routine coming to a screeching halt. For me, my head spins while my body remains still.  She’s doing okay and God willing will recover fully and soon.

I can’t say enough good things about this lady. I know my own mother, who’s been gone for six years, would be so happy that I have such a wonderful lady to be the mom I miss so much. They liked each other.  Both tall with big feet, my mother (Paula) and my mother-in-law (Natalie) have a confidence you don’t see very often. And no matter what was going on beneath the exterior, they rarely would show it. I’m not sure if that’s a good trait or not.

What do you do on the days that it’s all too much to process? When it all just accumulates like a pile of dirty snow until you need a time out?

Drink to dull the senses?

Eat for the pleasure of taste and comfort?

The medicine cabinet emergency Xanax prescription?

That friend who always has pot to smoke?

Retail therapy?

Exercise?

A walk?

A nap?

Lose yourself in someone else’s story?

Sex?

Long conversations with compassionate ears and lips?

Or do you, like me, find yourself frozen in one spot? Next thing you know it’s twenty minutes later and you have no idea where the time went. You pull yourself back together from this mini vacation in a time vortex or some other Dr. Who/Star Trek kind of explanation. I unfreeze my body. I unfreeze my brain from my own cryogenics lab, mentally say goodbye to Walt Disney’s rumored head in a jar, and begin to process it all once again.

I think about how last night Miriam said these words to me…”I like to play with you Mommy. Let’s hold hands.” And how she wouldn’t let my right hand go as I continued to type with my left hand on my laptop.

How that made me cry disproportionate tears because of the news about my mother-in-law.

Because of that story I shouldn’t have clicked on that day about the young mother in Australia with cancer and the kids she’s leaving behind.

Because of remembering the days with my mother when Noah was little and what she would say now about Miriam. She’d be so proud and amused by her leadership qualities.

Disproportionate tears keep falling because somedays the hurt slightly outweighs the feelgood. And we have to cope however we cope. I write my words, rearranging my sentences and phrases until it feels right. I hit the PUBLISH button from the rocking chair and call it a day.

I don’t worry anymore about how I sound. I’m all about the brutal honesty. The vulnerability. The exposure and sometimes the blinding double exposure.

I’ve never been good at combination locks. I’ve tried to avoid them my entire life. My high school was so small that we didn’t even lock our lockers. I’ve had jobs where I’ve needed to unlock a combination lock safe. I just allot myself extra time for cursing in frustration, but eventually I get it open.

We have a row of lockers at my current job. When I started there, over six years ago, I was given a combination lock.

“Uh, I kinda suck at these,” I said.

“It’s not hard, you’ll get it,” my manager Jerry gently said to me.

“No I won’t,” I thought to myself.

I just left my locker unlocked in the beginning. Just leaving the u-shaped arch positioned to look like it was locked. I had outsmarted my ineptitude. I had thought outside the box. I had left my stuff unsecured.

One day, for whatever reason, I locked it. Like locked it shut. I had no idea what the combination was. I had forgotten it. I’m not sure I ever really knew it actually. I went into a panic.

I had completely forgotten about this incident. Six years later, as my coworker Ryan and I teased a new guy about his locker and other rookie stuff he would need to know, Ryan reminded me. A memory from the dark days. The ‘how the hell am I even here?’ days. He reminded me how panicked I was. It was Friday and I needed to get to Temple. He said he felt so bad. He was watching me pull and spin and go ape shit on this lock and locker.

“Do we have a bolt cutter??!!” I asked. We didn’t.

I remember the emotions of this incident more than what actually happened. Panic. Anger at myself. Desperation to get my car keys out of this locker and get the hell out of here. That feeling of being physically trapped turned into being emotionally trapped. This was no more than six weeks after my son, Noah, had died. What the hell was I doing here??!! Where else would I be? I can’t even handle a combination lock. I can’t even keep my…stop that thought. Physically stop that thought and so many others.

I’m so glad Ryan reminded me of this incident. I really am. It’s all about looking backwards sometimes.

See how far you’ve come.

How you have changed.

How you are healing… or at least a little less broken.

How you are simply still going.

When I came back to work after Thanksgiving last week, we had our company mandated Christmas music playing. The first song I heard as I walked out onto the sales floor  was “Happy Xmas (War is Over)” from John Lennon.

“So this is Christmas and what have you done
Another year over, a new one just begun”

Woah. John’s voice. It hit me hard. But rather than question what I hadn’t  done as another year has passed, Ryan reminded me of what I had done. How far I’ve come from that understandably panicked girl who’d just lost her son a few weeks earlier. Hyper aware and sleepwalking simultaneously. That still applies. It’s just changed.

There will always be a “before” and “after” Noah. A line of demarcation. For the rest of my life. And I still can’t handle a combination lock.

About two weeks after Noah died, a lady named Annie took this bracelet off her wrist and put it on mine. Her son Graeme had died two years prior.  He was hit by a car. I love how she spelled his name. I told her so, too. She smiled. She was at the point of counting in years. I was still at the point of counting in days. Practically minutes.

Hal and I talked with her for hours at our cousin Arlene’s house. My tears just instantly started to fall as I typed that sentence and was brought back to that afternoon, six years ago. The raw days.

We looked at her in awe. How was she still here two years later?  She just looked like a normal pretty mom. When I picture her in my mind now, I see her as simultaneously stunned and serene, carefully choosing the right words to say to us. I remember being so desperate for a magic sentence. I hung on her every word. She said it all came down to love.

“Love never dies. The only thing that is real is love. And our love for our children will now be different but the same”

…or words to that effect.

I struggled to have that make sense. Inside I cried “BULLSHIT! I want Noah back!!”

Annie took off the simple silver bracelet hand stamped with LOVE that a friend had given her after Graeme died. She said it was now my turn to wear it.  She told me that when I’m ready, I will pass it along to someone who needs it. I struggle with the fact that I still don’t feel ready. I feel almost ashamed. I’m afraid to let that strength go.

We received letters and books and suggestions from other parents. Some found us. Some we found. A friend from high school lost her 16 year old daughter, Mara, in a car accident. I had no idea. She sent helpful books and offered an eternally open ear.

My mother-in-law’s friend of seventy five years lost her son, Tom, in 9/11. Never in a million years did I think she and I would have the death of our sons in common.

Many other pieces of wisdom from the “sad clubhouse” rolled in. When something would resonate with us, it felt like a little piece of hope dropped at our feet. A sentence to recite or thought to think to ourselves repeatedly when we couldn’t hang on much longer. Some made sense and others didn’t make sense until a few years later.

“Don’t skip a step”

This made sense about a year later when I tried to force my okay-ness. You can’t. You will want to but you can’t. You will go backwards and sideways and spiral out of control. I still abide by that one when I’m pushing myself too much. Stretching myself too thin. For Hal, for Miriam, for family and friends. For me.

“You will think you’re going crazy but you’re not.”

This was told to me at Noah’s funeral by an old friend’s mother. She had lost her daughter, Susan, to cancer. Thank god I had that sentence put in my head from day one. Nothing could’ve been truer. And it still is. I still lose my mind in the confusion and shock. Over and over. It takes a lot of exhausting work to process the crazy. And make friends with it. I think I have. Most of the time.

We found that more mothers were doing the talking. The resources for Hal were a little harder to find. About a year after Noah died we learned about a professional entertainer and clown (just like Hal had been before the accident) who lost his son, Luca, in an accident. I found him on Facebook. I wrote to him. He wrote right back. I remember the first sentence of his email. It was something to this effect.

“Holy Shit! I can’t believe this happened to you.”

We have been friends ever since. There is a language that parents who have lost children speak. A short hand. They know that nothing is too crazy to say. Because the craziest has happened.

Just two days ago an old friend asked me for advice on what to say to an adult college student of hers. Her student’s 16 year old daughter, Macy, was just killed in a car accident. So I’ve been thinking about what to say. I’ve been asked to do this before. And I will be asked to do it again and I’m more than happy to do whatever I can. I feel it’s my duty. It helps me and I hope it helps them too. Maybe the LOVE bracelet gives me that strength and that’s why I still have it. If I had a million dollars, I would buy one for every hurting parent I know.

One gift you can all give to hurting parents is to say their child’s name. Never be afraid to say their name. It’s like music to our ears in a way. The most beautiful word. Synonymous with Love. I just polished the LOVE bracelet last night. I could feel Noah by my side as I did it.

She just would not stop saying these words… “If it doesn’t ring up, it must be free!”

She said it at least six times. And she wasn’t even referring to her own bottles. She was talking about, as well as directly to, the customer at the next register over. As soon as I’m done ringing up this Polly-Want-A-Cracker human parrot, I’ll go over to help the cashier having the technical difficulties. She’ll keep saying “it must be free!” while laughing like a moron. And then I’ll get very sad for so many reasons.

Let’s see if I can identify the origins of this sadness.

Firstly, humor is important. Like the most important thing in the world if you ask me. Without humor, I would not be here. I would’ve died of sadness repeatedly throughout my life and no doubt after my son Noah died, I would’ve jumped right in with him.

My mother used to tell me a story about my grandfather’s first wife. Her name was Bella. My grandfather Max married Bella even though he knew she was dying. Tuberculosis I believe. They were married for six months before she died. He tried to jump into her open grave at the funeral. He drank heavily for a few years after that and then he met my grandmother. I imagine like many of my customers, the liquor took the place of humor. But what is even remotely funny about losing the woman you love in your twenties?

I have a friend. His name is Peter. Humor is what makes up the core of his being. He’s actually a very successful professional clown. But like me, he suffered the most unfunny thing in the world. He lost his son in an accident too. Luca was not quite five years old. He told me that during Luca’s funeral, in a moment of lunacy and intense despair, he pretended to push his surviving young son into the grave too. Everyone gasped and was horrified and panicked and Peter still has no idea why he did it. How could he? The mind is haywire for many years after trauma like this.

So humor in whatever form  we can push through our bodies and minds becomes a survival technique. So maybe the human parrot lady (herein known as Polly) was trying to lighten the mood of a semi-stressful situation in a liquor store 2 days before Thanksgiving. I think I was pissed and sad because her “line” simply wasn’t funny. Not the first time. Not the sixth time. And repeating it changes the room from unfunny to sad in zero to sixty.

I just got Miriam this classic toy called Crocodile Dentist. It’s a spring action crocodile head. You open his jaw, randomly press his teeth down one by one until his mouth CHOMPS down on your finger. It hurts a tiny bit but the tension of the game creates nervous laughter. However Miriam, at not quite four years old, can’t appreciate the tension. After the first chomp she wants to put it away and tell Crocodile Dentist he’s not very polite. She starts to cry a little. We try again the next day to play with the Crocodile. This time she giggles a little leading up to the CHOMP. She squeaks out a giggle after the actual CHOMP but then the tension of the toy gets to her again and we put it back in the box.

Easing the tension. Dealing with the pain. How does a naturally unfunny person ( yes I’m talking to you Polly) deal with life’s stresses and traumas?

I know for me, there’s no better way to feel better or forget my troubles than to post something funny on Facebook and watch the giggles come back in droves. Crafting the actual “funny thing” helped. The immediate responses helped even more. The tension at work or internal demons I may be fighting with that day are instantly eased.

So Polly was trying to do the same possibly? Easing the stress at the register (albeit with a lame non-funny joke) or my friend Peter’s “out of his mind” moment at his son’s funeral. Miriam’s nervous giggle at the discomfort of a game she wasn’t enjoying. My comical venting on Facebook to get some soothing validation in return.

Humor, it’s what life is made of.

I wore the wrong sneakers to the park the other day. I wore my black fabric sneakers that my coworker Kaliff jokingly called my “skater shoes”. They have zero support but I love how they look. They look young. They look simple and fun. They look cool. Uncomplicated. Unencumbered. Unpretentious. Unstressed. They look like the life I’d like to have.

But today I’m paying the price for running around at the park wearing those sneakers. My shins are killing me. So badly, I took three Tylenols. That’s one Tylenol too many. They were extra strength.

But man, did we have fun! We ran from the ‘little kid side’ to the ‘big kid side’ over and over. Miriam is right in that nether region. And it’s all so new for me. And her.

In those sneakers, I kept up with her climbing the rock wall, running across the shaky bridge and coming down the “big beautiful tunnel” slide as she called it. In those sneakers, I didn’t have time to let my claustrophobia keep me from following her down that tunnel slide or my fear of heights keep me from climbing to the top of the jungle gym. Those sneakers seemed to turn me into a girl I used to be and the mom I always thought I’d be.

I moved faster in those sneakers than normal because that’s what it seemed I should do. These sneakers are what the kids wear. And the young moms. And even my old pal “my inner child” has a pair like these I’m sure.

So now I’m thinking about changing my hair. And the sentence that keeps coming out of my mouth is:

“I love ____, but I’m too old for that.”

Fill in the blank with pastel pink, Kelly Osborne lavender gray, goth-ish dark auburn, chunky bleached out streaks. Anything I come up with, I overthink. And I start to doubt my freedom to be who I want to be. And how I want to look. And suddenly looking at pictures of hairstyles and hair colors on the computer turns into a therapy session. My hair never seems to evolve but I do.

I get brave and bold and more comfortable in my own skin. I try not to overthink the implications of having unnaturally colorful hair or sequined eye glasses. Or even being that almost fifty year old mom with the three year old running through Nomahegan Park in the wrong sneakers, having more fun than any of the other mothers with their normal colored hair.

I try not to think that I’m too old for really taking a good shot at the only career I’ve ever really wanted. Well maybe the two careers I’ve ever really wanted. Mommy and author.

I write my own story now. That includes wearing the wrong sneakers, even if I know my shins will hurt the next day. I will color my hair some unnatural color sometime soon. I will not overthink the things that make me happy.

I put this whole pancake syrup container in my mouth at lunch the other day. Unopened. I was demonstrating to a friend the level of stress eating I was at lately. If it’s not nailed down and is remotely edible, I will put it in my mouth.

I’ve tried to start being more aware of what my triggers are. It’s like having an ‘out of body’ experience. I watch myself as I eat another unsatisfying and poorly made bagel with insane amounts of butter. Or another slightly stale cookie or potato chips.

It doesn’t matter if I have a protein bar, placed smugly in my purse that morning with the best intentions. I will eat that sucker too. And sometimes not even remembering the first bite to the last.

I can’t stress enough how I’ve never been a skinny mini. I’ve always liked to eat what I wanted when I wanted. It’s not the weight I’m talking about it. It’s the act of stifling feelings. Of wanting to run screaming out of my job sometimes.  I stifle feelings of frustration. An endless list of frustration. Frustrated with not having the solutions.

More time to play with Miriam.

A more satisfying job.

More time for writing.

More money. Not just extra money. But money to pay the bills we DO have. It’s a quiet shame so many people don’t talk about. Juggling, depriving. Being angry at not being able to do things we want to do with Miriam. I take that back, actually. Not really angry but again the word “frustration” with coming up with HOW to make more money.

More happiness. I live with this not too distant feeling of knowing what’s it’s like to have nothing. Not in the sense of not having a home or people who love me or food to eat. Because, yes, I know there are too many people in the world like that. It was the lack of purpose after Noah died. It was the fear of not being able to keep my marriage together in this complicated loss we share. It is the fear of never being “whole” again. And I think I have to come to terms that I never will be. I have to live this fractured life. I recently learned about a Japanese term called Kintsugi.

As defined by Wikipedia…

Kintsugi or Kintsukuroi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum. As a philosophy it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise.

Am I trying to fill the cracks in me with carbohydrate and sugar in place of gold? Are the customers I see daily coming through my line at the liquor store filling their cracks with Woodbridge Chardonnay and Smirnoff ? I’m sure they are.

I always eventually hit the brick wall. When I’m really uncomfortable in my body and very self conscious. When I’m way too winded running after Miriam. When I just plain feel gross.

I guess it’s about respecting and even revering my body. My boss lost about 50lbs this year. Every time a catered lunch came through our break room or a birthday cake showed up, he would simply gesture to himself and say “temple” and continue eating his vegetable lunch and pass on cake.

I haven’t really wanted to lose weight again since I needed to lose weight to qualify for the medical study that gave us the gift of Miriam. And if I don’t REALLY want to do it, it will not happen.

I’m very accepting of myself in its physical flaws. I’m not so accepting of all my other shortcomings. And maybe that’s the part I’m trying to squash with chicken pot pie and a 1lb bag of chocolate Twizzlers. I often feel various forms of guilt. Guilt of not having enough physical time or emotional energy for friends or family. Guilt of past mistakes. Guilt of wanting more when I actually have plenty of what matters.

My mother bought me this ladybug magnet for my refrigerator when I moved into my first solo apartment eighteen years ago.

“For good luck,” she said.

That magnet has fallen off the refrigerator at least twenty times over the years and has never broken. It’s ceramic. It should’ve shattered into a million pieces. It’s lived in six different apartments, always transported in a paper towel in my purse.

That’s my mother there in that photograph from 1939. If you were to put a photo of Miriam at age two next to it, photoshop in the striped ball and Buster Brown shoes and make it sepia toned, they would be identical.

My friend Nancy posted on Facebook the other day.  She was wishing her father was still alive to be able to see how great his grandchildren  were doing , the new house she and her husband just bought, and even his reaction to the election.  I commented that “I believe he CAN see, just not in a way we can understand yet. Just live your life as if he were watching and continue making him proud.”

Not hard to do…Nancy is pretty freaking awesome.

In 1994, my close friend Marybeth lost her father. We were twenty six years old. It was one of the first deaths, aside from both my grandmothers when I was sixteen, that I’d experienced. Such an adult thing to experience. The loss of a parent. I didn’t know how to comfort her. What to say or how to say it. I wrote her a poem and I put it in a glass bottle with a cork. I remember picking it out at a craft store but I can’t remember where. Marybeth still has that bottle with the cork top. She recently sent me a picture of it. The poem is rolled into a scroll.

I love scrolls. They always contain one of three things:

1. Wisdom
2. Secrets
3. Love

I hope she doesn’t mind me sharing this…

Marybeth’s Heart

Cannot be contained inside this jar.

Her love seeps through cork and cuts through glass.

As she shuffles through these autumn leaves-

Trudges and slips on winter’s ice-

Strides through brilliant spring sunlight-

And glares into summer haze-

She’ll remember the man who raised her into her beauty

for all to love and appreciate and treasure.

And feel him with her always

Smiling, proud, and living in a peace that we can’t yet understand

But somehow know.

How we comfort ourselves after someone we love dies is completely up to us. I remember wearing a necklace of my mother’s nonstop, even when I slept, for a few weeks after she died. Like it was a way of keeping her alive. Or maybe a conduit of her energy from heaven or wherever she was.

The changing of the seasons, especially autumn into winter seems to trigger depression and extra feelings of missing them, whoever they may be. I don’t know if I read this or I came up with it on my own in my really dark days… but I have a theory.

The season change is time passing. And time passing sucks without our loved one here to see and feel it too. And it’s a constant punch in the gut to repeatedly realize that they’re not coming back.

I actually remember the moment that I really realized Noah was not coming back. We were moving out of the apartment we lived in with him. We were worried he wouldn’t be able to find us if he came back. I realized, as we carried boxes out of our shell of a home, that he couldn’t possibly come back like in Stephen King’s Pet Sematary.  We were worried about his spirit not being able to find us. Hal and I actually said out loud as we closed the door at 800 Forest Avenue  Apt 4G  “Follow us, Noah!”

So I think they are following us. Maybe they’re following us simply inside our heads and our hearts. Maybe they are standing behind us sometimes,  like the psychic at the renaissance faire said about my mother. We won’t know until we’re in their place.

But go ahead and talk to them. Go ahead and feel them in the room with you. I’ll wear my mother’s necklace and drive around with Noah’s mismatched socks in my glove compartment and I can cover Miriam at night with the quilt we splurged on at the Kutztown Fair for Noah. It has a pattern of sock monkeys and bananas. She loves it and it’s a soft and gentle link to him.

I can fool and comfort myself that this quilt is the closest I’ll come to Noah and Miriam ever sharing a nap together. A part of him is with her. My mother’s necklace around my neck. Replaying a supportive conversation my mother and I had in my head brings her back to this world for me. Seeing her handwriting on an index card stuffed in her cookbooks or the list she made of the guests for our wedding. Seeing her handwriting feels like I’m holding her hand. And maybe she’s holding mine too.