One Year Later

This one sat in the drafts folder for nearly two years. Some things need to bide their time a little while, I guess. November 7th. 2014

Spring 2013.
It has been almost a year since I posted on this blog. A year ago, in another Spring, when Finn was just finding his legs, Oliver was getting ready for the big preschool bike parade, and many days we meandered home from school with the King girls, a stroller parade with the big kids running ahead or stopping to climb rocks and hang from railings, while the little ones toddled behind, taking turns wanting to hold hands.

 

Even then, when we didn't know what was coming, it felt like a blessed and precious time.Now those days hang in memory like images from another age. I look back at us and I feel so tender for those people, those people who had no idea what was about to be lost. And then I feel so tender for all of us, in our fragile and tenacious humanity, all of us who will lose, and lose and lose over and over.

So now it is Spring again. We traveled through those days of beautiful mundane routine, when the most pressing question was where Oliver and Amanda would go to Kindergarten. And then it was summer, and we embraced the unscheduled days stretching ahead of us. We went swimming, we went camping, we played in the woods and at the beach. We had days of toddler storms and five year old tempests, we questioned everything we did, we snapped, we cried, we cuddled away hurts. And we had days that unfolded with gentleness and ease.

Oliver and Amanda started Kindergarten, and Fall came, and the rituals of apple picking and pumpkin gathering. Worry was with us every day, and waiting for news from specialists appointments and lab results became a new occupation, but still the kids played, and argued, and found new ways to confuse and delight us.

 Julia was feeling less and less well, but she still loved to come over to play. We read piles of books, ate together, sang songs and chased the cats and chickens.

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And then, late October, the walls came tumbling down. A hospital admission, a transfer, phone calls and texts that seem even now impossible to believe. Learning that you can feel like a gutted fish, and still walk, talk and breathe. Knowing what I felt was only a fraction of  what Carrie and Glen were enduring, I watched in awe as they weathered--weather-the worst of days, of weeks, of months. Amazing Julia chronicled Julia's struggle to overcome a brain tumor, a stroke, infections, complication after complication, and finally her passage from her body as she left this life on January 24, 2013. These were months of the deepest tragedy and despair, of pain and heartbreak, but also of laughter and fun, companionship, a community rising to the occasion, hope, compassion and the kind of love that enfolds us in the gentlest and strongest of embraces, that carries us forward, that holds us together when we have broken into a thousand pieces.

Now it is Spring again. Julia is gone, but with us still. I slide Finn's feet into his sandals and see Julia's purple shoes. Finn does his silly walk across the kitchen floor, just the way Julia taught him. I walk into the gymanastics studio and am slammed with the memory of Finn and Julia playing with the lockers here last year. I dream often that I am searching for a missing child.

Oliver has seen her a couple of times since she died, he tells me. Once during her memorial service, when "I saw her in the sky. She looked bright-eyed and happy. She whispered something in my ear, but I don't know what." And once when Amanda, Audrey and Beatrice were coming over to play, and Oliver told me that Julia was planning to hang out so she could be part of the fun too. He insists that we have the right portions of treats so we can include Julia. He grapples with why she died, and how, and what it all means. And Finn. Finn asks to see pictures of Julia. He plays with toys that used to be hers and calls them Julia Toys. He has decided his toddler bed looks like Julia's crib in the hospital and says "I go hopital" when he climbs into bed. He is the age she was when she went into the hospital. Soon he will be older than she ever will be, a fact that still feels like broken glass in my heart.

And we go on.  We put in the garden, we plan camping trips and swim lessons, we fold basket after basket of laundry. We worry about mundane things again.  We get annoyed at the kids, and short-tempered, but we try to say yes a lot too, try with new fervor to enjoy what we have right now, this moment. Sometimes lately an ordinary kind of happiness has crept in and settled in my heart, right next to the deep well of sadness that I carry with me always. I am trying to be OK with that too, to say yes to enjoying the sun, friendship, laughter, to celebrating the kids' new milestones, even if they are reminders of everything Julia won't be here to do.

When Oliver was born, I felt broken open, exposed, vulnerable. The beauty of the world shone brighter, the horror was more real and much more terrifying. Holding this tiny life in my arms, I'd walk through town in a dream, feeling like I was missing a layer of skin I'd never known I'd had before. Losing Julia broke me open again, peeled away another layer. I feel open. I feel like I know less than I've ever known. Humble. More afraid than I've ever been, and more courageous.