Hey Thor,
It's mama on the morning of your birthday. You would be 30!!! Whoa!
We would be celebrating big time this week with your brothers teasing and calling you Old Man or insisting on a cake that says something about being over the hill. You would take it all in stride as you always did, laughing it up and dishing it right back at them. It's one of the things I am sorriest about, your brothers not having you in their lives to grow up and share life's crazy journeys with.
We all carry you with us in our hearts. And I know each of us is feeling this day in our own way. It's a big milestone. And these "shoulda been heres" are really tough to get past without a plan.
It's been so long since I've written one of these letters that it's hard to exercise these muscles of expression. Putting down in words the complex feelings around you, your birth, short life and death and the years of carrying the weight of loss comes harder now. Maybe it has to do with survivorship. Survivors don't let wounds bleed constantly. We find ways to compartmentalize for sanity's sake and to continue to be a functioning human being in the wake of devastation.
We marked ten years since you died last New Years Eve. Now we mark what would have been your thirtieth birthday. My way of honoring, remembering and holding space for my heart is to take this day off as a retreat day and just allow the emotional body to sing, cry, wail, laugh, remember, dance, reflect, ponder at will.
Leading up to these remembrance days, as I call them, I find myself intensely agitated, and it all begins in the body. Amazingly, the body remembers everything! YIKES! How, I have no idea. My conscious mind is going along doing whatever my calendar says I'm supposed to do but all the while there is a ramping up of disquieted energy and sorrow. Tears sting my eyes for the simplest of things. I'm inexplicably prickly, distracted, irritated and sad. It's like PMS on crack.
This year was made all the more difficult due to some unexpected side-effects from a medication that plunged me into a spiraling emotional maelstrom which cruelly using the stored body memories as fuel. Lord, I'm glad I had some PTO and could take a few days. Don't worry, boyo. I'm fixing it.
Your dad has been an absolute champ seeing me through it. I needed something to do with my hands that also fed my soul and ticked some items off my to-do list (that list is a big stressor, so getting things off it is big relief!). We got some new storage shelves and workbenches installed in the studio so my creative space is back to being usable. It's a seemingly small thing, but having that space where I can unwind and let my heart pour out into a glass work or a painting or a mosaic or a new pair of earrings is my emotional dojo and joy incubator.
When I'm in it deep like this, I find myself taking long shuddering breaths and letting them out slowly in an attempt to calm my parasympathetic nervous system. Sometimes I need to do that several times in a row just to get breath past my tight chest an all the way to the bottom of my lungs. Sometimes my lungs feel like I'm drowning with sorrow. Yes. Still. After all these years the heaviness of losing you turns precipitous and fills my lungs with sorrow.
The remedy is breath. And movement. And art. And sunshine.
I've been seeing a therapist for the past few months which has been enormously helpful! It felt like the right time to begin to make sense of the experiences I've lived with special deference given to the past twelve to fifteen years. There was so much happening in our family dynamic before your passing. All that got suspended, put on hold until a later day. Well, that day has come and now I've uncorked the bottle. My Emotional Wreck/Nervous Breakdown Genie has been released and I'm working with her to get some shit resolved. Your dad and I are working on our relationship. I'm attempting to make sense of my past and some of the other defining moments, events and people that have left huge craters in emotional body. And of course, the reality that we still learning to balance gratitude that we got nineteen years with you and the gut-wrenching awful grief of losing you. It's a lot.
It doesn't help that I'm super strung out and burned out at work. I feel like I'm failing or letting my team down by the simple fact that I am a human with limits that I've been pushing beyond for several years, Now the bill is due and there's not enough money in the bank. To quote Bridget Jones...fuuuuuuuuuuuck! I have no idea what to do with this one. I'm trying to heal and recover - another reason for my weekly sessions. Can I get back? I hope so cuz I love this team. Any angel wisdom or perspective you might care to share with me on this one? I'm listening.
There is good news. Today is sunny and beautiful. Self care is made easier when I've got sunshine, breezes, flowers, space and time which I do! So, I'm going to take this blessing and the day and invite your presence to be felt in whatever way the moment calls for. Later, I'm going to see Sierra Ferrell with Xan and Annika and Aunt Poorna and one of my co-workers, Carter. We will celebrate you and the love that eternally connects us by being together in music and laughter and dancing!
Of course, I will cry. But know this, each tear is sorrow expressed as liquid love born into the light where it shines and refracts into a million colors. This is how our love for you continues in the world; it's in the countless ways that love and kindness sweetens the air and imbues the scene. It's in the way that we walk ahead holding space for opposing emotions; Joy and Sorrow. They are two sides of the same coin, worn smooth in my pocket after so many years that they have become One Thing. I believe this is the Mystery of Quan Yin. I'll meditate with her today.
I love you sweetness and I'll never stop wishing for something different, at least once in while. Those conjured up imaginings of a life where you didn't die on that December night and are instead here with us for chicken & dumplings, guitar picking under the gazebo and enjoying Dad's new shop. It causes an ache and longing that blurs my imagining with new tears. But I've got a smile wrapped around those pictures, too.
Here's to the mystery of the heart...
- A person can love many people with their "Whole Heart"
- A heart can hold both joy and sorrow equally
- The love between a mother and child never dies
- God IS Love
I'm gonna go watch some birds for a bit now and see what the rest of this remembrance day brings. I am grateful to have a day to spend with you in memory and love!
Mamma
