My Will Surives

Roll over.

Throw the blankets off.

One foot on the floor.

Two feet on the floor.

Walk.

I will myself to start the day, because that is the hardest part.

Soon, the girls will wake up and I'll be too busy to notice that I am grieving, but I will feel it with every step.

Though some days are harder than others, not a day has gone by since this day 9 years ago that I haven't struggled just to keep living.   I wonder daily what right I have to breathe when my son cannot.  I wonder why I simply couldn't take his place and give him, with all the potential of a new life, the opportunity to live.

But I did give him life.  I carried him, even under circumstances where most women wouldn't, and every single day that I carried him I knew he would be something special.  Even when those dreams shifted, even when I knew his life would be short, I knew it would be meaningful, because he was unique, his own person, with his own destiny and his own purpose in life.

Some days those thoughts carry me.  We aren't promised a long life.  Not a day is guaranteed.  It's cosmic.  It's scientific.  It's the way things go.

Other days - today - I can't understand how the world keeps spinning, how the sun goes on shining, why business is still conducted, why people still drive the streets and still drive like such assholes and I hate them all, every single one of them because they dare to be on the road with me on this day that the world ended yet still somehow went on.  How is my heart still beating with this tremendous hole deep inside of it?

Nothing makes sense.  My baby had just started moving; how could he be dying already?  My son has died; why am I still alive?  My heart is broken; how can it still love?  My daughters are healthy and thriving; why isn't my son?  The world ended 9 years ago today; so how is it that life has gone on?

Determination.  Hope.  Gideon.  Will power.  Promise.  Whiskey.  Noelle.  Clients.  Mock Trial.  Marcos.  Eden.  Delilah.  Spring Training.  Love.  Every day I search for a reason, and every day for 9 years I have been able to find one.  I search for the reason, I will myself to start the day, I get through the hardest part.  Life is hard.  It is fragile.  It is unfair and imperfect and sometimes it's short.  So I take every day I am given.  I take every day because my son only got ten of them, and I take every day because I pray my daughters have thousands of them.  I take every day, the weight of Gabriel's death weighing deep in my bones, bleeding from my heart, eased by the hope that I will see him again some day.  That is how I get by in this post-apocalyptic world - Finding the beauty in what remains, and hope in what is to come.

The Couches

One fine day, I reported for an ultrasound.

The baby was not cooperating, and I should go walk around a bit.

"Something's wrong," my child's father asserted.

"You're paranoid."

But actually, he wasn't. A few moments later the tech told me to wait for the doctor and a few moments after that, a doctor who ruined my fucking life brought my world down with three words: "Incompatible with life." In two weeks we would see a specialist, who may or may not confirm the diagnosis.

So I did what anyone would do.

I shopped for couches.

"We're having a baby. We need something to bring a baby to."

With all the moronic faith in the world I turned over the pittance of a tax return, our first as a married couple (and as it turns out, one of only two we would file together), to buy a sofa and a loveseat. 

How stupid of me, to believe. 

It didn't fix anything. Not long after, a specialist confirmed the words of that bitch ass whore slut idiot doctor. My baby had anencephaly. He would die.

I had options, but there was no choice for me. I did the only right thing, and I carried my baby, and I had my baby and 2 days after his birth, Gabriel and I were discharged from the hospital and sent home.  We laid on those couches and lived and cuddled and loved and fought and snuggled and after eight days on those couches, he died. In my arms. On the couch.

I waited long hours on those couches for Gabriel's father to come home, drunk. I crawled from the depths of my despair, some days dragging myself from my bed only to get so far as those couches.  When I was divorced and needed a roommate to help with the rent, I relinquished the couches to a stranger as a part of communal living space.

One day, sitting on the sofa writing thank you notes my baby shower, I became quite aware my unborn child would be born that day, and Eden came barreling into the world hours later.

Those couches were picked up and moved to our new home and the memories of my son were stretched thinner as I built a new home and a new family and new memories of those couches.

We decided to buy new couches, and I could handle that. But the old couches, The Couches, must stay in our living room until we were sure that the new family sectional was a good fit.

So every morning the memories and couches greet me, assaulting me with reality. People live, but people die. My beautiful daughters don't know how every breath I take both rewards and punishes me. They still jump and play on the old couches, unaware how The Couches are haunting me.

It's January. And I'm fucking sad. I'm sitting on my new reclining sectional, plugged in to its power source, with my cocktail in its built-in cup holder, grieving the 9 year old couches in the next room.  Grieving the Andrea who died the day she learned her son would die.

Countdown to D-Day has begun.

The Possum

About two weeks ago I saw a possum that had been struck by a car, lying dead on the painted center divider on Truxtun extension.  For a week I passed by that possum, watching his little body get flatter and flatter.  I passed by him every weekday and wondered how he came to be crossing that main road alone, and who struck him on the center divider.  Why hadn't animal control come to clean him up.

One night I woke to the sound of rain and I started to think about the possum.  I thought about his tiny body decomposing as the water dumped on him.  Did he have a family?  Do they wonder about him?  Was a possum waiting for him on the other side of the road? 

He was still there today, just a flattened carcass.  If you drove by today, you wouldn't know he was a possum.  He's got a story.  He lived a life.  Then one day he was killed, and he never even got a proper burial.  It's like he never even mattered. 

That's gotta be the worst thing.  To die, and disappear, and it's like you never even mattered. 

For the first time since he passed, I did not go to the cemetery to visit Gabriel's headstone on Thanksgiving.  'They' say visiting the cemetery isn't as important as keeping his memory alive.  And I know that Gabriel's memory lives on and that I am the one keeping it alive.  But I hate the thought of him not having flowers at Thanksgiving.  I hate the thought of somebody passing by his plaque and thinking, "That poor little baby.  He only lived ten days, and now, he's forgotten. It's like he never even mattered."

Because he did matter.  He was my whole world.  The whole world ended the day that he died and while I managed to crawl from its ashes, I'm living in a whole new world, where love is fragile and guarded and life is uncertain and the rain pours down on a possum who never even knew what hit him. 

Fade Into Blue

It niggles at me a little every day, and has for the past almost two months.

I never did write my annual "Blue" entry for Gabriel's birthday or passing.  The tradition began on June 12, 2012, one year and two days after he was born, with an entry called "The Blueberry Bush Revisited," and is a reflection of another year since the birth and death of my first born child and only son.  

Eight years into this process, I seem to have simply faded into blue.  Every morning, I spend at least some time searching for motivation to get up, to breathe, to live.  Every morning, it would appear, I find it, somewhere, however nominal it might be that particular day.  One foot in front of the other, I make my way to the bathroom to get ready for the day, to raise Eden and Delilah, to maintain a career, to tend bar, even to tap dance.  My life is full of joy, but a big part of the experience of joy, for me, is sheer grief.  

Two days ago as Eden lined up with her new kindergarten classmates to walk with her teacher to her classroom for the first time, tears slid down my face.  Tears of pride in the bright, strong, healthy girl that brought the color back into my world.  Tears of mourning, over the two children before her that won't go to kindergarten, the siblings that she'll never get to meet on this earth.  Tears of desperation, over the high likelihood that she and Delilah will be my only children that I will get to see off to kindergarten, and the speed with which this all seems to be happening, my family not at all what I imagined it to be.  One foot in front of the other, she walked with a lightness that has long left me, with a carefree ease I pray she is able to keep.  

At about ten minutes to noon that day, shortly before I was to leave to pick her up after her first day, I sat alone at my kitchen table, eating what I wanted to eat and watching what I wanted to watch in a rare moment of quiet in my home.  Suddenly, unexpectedly, I began to sob.  Nothing is louder than a quiet house and the absence of voices and footsteps that you expected would fill your home.  My miscarried child and Gabriel would have been in the third grade this year.  I thought there would be at least two more children following Delilah.  The hollow sound of what might have been. 

Though the years have gone by quickly, the days are long, and busy, and rarely is there time to feel these things in a dedicated moment of grief.  Instead, it just lives in me, in the soles of my feet, in the crevices of my broken heart, in the weight on my shoulders, in eyelids that burn to cry while still holding back tears.  This is it.  The Fade Into Blue. 

Grey Joy

*Heads up:  This entry will contain spoilers for the final season of Game of Thrones





















Only twice in my life of television viewing can I recall drastically changing my opinion of a character from loathing to championing.

The first was Todd Manning, introduced to viewers of the long-airing soap opera "One Life to Live" when he and his frat brothers gang raped Marty Saybrook at a party.  Over the years, the sincere remorse that his character showed for what he had done to Marty, as well as the odd friendship that he developed with her, led me to let my guard down and learn to care for this character too.  I kept the events with Marty in the back of my mind for the many years that I continued to watch the show, but allowed myself to be swept up in the storylines that gave dimension to his character such that he was no longer defined, for me, by that one gravely criminal act.

The second has been Theon Greyjoy.  In the first season of Game of Thrones, he shows us no redeeming qualities.  He is a shallow, oversexed, callous teenage boy, and the complexities of being raised by one family while being the heir to the lord of the Iron Islands isn't explored.  By the second season, he's demonstrated himself to be an uninspiring leader, a traitor to the family that raised him, and willing to kill two young boys to earn his father's favor.  In the beginning of season 3, the average viewer is probably thinking that the torture Theon suffers is exactly what he deserves, but for me things started to turn when Ramsey Bolton uses two women to tempt his shell-shocked prisoner Theon, only to castrate him.

I really don't know what someone could do to make me believe that they deserved the life that unfolded for Theon after that.  Even as I would recall Theon having killed the two farm boys, lying and trying to pass them off as Bran and Ricon Stark, I found myself applying Game of Thrones realism - That the act was part of playing the Game of Thrones, which is deadly and brutal.  Torturing Theon, abusing him into submission, mutilating him, and stripping him of his identity was sadistic, and went beyond just trying to be a lord or king.  For me, it was one of the most painful storylines to watch.

It only got harder when Sansa Stark returned to Winterfell to marry Ramsey.  There's a case to be made that Theon should have acted sooner to defend Sansa from the disgusting brutality she suffered at Ramsey's hands.  But everything in Theon's presence - from his posture to his appearance to his limited dialogue - indicated that he was truly Ramsey's slave.  He even slept in the kennels, with Ramsey's hounds.  I should probably find the housing appropriate for his crimes but the thing about Game of Thrones is that your normal sense of morality is suspended and your sense of justice changes to accommodate the violent series backdrop.   No matter what he had done wrong, I couldn't accept that Theon deserved what happened to him.

As the series went on, I started to think Theon would never redeem himself in the eyes of those who knew him.  Ever.  He killed Myranda and saved Sansa from certain death if Ramsey had caught them.  He helped her flee, pushing her to keep going through the winter snow, through an icy river, until she had been safely delivered to Brienne.  From there he returned to the Iron Islands and conceded the throne to his sister Yara, and conspired with her to thwart Yuron's attempts to take the throne.  But for every two steps forward, it seemed he took two back.  When Yara's fleet was attacked, he jumped ship (like, seriously) while Yara was captured.  And when he rescued her, she thanked him by punching him in the face.   He might have deserved that.

When Theon returned to Winterfell once again to fight during the Long Night battle, I unexpectedly cried when Sansa greeted him with a hug.  The Game of Thrones world is strange and complex and in the real world Sansa might never want to see Theon again, but in the Game of Thrones world, relationships are strange, allies are few, and friends are fewer so you take them.

During the Long Night, Theon was assigned to guard Bran.  He was the first character I heard say, "Make every shot count."  It seems so small, but most of the battle was futile and Theon seemed to be the only person who was battling thoughtfully.  He seemed to understand the gravity of his role.  For me, the most powerful moment of the Long Night episode was hearing Bran say to Theon, "You're a good man.  Thank you."  I didn't think Theon would ever get to hear those words.  They seemed to set him free.  He died in a pointless attempt to kill the Night King, and I was disappointed in that.  But I was happy that he was at rest.

I think every day about the many, many, serious mistakes I've made in my life.  They are the kinds of mistakes that I can't really talk about.  Things that will likely haunt me until I die.  Things that lead me to believe that the tragedies I've suffered are just what I deserve.  My friends and family will say to me, "That's ridiculous.  That's not possible."  But I think maybe it's not impossible.

My joy is always shadowed with grey.  It's always weighted with sadness and regret.  I love my children so very much, but I also know that they have been given a mother who is burdened by her mistakes, who has been damaged by her own actions, who isn't the best mother she could have been because she's already sent herself down a broken path.  My life is full and my blessings are many; still, I know I'll live my life of grey joy and regret, hoping that at the end of it all I will hear, from the One Who Matters, "You're a good woman." And I never rest easy, believing that I will. 

Moment to Moment

I recently had the most proximate experience with roadkill that I have ever had.

The dog must have been hit a car just two or three cars ahead of me.  His entrails lay in a fresh heap on the freeway and I was able to safely swerve but no one ahead of me seemed to do the same, which lead me to believe it had to have been one of them.

I'll never get used to it.  I'll never be unaffected by the sight of a dead animal on the road.

Death should affect us.  Whether it is an animal or a person, death should prompt us to appreciate life and acknowledge our mortality.  After all, death is coming for all of us.

Death worries me and fascinates me and preoccupies me and kinda scares me.  A defense mechanism developed after experiencing traumatic deaths in my life, is that I consider every day that it might be my last day.  I at once anticipate it, and fear it.  I don't want to die yet, but experience tells me that death is indiscriminate.

I feel confident that there is a life after death, but occasionally I wonder if I'm wrong about that.

More frequently, I worry that I haven't done enough to earn life after death.  And I know that, whether I have or haven't, I won't know it until I am dead.  Which really freaks me out.

In my boundless interest with death, I find Good Friday to be one of my favorite days of the liturgical year.  Christ died, even though he didn't want to, and even though he didn't have to.  He chose to die, even while asking if that really was the only way for his mission to be accomplished.  That fascinates me, too, and humbles me, and makes me so incredibly sorry for all of my wrongs. For the small ones and especially for the big ones.

A lot of people find that the devil's attempts to derail their faith increase during Lent.  I find the opposite to be true, that my faith automatically grows stronger and vascilates less in this time.  I never have more faith in Christ than when I consider His death.

When someone I know dies, I always find myself struck by the realization that I will never see them again on this earth.  It's a huge concept to wrap your mind around, and a strange one.  They were here, and now they are not.

Every Good Friday, I find struck by the idea that one moment Jesus was here, alive one moment, and then dead the next.  I allow myself to be burdened by His crucifixion, to think about it, to grieve it, to walk under the weight of that wood.  I don't deserve His sacrifice, and meditating on it seems like the least I can do.  It was an excruciating, humiliating death that his mother and closest friends had to watch.  And He chose it for me, personally.  And for you, personally.  For each of us, personally.  We each matter to him.

Death should affect us, because each of our lives have effect.  We each change the world by being in it, and the world is a different place the moment we are gone.

Just Dance

"From the top!"

Every time Mr. Marvin says it, I feel like a star, even though I am the worst dancer in my class, with the least amount of experience.  But for one summer for a few weeks at the YWCA, I had not had any tap dancing training.  When I started taking classes 5 weeks ago I figured I was too old to learn and would promptly make a fool of myself and in fact, I do, every week when we learn a new and more complicated combination.  And I love it.

I love learning.  I love growing.  For the first time in my life, I sincerely love being corrected.  I love the patience Mr. Marvin extends me.  I love the students who encourage me even when they are already so good.  Most of all, I love that for an hour every week, I am just dancing, the satisfying, rhythmic (when I can manage it) tap of my shoes distracting me from the incessant dialogue in my mind over my responsibilities, my shortcomings, my trauma, my grief.

A sign in the studio reads, "Life isn't about hiding from the storm.  It's about learning to dance in the rain."  8 years ago today I "came out" with Gabriel's terminal diagnosis.  Looking back it was perfectly timed and carried out, but back then I was really just flying by the seat of my pants. I always want everything to go according to my plan, and the situation I was facing was nothing like what I had planned.   For nearly 6 weeks I carried the painful burden of knowing my son would die, with a growing belly that was increasingly being met with smiles and words of congratulations.  And I smiled, and carried on, but inside my storm was raging.  And then I opened up to my friends, and there I was, dancing in the rain.  There were days I cried and days that I laughed, but I was living in a way that I never had, and enjoying every minute with my son.

Life since then has been a roller coaster of experiences, and emotions, and long bouts of depression, and moments of great joy.  And I'm tired.  I am tired on Tuesday nights at 7:15 when I leave for dance class.  By then, I have wrangled two kids and dropped them off at two different places, having had to remember which Dr. Suess dress up day it is, and to pack Delilah's lunch and grab her therapy binder.  I feel a sense of relief when each child gets to her respective location, and I am on my way to work, but I immediately begin missing them.  They are on my mind even as I listen to my clients, argue with opposing counsel, present my case to the judge, and think about getting dinner on the table for them in the evening. After work our home is a mad rush of dinner and dishes and laundry and baths and playing.  Marcos and I are in survival mode, just trying to keep our heads above water.  And at 7:15, I head out, and once again I begin missing my girls, wondering which stories they will choose at bedtime, and about the funny things 'Mr. Bear' will say that night.  Then I put on my tap shoes, and we do some shuffles to warm up, and I am dancing.  I am dancing because my son can't, so I will.  I am dancing because my girls are learning, and I want to teach them.  I am dancing because it feels good.  It doesn't come naturally to me.  I have to think about my steps, I am training my body to do things it hasn't had to do.  It's work, and I love it.

In June, two days before Gabriel's 8th birthday, I will perform in the same recital as my girls, on the stage in the East High auditorium where I performed in plays and concerts and received scholarships and awards when I was in high school.  I'm nervous already - More than I ever was to do any of those things.  What if I mess up?

One of the most important things I am learning in dance is that inevitably, I will mess up.  I make mistakes, my plans get off track, and things don't always go as I want them to.  I can practice, I can prepare, but life will still happen.  So what I'm learning, is to recover, and keep dancing, even in the rain.