The Perspective of a Bereaved Mother Nearing Mother’s Day

“It takes a lot of breath to live a single day in a world that often forgets the importance of the mother.”

Motherhood was a role I had barely settled into when our eight-month-old daughter, June, was diagnosed with cancer. Despite already having a two-and-a-half year old at home, when we learned June was sick, I was in the midst of learning how to be a mother.

Being June’s mom became a role I lost myself in entirely. Because of the suffering that is often involved in loving your children, mothers can lose parts of themselves. Some to be recovered and others never to be found. 

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A good mother sacrifices a piece of herself the moment she brings a child into the world. Every good mother builds their world around the child from the day they are born. Intentional or not, the child becomes the center of the mother’s universe. While, simultaneously, the mother becomes the child’s entire universe. If and when they are so fortunate. 

I can’t understand why we don’t celebrate our mothers more. Not just on a day in May. Instead we put ourselves down and dance around the critique of others. Like who is mothering their children correctly. What the best practice is. We criticize ourselves. We fault our mothers, then sacrifice our being to be nothing like them. 

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This time of year, every year, I am reminded of the mothers whom I’ve lost. The one’s I’d give anything to have a sliver of again. 

“If she could see us now,” I’d say to June as I flushed her central line with saline while she lay on the changing table atop my grandmother’s dresser. The one I inherited when my grandmother died several years before June was born. 

“I wonder what she would think of you, Junie,” I said smiling, as I bent over and opened the drawer with June’s pajamas, laying a pair over her scarred body to examine whether or not she had gone down a size. My baby, who had only just turned one, was shrinking. 

June’s top and bottom half were split, denoted by a thick scar just above her umbilicus that ran the width of her abdomen. It looked as if she had been sliced in two. 

Some days, I’d talk to my grandmother aloud as I flushed June’s lines, or at night as I rocked her to sleep, in hopes she’d hear my pleas. Maybe in some miraculous way she could help June recover from the cancer. 

“Oh, Taryn,” I imagined she’d say if she were still alive, teary-eyed, in her most forlorn voice, after I told her June was dying. 

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I remember sitting on the edge of my grandmother’s bed as a little girl watching her pull out the same dresser drawer I later kept June’s pajamas in. I watched her lift a sweater from the drawer and hold it up to herself in the mirror. From where I sat, I could see paper lining the bottoms of the drawers painted with roses. 

“Oh, Junie, if Nana could see us now, what would she think?” I’d say to June as I pulled another drawer open and instead of dainty roses there were was a mess of syringes filled with heparin and saline, alcohol pads, and antibacterial green caps. Medical supplies now devoured the drawers once lined with paintings of delicate pink flowers.

I’d often wonder what my grandmother would have done for me when she found out June was sick. What kind of mothering she would have offered. Perhaps, she would have offered me the mothering every mom who’s child has cancer so desperately needs. 

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Mother’s Day has always been about other mothers in my life. When I consider the mothers deserving celebration, I don’t think of myself. I think of the mothers who have lived many more years than I, such as my elders. 

At times, I don’t know how to recognize and celebrate the mother in me. Part of that is because of the wound that comes with identifying as mother after losing June. The other part is that I am still figuring it out. 

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This Mother’s Day marks the third since June’s passing a little over two years ago. Just eight weeks after she died, I experienced my first Mother’s Day as a bereaved mother, exactly forty-weeks pregnant with my son.

In the photos from that first Mother’s Day, I am reclined on a couch, my face and eyes are swollen and tired. I’m symptomatic of the final days of the third trimester. I ache all over. My heart aches the most. My eyes are puffy because I’ve been crying since June died eight weeks before.

Have you ever woken up from a deep sleep and the pillowcase is wet from the tears you cried while you slept?

Most nights after June died, my body just wouldn’t quit. When I was lucky, my mind would shut down as soon as I lay my head on the pillow, but my body would continue to expel the suffering through my tears.

The nights I couldn’t turn my brain off and lay awake, were the nights I swore I could hear June calling for me. I’d hear a tiny whispering voice saying, “Mama, mama, mama,” over and over again. 

The mourning mother in me cried on and off most nights in the wake of June’s death, while I slept, nine months pregnant, on the verge of giving up. 

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My son, whom I unexpectedly became pregnant with during June’s treatment, was due May 8th, 2022, which that year, unbeknownst to me, was Mother’s Day. 

“Isn’t that Mother’s Day this year?” A nurse asked me after I told her my due date as she hung a bag of Cisplatin on a metal pole and connected it to June. 

“Is it?” I hadn’t considered. I didn’t care. Or did I?

This small detail the nurse pointed out forced me to acknowledge my greatest fear. If my son was due on Mother’s Day it was because he was part of a metaphysical exchange. A parting gift. His birth would seal June’s fate. What more cherished a gift to receive on Mother’s Day than a brand new baby boy as your daughter is dying of cancer? 

At that time, no one knew the cancer had returned in June. I had every reason to believe she was going to survive. We all did. She had been declared cancer free several months before, prior to entering the most enduring portion of treatment: high-dose chemotherapy paired with stem cell transplant. 

June had survived the worst part of treatment which many children did not. She died a survivor. 

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My son wasn’t born on his due date, Mother’s Day, 2022. To my great relief, he was four days late. 

I was relieved to not have to endure my first Mother’s Day as a bereaved mother birthing a child I’d only just meet for the first time. One I’d feel guilted into loving immediately. A child of mine who would never know his sister. Seemed impossible. I’d been so distracted by caring for June, that I’d almost forgotten he had grown in my womb. 

The last baby I held was June, and I knew he wouldn’t be June. Although part of me wished he was June and that we could have a do-over. That I’d wake up from the nightmare where my two babies were so close to meeting, but never did.

“Junie, your brother could never replace you,” I’d whisper to her at night as I rocked her to sleep. After she died, I’d repeat the same words when I’d be laying awake at night wondering where June really went. “He will never replace you,” I’d say just after I could have sworn I’d heard her whispering, “Mama, mama, mama.”

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Sunday, May 12th marks the day my son turns two. It’s the first birthday of his that has fallen on Mother’s Day. It’s a monumental birthday for two reasons. 

Firstly, our son is healthy and thriving. He’s turning two! He’s an absolute gift, just as I once feared. I could never have asked for someone more delightful to be placed directly in my life’s path. My son has saved my life in many ways. 

Secondly, our son turning two marks the first age June never reached. The first birthday she didn’t celebrate. This is a big milestone in our household because for the first time in nearly four years, I’ll know what’s like for my child to continue to live. I have been caring for an infant, newborn, and toddler who is just about to turn two, but then doesn’t.

My son’s age is also an indicator of the time that has passed since June died. In that sense, I know he and June’s lives are forever intertwined.

I am overcome with emotion that my son is turning two. It’s an incredible feeling. I’m also anxious to see if it takes the edge off the worry I have surrounding my living children. I wonder if my breath will come back. 

His life is a tremendous gift I have to celebrate this Mother’s Day. I no longer fear the arrival of the day itself, or fear feeling happiness, like I did that first Mother’s Day without June. 

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I framed a piece of the rose paper that lined my grandmother’s dresser. I’ve been searching for it in the moving boxes. It reminds me of my younger years, when I was free from worry’s chains. 

It reminds me of that day my Nana pulled a sweater from her drawer, held it up to herself, and then turned to me to say, “Dear, do you see this scar? The doctors cut me open. They operated on my heart, dear.”

It looked as if a jagged knife had been dragged from just below her neckline to the bottom of her sternum. Scarring from the stitching made it look more like shoe laces could be woven through it, than anything else. She thought she was going to die, then lived nearly two more decades.

I don’t have a scar like either June or my grandmother to show that I’ve been severed in places no mother should ever have to be cut. But from them, I learned that if someone is sewn back together, even without the sum of their parts, they might still be whole. I’d like to think this is exactly how both June and my grandmother felt before leaving this world. 

In the process of healing, I’m becoming okay with losing parts of myself because perspective has won, once again. My life could never have been this beautiful had I never met June. I am whole. 

My Daughter’s Birth Chart Is One Way I Keep Her Alive

“Who would have thought you could build on the memory of someone who no longer physically exists?”

Note from author: I previously posted this piece several month ago, but recently, I took some time to rework it. I felt it important to share again because although it’s the same piece, it’s taken on a completely different life. Thank you for reading.

Our daughter June, an Earth sign, was born on the cusp of Virgo-Libra on September 22nd. The year she was born, the twenty-second day of September, was also the first day of Autumn. June, rooted in Mother Earth, traveled into the world on the first day of the first season of the rest of her life.

But June, the most astrologically grounded of my three children, has departed Mother Earth. She passed away at eighteen months old, after nearly a year long battled with neuroblastoma.

She’s taken wings, and today, soars above the material world. June is in the heavens. My heavens. Where the clouds are fluffy pillows perfect for midday naps and the stars twinkle all hours of the day.

How does an earthly being become a celestial being? There exists a paper thin threshold between life and death. I know because I watched June cross it.

I wonder, are the stars and the galaxies part of the material world or part of the heavens? Does it matter?

It matters to me because I have two children here in the material world, but I don’t only have two children. I have three children, and I must know where my second born now resides.

I struggle to pinpoint the elusive Death which in it’s transformative power has completely changed my life for better and for worse.

Death is not the end. It is not stagnant. It may be the end to one thing, which is life, but in my world, Death is also a beginning. I’ll explain why.

Love exists and grows within a family much like the beautifully layered, and fused oyster shells. Neither are linear. Neither are two-dimensional. Love bonds with love creating a remarkable, unbreakable cement chain of strength. A haven for other forms of happiness to spawn. Like that of the oyster bed.

Many books have told me that when a child is permanently taken away, the parents are left with so much love, but no where for it to go. For me this implies an end to growth, and an end to love. A dead end. This is grief, some say.

My love for June is not a dead end.

I feel love for June that isn’t weighted in grief. An active, pure love. Not a love where June’s death is the shadow trailing behind it. My love for June isn’t always sorrowful. It’s an undying layer of our family that continues to grow from the mere fact that June is and will forever be our baby.

One form of joy for a parent that arises from the bond to a child is in the anticipation of who a child will one day become. How will they grow? What will their personalities will be like? What sort of things will they enjoy? Will they be funny or serious? Who will this tiny creature born from my womb grow to be?

After planting seeds in the spring we wait patiently for the day the seeds reach their fullest potential. After nurturing and tending to the seeds all summer long, the day finally arrives when what we planted months before is in full bloom.

The greatest gift I could ever be given in this life as a parent is to see my children in full bloom.

Yet, I will never know June as an adolescent or adult. I am not a parent who has been afforded the luxury of knowing my child for the rest of my life. A luxury I was blissfully unaware of existed prior to June getting sick.

From time to time, I read the astrology of my living children. Reading their astrological charts brings me a bit of knowledge I otherwise wouldn’t have had. It gives me understanding, empathy, and a lot of perspective.

It brings me joy to see that strong personalities and characteristics which surface daily in our household are innate to my children’s beings, and not a reflection of my parenting.

It helps me to have patience and allows me to breathe through character differences and squabbles. It reminds me we are learning how to live our individual lives collectively. We are not extensions of one another. Each person brings something different to the dinner table at night which keeps our family alive and engaged.

I can’t help but smile when I see my children exhibit their shadows and flex their strengths. Like when my eldest daughter, who is a Scorpio, stings me with her venom for the fifth time of the day. Or when on a long drive home, she begins telling me about the peculiar ways of the world, flexing her childlike intuition.

I nurture the goodness in my children. I love them more than I’ve ever loved anything in my life. It’s impenetrable love. Watching them grow into their personalities is mystical and enchanting. A slow crescendo to the great reveal of an adult. A gift I know never to take for granted.

There is mysticism, too, in who we will become as we grow together as a family. Who we will become despite June not physically being present with us.

June is gone, but she is still very much here with us. Each person in our family carries her with them in a different way, and I trust that she’s close-by, watching us grow.

I ask June to pay close attention to her older sister, and to give her a beyond-the-veil-nudge to make the right choice. I ask June to embrace her when she’s having a hard day like when she misses June, but can’t find the words to explain. I ask June to help her older sister grow into the beautiful person I know she is meant to be.

June’s influence is invisible, yet powerful. June is the water, the sunshine, the air, we all need. She is the nutrient our family so badly needs to grow. June is also the seed. One I will continually plant for the rest of my life.

I read June’s astrological chart when I am done with my living children’s charts. I read my living children’s chart’s first so I can get a sense if the source is reliable or not. I am a believer, but not a sucker.

I have the living proof comparison in front of me as to whether the chart is speaking the truth. I compare the chart to the child. The child to the chart. Once I am sufficiently convinced of utter truths about my living children, I move onto June’s chart.

I enter June’s place of birth, her date of birth, and the time at which she was born: 1:43pm, and click the button on a free chart reading website that reveals to me more than I already know about June.

I enter this very important information into several websites which all wield a similar tale about June. The story of whom June would have one day become when she reached full bloom.

Reading June’s chart is very different from reading my living children’s charts. June died when she was one-and-a-half. She is not in front of me as living testament to what I read. I am forced to fill the gaps. To let my imagination take me places my mind skirts around.

As I read June’s chart, I learn things about June I would never have learned unless she were here with me now. Parts of her that I wasn’t privy to seeing grow. Aspects of her personality I will never know. Who June might have been if she’d had the chance to grow up.

Can you imagine your child never growing up? Seems cruel of me to ask, but neither could have I.

Fair and just, responsible and successful, earnest, independent, optimistic, confident, free-spirited, self-expressive and creative. These are some of the overarching adjectives used to describe June in her birth chart. These are adjectives I can only imagine her growing into as she one day grew into herself. I’ll never truly know.

Elegant. Elegant hurts. It stays with me. June was the most elegant one-and-a-half year old you could ever meet. Elegant reminds me of her long, dainty, pianist fingers. June was just elegant.

The birth chart paints a beautiful picture of who June would have been if she were still alive. It aligns with everything I know about June. I believe it and accept it as truth because there is nothing to tell me otherwise. It allows me to get to know June more intimately despite her being gone. It accompanies my wild imagination in its pursuit to work through her not being here, and to not allow Death to be the end.

I am building on the memory of June. Who would have thought you could build on the memory of someone who no longer physically exists? I could never have imagined, yet here I am.

I can never remember her full birth chart, therefore every time I read it, it’s as if I am learning about June for the first time, every time. It’s invigorating and heartbreaking.

The birth chart is also the ghost of June. It’s the shadow that follows me in the night. It keeps me awake and wondering what life would have been like if we hadn’t lost her and if she hadn’t died so brutally of cancer.

The birth chart states that those born on September 22nd are singled out by fate. An ill summary of June’s life.

It also states that those born on September 22nd hold the strong belief that everything will work out. Makes me think she might have been a little bit like me.

On days I enter June’s birth chart into various sites, I turn curiosity into reality. The information at my fingertips has the power to reignite the spirit of June. Momentarily, I bask in the thought of what every parent dreams the day their baby is born: who my June would have one day become.

Death is the beginning of an end here on earth, but what comes after no one truly knows. The day June died my life was sprinkled with seeds. I don’t have to pay much attention to them because they will grow and fuse on their own much like the oyster spat. What and how many layers will form, I have no way of knowing, which is all part of the fun. My role is cemented in the group.

I didn’t give up when June became sick. I didn’t give up when she was diagnosed with cancer. I didn’t give up when she died.

My role is to never give up, and I am finally beginning to believe, I never will.

I’d Do Anything To Be ‘Just’ Mom Again

One of the perks to living in our Maine town is the measly twenty dollar, unlimited access, beach pass offered which gives rights to three different white sandy beaches. 

It’s usually spring when the kids and I drive to the town hall to buy the pass which holds so much promise after surviving another Maine winter. Bare, barely budding trees make it hard to believe summer will arrive. Another year has come and gone. I could never have imagined one of these early chaotic years as a family would be the last year of my daughter’s life. 

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After June passed away, my newborn son and I drove to town. The sight of a budding bush amongst a backdrop of sparsely wooded trees forced air out from my lungs that I’d been bitterly holding onto since June died. A punch to the diaphragm. These buds were lively and offensive proof that life, despite June dying, continued.

The winter, like June’s life, would also end. Although, unlike June, the winter months would one day recycle. Maybe this is very much like June. I’d like to believe June has been recycled in many ways, including in the air we breathe. It brings to me thinking, I’d do just about anything to have the opportunity to breathe June in once again. 

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As my son and I drove to the town hall, like I imagined many normal mothers in my town did, I knew it was time to wake up from winter and to stop holding my dead breath, but I couldn’t. This year was different. I couldn’t wake up from the winter of June’s death.

I whipped the car into a strange driveway. My eyes flittered as if I was frantically examining the scenery, but it wasn’t the driveway or house I saw in front of me, instead it was the details pulled from the the depths of losing June that replayed. A curtain dropped over my eyes in the weeks and months after June died, as I tried to retrace my steps back to her in complete darkness.  

I backed the car out, and returned to the safety of home. It had only been a few weeks since her passing. It was too soon, but it’s what the old version of me would have done. When I was just mom. It brings me to thinking, I’d do anything to be just mom again.

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For my children, the pass promises beach days filled with collecting hermit crabs from the cool, salty inlet and plopping them into a pail that has become the day’s aquarium. For me, it’s the promise of endless sky, salt tinged air, and warm sand over the tops of my feet. The promise of spending time in a place no one can ever tell me to leave. 

On summer days when I‘ve packed enough snacks, and decidedly skipped naps, I watch the reflection of the melting orange sun on the pristine waters as my children splash in tidal pools at my feet. I welcome the night air as it lowers itself onto us. I look up into the sky and spot the first star of the night. “It’s Junie,” my daughter says as my eyes meet the star which we were both eagerly awaiting. For my eldest daughter, the first star of the night is always June. 

I close my eyes with my chin tilted upward. When I open them again and see the star, I know that all three of my children are visibly present with me. Then, I close them to test my other senses. To see if I can still feel June without seeing her in the star. I’d give anything to see June again.

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Peaceful summer days are packed and promised into the flimsy circular decal which I peel and stick to my front windshield every spring the moment we exit the town hall. 

The year before our son was born, June and I ventured to the town hall together. Instead of flinging my son’s car seat over my arm, it was June’s. She and I walked together quietly through the entrance, and as we approached the counter to request the season pass, I set her on the floor next to me. In every exact way, I did the same with my son, only a year later. 

A sick parallel in time. One, I could never fathom. One, I cannot change. The mother I was, the life we had, swept away from me like the water from the inlet. It takes the tide six hours and twelve-and-a-half minutes to go from high to low or low to high. Its as if the last year of June’s life was the tide. Draining, pulling itself away from me. If one year was the equivalent to one tide, June would have been gone in six hours and twelve-and-a-half minutes. That’s how fast it went.

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The first time the two girls and I went to the beach was two days before June’s diagnosis. I had been anticipating June’s first beach day since she was born in September, eight months prior, on the first day of autumn. 

The beach was part of the induction into our family. It was my opportunity as a mother to offer my children all of nature’s beauty, then selfishly watch it unfold in the reflection of their eyes. 

No one knew June’s body was riddled with cancer that first spring day the girls and I went to the beach. 

We arrived and I laid out the beach blanket. I emptied a bag of toys onto the sand. I reached for June, but she cried when I removed her from her car seat. Unsure of what to do, I placed her back in. This was not how things went with my firstborn. This was an induction gone sour. As June shrieked, I pulled the canopy over her face to protect her skin from midday rays. I handed her a baby yogurt and tiny spoon. Yogurt was the only thing she’d been willing to eat in weeks.

This is how she was in the photo. In the only photo I have of her on a beach before we knew she had cancer, in the beginning of the last year of her life. She’s wearing a dainty red, sleeveless cotton jumper. Her hands and feet are sticking straight out into the open air. In excitement? I don’t know. Protest? Probably. Her eyes are squinty, and looking off into the distance. Minutes later, with no real explanation, she threw up the yogurt she had just consumed, which in the photo, is delicately displayed on her lips.

I had no idea that in the next ten months, June would be diagnosed with cancer, begin treatment, go into remission, continue treatment, but ultimately, that the cancer would return. June would die. It would all happen in less than one year. 

I learned that promises which span a lifetime don’t exist. The meaning behind small details like beach decals quickly lost all of it’s significance. Losing June is a tragedy so complex it’s hard to fathom. 

Layers of complexity like those that make up June’s wardrobe which now sits in a plastic bin at the bottom of my closet. The dainty red jumper is one visible layer of the child I lost. Each layer denotes an experience in the final year of June’s life. Each outfit a layer in the traumatic existence we came to live. 

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I gave birth to my son in May, eight weeks after June died. The excitement around collecting the beach pass and paying my meager twenty-dollars was absent. 

After June died, I lied to my oldest daughter, who was three at the time, and said that the beach wasn’t open normal hours. The bereaved mother in me told her that we could only go to the beach in the wee morning hours, when unbeknownst to her, the parking was free. That’s what we did because the grieving mother in me couldn’t fathom returning to the town hall without June for the decal.

Instead, for two summer months before the clock struck nine, I gathered our belongings, my son in his car seat on one arm, and my screaming daughter in the other, and carried them to the car before it cost me twenty dollars to park for the day.

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It was so much work to build the walls of grief around me, and likely more work than succumbing to the task of buying the pass, but still, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I was blocked by my brain from passing the hall’s threshold without June in my arms.

The day came when I had no choice but to let the wall crumble. It had become too much work to maintain. My living children wanted the beach. It was late August when my son and I drove to the town hall. He was quiet like June had been. 

“May I also get a copy of my son’s birth certificate?” I asked as he sat quietly in the car seat at my feet, as June once did.

“Of course,” she said. “I’ll just need–”

“Oh! How many children do you have?” The woman sitting at the far computer asked.

“She has three! 4, 2, and an infant! Wow, three under five!” the woman helping me said before I could respond.

“My daughter June died,” I said. “She would have been two in September.”

The woman kept her eyes on the computer and didn’t look at me. She stood when the paper exited the printer, and turned to hand me the birth certificate and beach pass with her eyes cast downward. She never looked up. The other woman’s eyes averted back to the screen in front of her.

No one said anything.

Heartbroken and exposed, I lifted the twenty-five pound car seat and flung it over my arm. I walked out drowning in my grief, shedding tears I no longer cared anyone saw. I was at the mercy of a world that was unable to acknowledge the burning pain of losing a child. I expected it to be tough, but I hadn’t expected this.

I clipped the car seat into the holder, opened my door and threw the pass and certificate onto the floor. I gripped the steering wheel and screamed. Screams that emanated from my postpartum womb, as I sat suspended in June’s postmortem life. I oscillated between postpartum and postmortem. Postpartum. Postmortem. Dueling tsunamis. I was in the middle and would drown regardless of which won because both ended in the irrevocable loss of June.

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On September 20th, a year-and-a-half after June died, I returned to the town hall again. My son now one-and-a-half, and my eldest, almost five. 

This time I had an asking and an offering. I returned with a proclamation asking that the month of September (in our town) be acknowledged as Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. I stood in front of the town council and shared an abbreviated story of June’s life and the toxic toll of pediatric cancer on children, their families, and the world. I asked the council to sign (watch the video here).

In my initial mourning, I never imagined I would be presenting to the town council, advocating for the month of September to be recognized by the town as Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. Tearfully, they accepted.

I dedicated that night to June. As I walked out into the September evening, just two days before June’s third birthday, and spotted the first star, I said, “It’s all for you.” 

And it is, it’s all for you, June. 

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Two weeks ago, I returned to the town hall for one last time. We moved out of state and before we did, there was one last thing I needed to collect: June’s death certificate. I’d purposefully put it off for two years. For two copies, it cost twenty-one dollars cash, nearly the same as the summer beach pass, which reminded me I would not be purchasing one this year because our family would no longer live in a beach town in Maine.

The woman behind the counter was not the same as years before. Then again, neither was I. She smiled at me as I handed her the form requesting two copies of the death certificate. She glanced at the paper, stared into the computer screen, then disappeared into the back room. 

“Sorry, it’s something on my end,” she said when she returned several minutes later, glancing my way.

“Do you need help?” The woman sitting behind another screen asked. 

Are those tears in her eyes? I wondered as she told the woman she was all set and handed me two copies.

I walked hand in hand with my son, now almost two, out the double doors and to the car feeling a smidge stronger. I set the certificates down on the middle console, and buckled my son in his seat, shockingly composed.

I climbed into the car and lifted the certificate to read. The reasons listed as to why June lost her life were boldly typed there in front of me. It was like learning why June died, again, for the very first time. The notarized paper marked a new finality to June’s life I hadn’t yet experienced. 

I dropped the pages, and grabbed the wheel. I wailed into the backs of my hands. For the last time in the parking lot of the town hall, I screamed out all the tears I had left in me. 

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I’m grateful to never walk through the those town hall doors again. I’ll always have the experiences on paper. Several good, a few terrible. They’re part of my story.

I am a mother in mourning, a bereaved Mama, and sometimes, a grief stricken mother on the days I have to perform hard tasks such as requesting June’s death certificate. In these last few years, I’ve learned I am also a strong mother. I can survive the grueling tasks continually doled out by life, and still show up for myself and my family. 

I will forever have three children, two by my side and one on my shoulder. The one on my shoulder likes to grace the sky at night, and I look forward to seeing her there, although I’m getting better at closing my eyes and knowing she’s here regardless of seeing her or not.

No more beach passes, and likely no more birth certificates. A chapter of my life is closing, but I’ll always leaf back through it. I have lots of documentation from the town hall as proof. 

As we begin this new chapter, I exist today as the woman and mother I am because of where I have lived. I’ve learned to find the beauty in the most terrible memories. If you asked me what I’d change about my life, I’d say everything and nothing at once. 

I know that tomorrow, despite having lost June, does have promise and I intend on finding it in the most unsuspecting places like window decals. There’s a whole world I’m unaware even exists. A world I have yet to experience. One our family will venture out and find together.  

This is not the end, it is just the beginning. Life has no guarantees or promises, except for the ones we make to ourselves. I promised myself when we moved that I would make life good. 

Based on how quickly life can change in a year for the worse, I know it also has the potential to change for the better. The curtain is raised. The tide is coming back in. I didn’t drown in the tsunami that was June’s death in the aftermath of my son’s birth. Life does go on, and I am getting the first glimpses of how great it can actually be. 

If I Could Erase My Pain, What Would Be Left of Me?

A Poem

What would your past 

say to you? 

If you chose one thing

to erase.

What life have you

breathed into 

that thing

which lives

in your present

mind?

What makes it worthy of 

erasing?

A memory

is all it is.

A feeling

is all it has become.

A thing of the past

yet,

if you were given the option

you might erase it.

You wouldn’t get a

redo.

What could that mean

for you?

What lessons

would you 

unlearn if you

erased that 

one thing? 

If I told you,

you could erase 

one memory

from the past,

or all memories

you’d wish

to let go,

but

the implication

would be

you’d be 

a different person,

what would you say?

You’d unlearn

the lessons

that were 

set forth on

your path.

Lessons that were

painful from the

start. Those that still ache

at the mere flicker

of the thought.

Surely,

you’d let them go.

You’d become a

different person,

but you’d give anything,

to be free—

from the bars of the mind

that keep you jailed

in the brain, alone,

locked away in a dark

place.

What if I told you,

you would no longer

be you, entirely? 

I ask you

to think about 

walking up to the

moment 

you’d erase 

and asking it

it’s intention

with you.

Ask the memory

you’re about to erase,

“What have you

taught me?”

Then, ask again,

if that’s a lesson

you’re willing to let go. 

For it has shaped you,

it has willed you,

It has bound you,

and integrated itself

into your life.

Woven infinitely

into the cells

that make you,

you.

It is you. 

Now ask yourself,

why would you 

want to

erase you?

June Sent Me a Message on the Second Anniversary of her Death

“I must trust that each step forward is toward a new beginning our family so deserves.”

The weeks leading up to the second anniversary of June’s death on March 13th are a blur. It’s been two years since she passed away from neuroblastoma.

The days have been filled with throwing things from the cabinets and corners of our house into oversized cardboard boxes, constantly texting the realtor about whatever the current issue is, followed by endless nail biting once our home of eight years officially hit the market.

The extra moments I have are spent on making arrangements for our move out of state such as enrolling my daughter in kindergarten (an unforeseen and lengthy process) and randomly searching the internet about the location of our future home.

Daily, I question whether we are making the right decision by uprooting our family from the only home our children have ever known. From the only home June ever knew. I can no longer envision what our lives will look like in three months, but I must trust that each step forward is toward a new beginning our family so deserves.

I’ve lived the anniversary of June’s death twice in the last two weeks due to the extraneous stressors involving the move. Once, I briefly thought it was the twelfth of March when it was actually the seventh.

On this second anniversary of June’s death I wasn’t able to write about her. I couldn’t dedicate my day to her as I had wanted and imagined. Instead, I was home, busy with our one year old son.

I found some time for June in the moments when we played outside. I watched birds fly overhead. As I stared into the blue sky I wondered if it had been that blue the day June died.

Our house went Live on the market on Thursday March 7th which explains why I thought it was also the eve of June’s death. Something I have learned since June died is that when one major life stressor exists, it inevitably bleeds into another. Thus creating a chaotic confusion in the mind and exacerbating current stressors.

House showings quickly filled the new Home Sellers app I installed on my phone as the four of us packed ourselves into the car and set off for a weekend getaway meant to maximize the space and time of showing the house.

Car conversation drifted between praying the house would sell to how much we would miss the home that had been so good to us for the last eight years. My husband and I whispered to one another in the front seat of the car, as our two living children played in the backseat, about the beautiful and haunting memories we would always have of our Maine home.

Memories which at every attempt at closing my eyes on the anniversary of June’s death flooded my mind creating a flawless picture of June.

Images of June in her healthiest state when she was declared cancer free sitting on the living room floor, stacking miniature cups of Play-Doh, a favorite pastime. Images of June on the day she died. Had you met June only four months before she died, you might not have recognized her on the day of her passing. Cancer took June’s health. Then it took nearly everything else just before it took her.

I watched the cancer take June from me, her father, and her older sister. But when I looked at June, dying in the last hours of her life, I only saw my precious, radiant baby. I didn’t see what a stranger or a friend might have seen. I didn’t see the sickness of the cancer that had taken over. I saw only my beautiful June, in the same light, as the day she was born. A mother’s lens.

Scenes from June’s life flicker on a magnificent omni screen of my closed eyelids. A permanent screen, the blessing inside of the curse, which allows my memories of June to replay any time of day or night.

The images inevitably come with thoughts. The brain can be a torture chamber when all is quiet, and I am alone. The anniversary of June’s death is no exception.

The most penetrating thought looming over me on the second anniversary of June’s death was related to “What more could I have done?” A question I already have the answer to.

As a mother, when your child dies, you forever feel in every cell of your body, there was more that you could have done had you had the chance. All while knowing, there was nothing more you could have humanly done. We did everything we could have for June. My rational brain knows that there was nothing more to do. Yet, I am left with the void of June and with that void accompanies the knowing that she is no longer here and I as her mother could not save her.

When I think about the day June died feelings of victimhood no longer arise as frequently, although admittedly I still feel like this is all so unfair.

There’s also a more complex emotion associated with June’s death that ripples through my body: June crossed the threshold of death alone. Physically, our family was by her side. We were laying with her as she died. But ultimately, I could not make the journey with her. Nor was I there waiting for her on the other side. She was accepted into the world of death by someone else. Likely a stranger. All I can hope for is that stranger felt like home to her. That she was not confused, and that there wasn’t a longing for her to return. That her one-and-a-half year old innocence brought her directly to where she was destined to go.

At the end of the day, any day, the culmination of thoughts can become too much. There are times when I feel all is lost. June died. She faced something I have never had to face. Without choice, she crossed the threshold alone, without me, her Mama, by her side. As a mother, you always want to be standing by your children’s side. Especially when they take their first leap into an unknown.

It leaves me wondering if she knows I would have gone with her had I had a choice.

On March 13th, the second anniversary of June’s death, our home went under contract. The notifications began popping up in my Home Sellers app. I couldn’t make sense of it.

The day’s trauma in the midst of moving upheaval had become so much that I couldn’t receive June’s message. It was shrouded in grief, but it’s no coincidence our house went under contract the day of June’s passing. With the two dates aligning, the message I needed so badly became clearer: it’s time to sell our house and move on. June’s giving us permission and I am now able to let go of doubt. The doubt that her father and I aren’t making the best decision by selling our home, the only home June had ever known, and moving our family to an entirely new state. June has sealed our family’s fate of a new beginning.

I am also left with the assurance that despite June crossing into the great unknown alone, she can still find me. She is present even when I cannot feel her around me. Her message suggests she has an influence on how our family’s life will continue to unfold. She’s never too far. She’s aware of the great change we are undertaking and is with us every step of the way. Truly, we have never left one another’s side.

How the Birth Chart Dispels Death

June, an Earth sign, was born on the cusp of Virgo-Libra on September 22nd. The year she was born, the twenty-second day of September, was also the first day of Autumn. June, rooted in Mother Earth, traveled into the world on the first day of the first season of the rest of her life.

June, the most astrologically grounded of my three children, has departed Mother Earth. She has taken wings and soared above the material world. June is in the heavens. My heavens. Where the clouds are fluffy pillows perfect for naps and the stars sparkle at all hours of the day.

How does an earthly being become a celestial being? There exists a thin threshold between life and death. I know because I watched my daughter cross it. I wonder, are the stars and the galaxies part of the material world or part of the heavens? Does it matter? It matters to me because I have two children here in the material world, but I don’t only have two children. I have three children, and I must know where my second born now resides.

I struggle to pinpoint Death as it is elusive. The transformative power of death has completely changed my life for better and for worse.

Death is not the end. It is not stagnant. It may be the end to one thing, which is life, but Death is the beginning of something I don’t understand. In my world, death is not the end and I’ll tell you why.

When a child is taken away, parents are left with so much love, and no where to place it. Some refer to this as grief. In part, it is grief. I also believe it is what it is, which is love. Many books have told me grief is the love we have no where to place after our loved one dies. I believe this to be true, and I also believe love is love. I can feel love for June that isn’t weighted in grief. Pure love. An active love. Not a love where June is the shadow trailing behind it.

Love exists and grows as do the layers of an oyster shell. Neither are linear. Neither is two-dimensional. Love fuses with other love creating a remarkable and unbreakable chain of strength. So too, a haven for other forms of life’s happiness to spawn.

One form of joy for a parent that arises from love’s layers for a child is in the anticipation of who a child will one day become. How they will grow? What will their personalities will be like? What sort of things will they enjoy? Will they be funny or serious? Who will this tiny creature born from my womb grow to be?

After planting seeds in the spring we wait patiently and nurturingly for the ultimate moment to arrive. The day the seeds fullest potential is reached. After tending to the seeds all summer long, the day arrives when what we planted months before is in full bloom.

The greatest gift I could ever be given in this life as a parent is to see my children in full bloom.

I will never know June as an adolescent or adult. I am not a parent who has been afforded the luxury of knowing my child for the rest of my life.

From time to time, I read the astrology of my living children. Reading my children’s astrological charts brings me a bit of knowledge I otherwise wouldn’t have had. A bit of understanding. A lot of perspective.

It brings me joy to see that strong personalities and characteristics which surface daily in our household are innate to my children’s beings, and not a reflection of my parenting. It helps me have patience and allows me to realize that we will work through character differences in time. It reminds me we are learning how to live our individual lives collectively, but that we are indeed individuals and not mere extensions of one another. Each person brings something different to the dinner table at night and this keeps our family alive and engaged.

I can’t help but smile when I see my children exhibit their shadows and flex their strengths. I nurture the goodness in them. I love them more than I’ve ever loved anything in my life. The love I have for my children is impenetrable, yet relaxed. Watching them grow into their personalities is mystical and enchanting. A slow crescendo to the great reveal of an adult. A gift I know not to take for granted.

There is mysticism too in who we will become as we grow together as a family. Who we will become despite June not physically being present with us. June is gone, but she is still very much here with us. Each person in our family carries her with them in a different way, and I trust that she’s watching us all grow.

I ask June to pay close attention to her older sister, and to give her a beyond-the-veil-nudge from time to time to make the right choice. I ask June to embrace her when she’s having a hard day. To give her body and mind strength to grow into the beautiful person I know she is meant to be.

June’s influence is invisible, yet powerful. June will always hold immense power over me and our family. June is the extra bit of glue that holds us so firmly together.

I read June’s astrological chart when I am done with my living children’s charts. I read my living children’s chart’s first so I can get a sense of what is believable and what is not. I am a believer, but not a sucker. I have the living proof comparison in front of me as to whether the chart is speaking the truth. I compare the chart to the child. Once I am sufficiently convinced of utter truths about my living children, I move onto June’s chart.

I enter June’s place of birth, her date of birth, and the time at which she was born: 1:43pm, and click the button on a free chart reading website that reveals to me more than I already know about June. I enter this very important information into several websites which all wield a similar tale about June. The story of whom June would have one day become.

Reading June’s chart is very different from reading my living children’s charts. June died when she was one-and-a-half. She is not in front of me as living testament to what I read.

As I read June’s chart I learn things about June I would never have learned unless she were here with me now. Parts of her I wasn’t privy to seeing grow. Aspects of her personality I will never know. Who June would have been if she had the chance to grow up.

Can you imagine your child never growing up? Seems cruel of me to ask, but neither could have I.

Fair and just, responsible and successful, earnest, independent, optimistic, confident, free-spirited, self-expressive and creative. These are some of the overarching adjectives used to describe June in her birth chart. These are adjectives I can only imagine her growing into as she one day grew into herself.

Elegant. Elegant hurts. It stays with me. June was the most elegant one-and-a-half year old you could ever meet. Her long and dainty piano player fingers. June was just elegant.

The birth chart paints a beautiful picture of who June would have been if she were still alive. The birth chart aligns with everything I know about June. I believe it and accept it as truth because there is nothing to tell me otherwise. It allows me to get to know June more deeply despite her being gone. It accompanies my wild imagination in its pursuit to work through her not being here, and to not allow Death to be the end.

I am building on the memory of June. Who would have thought you could build on the memory of someone who no longer physically exists? I could never have imagined, yet here I am.

I can never remember all the tales the chart tells, therefore every time I read it, it’s as if I am learning about June for the first time, every time.

The birth chart is also the ghost of June. It’s the shadow that follows me in the night. It keeps me awake and wondering what life would have been like if we hadn’t lost her and if she hadn’t died so brutally of cancer.

The birth chart states that those born on September 22nd are singled out by fate. An ill summary of June’s life.

It also states that those born on September 22nd hold the strong belief that everything will work out.

On days I enter Junes birth chart into various sites, I turn curiosity into reality. The information at my fingertips has the power to reignite the spirit of June. Momentarily, I bask in the thought of what every parent dreams: who my June would have one day become.

A Good Mother

It took thirty-five years

for you to find me.

I wasn’t hiding.

I just wasn’t ready

to be found.

I was astutely preparing

from an office chair,

behind a computer.

Honing skills

that deem one:

Adult—

Arriving to work,

on time, hosting

meetings, taking calls.

What could any of that

have to do

with you?

The answer lies not

within the task

but the responsibility

carried out.

Without understanding

responsibility,

I could never have

begun to altruistically

care for you.

During those thirty-five years

I changed course many—

some might say,

—too many, times.

You see,

I needed to find myself

before I found you.

In the years

before your birth,

I was preparing

a patient’s medications,

placing IV’s,

administering blood.

Like a good nurse

might do.

I was needling

the numbers into the

hard plastic pump and

pressing start.

Finger numbing work,

during endless shifts,

but patients, my

patients,

they needed me.

They taught me

the importance of

advocacy.

They gave me practice,

strengthened my voice,

so to have a stake

in the fight.

Our fight.

My fight,

for you.

I didn’t know it then,

but they

were preparing me

for my future

with you.

A life no mother

could imagine

before being told

she has a sick child.

Desperately

wishing there

was some way

to undo what the body

had done

when creating you.

A betrayal

to us both.

My body betrayed

your body

which then

failed you.

For thirty-five years,

I was preparing to be

the best

Mother I could be,

for you.

It took thirty-five years

of diligent preparation.

A surviving my twenties

exultation,

a dismissal

of selfishness,

to feel ready

to welcome you.

You found me.

You chose me

for reasons I cannot

fathom, for reasons

I want to, but

will never know.

I promised

I wouldn’t

disappoint you when

I signed the

proprietary

dotted line.

You, my daughter,

signed below.

A soul contract.

I believe it

was written in the fine

print, the part that I—

I was yours.

Forever yours, as I was,

and will be,

eternally.

I learned

the fine print

was missing

the clause

guaranteeing

you’d be mine

for a second,

but still—

I signed.

Because one moment

with you

was worth

an eternity of suffering

without you.

Because that’s

what good

mothers do.

Thirty-five years was never enough

to prepare for what

we together, would endure.

Then again,

one thousand years

could not have prepared me

for losing you.

Thirty-five years and

then there was you.

Seemed simple,

easy, yet momentous.

You made time feel

fast without

speeding it up.

You made time feel

absent

as if we existed

astrally

together

past and future

forms of ourselves.

Bursts of energies.

Our light

reflected in

one-another.

It took thirty-five years

for us to meet

and after knowing you,

I know

life without you,

is an eternal

sentencing.

I spent thirty-five years

preparing

for you,

in ways I didn’t

understand, until long

after we had met.

Until long after

you had gone.

A skill set I continue

to refine.

I wasn’t perfect.

I was just mom, and

I did the best,

a good mother,

could do.

You will always be my baby

and I, your mother.

In death, there are

few things

that never change.

These are two.

Love is the good

in a good mother.

The love,

the space in the heart

that only exists—

(here and not)

—for you.

It took you thirty-five years

to find me.

I’ll spend the rest of my life

looking for you.

In the sky, the trees, the

darkness of the night.

We will come so close,

we feel

one another’s warmth,

but far enough, we attribute

the warmth to

something or

someone else.

You created the good

mother in me,

and I’ll plan to be

the best mother

I can be

which I now realize

is the only mother

you ever knew.

Keep an Open Mind: Have Faith You’ll Get Where You Need to Go

I’ve been begging the Universe to send our family a door since June died from neuroblastoma in March of 2022. A door? Yes, you know, the generic kind with a knob you turn and it opens. A door we might, as a family, decide to collectively open together.

I can imagine it opens to possibility. If I had a choice, it would open to the promise of a fresh start. I wouldn’t even have to step through it yet. Just knowing it exists and that there’s life on the other side which could be mine, would be enough to bring utter contentment to my present life.

I wouldn’t be disappointed if the door were an actual door to a different home. I’d love a door I could walk through that didn’t trigger flashbacks of carrying June over the threshold as deep worry set in of how I would keep her alive until the next round of chemotherapy.

The walls at our house just beyond the threshold retain past energies of suffering that came, and never left. They threaten to swallow me whole every time I cross the sill of our basement door. They also contain the glittery, soft, warm energy June left behind when she died. The latter I cannot live without.

The day June died I wanted to crawl out of this house equally as much as I wanted to crawl out of my skin, and never look back, and certainly, never return. I wanted to run, but I didn’t. I’ve been patient. I’ve been waiting.

It’s been nearly two years since June died, and we are still here, in the house where I nursed June back to health many times. The house where we locked ourselves in and shut away the world. The house I held my dying daughter in the last moments of her life.

For the same reasons I hate this house, I also love it. It is both magnetic and haunting. I can feel life left behind from June that lives in the air. This energy is not something I can bottle up and pack in the moving boxes. This energy has to stay with the house. The thought of it staying behind after we are gone is enough to knock me to my knees. We birthed our children and brought them home from the hospital to this house. I brought June’s ashes from the funeral home, home to this house. This house is the only home June ever knew. It’s the only home any of our children have ever known. I will forever be drawn back here. The energy of the house is the magnet, and both living in it and leaving it haunt me.

I heeded the advice of a grief counselor to not move or sell our house within the first six months to a year after losing June. “There may be regrets,” she forewarned me.

My therapist offered her sentiment, “moving is on the same list as divorce and death. It’s a big deal,” which quelled my desire of fleeing for a bit longer.

It had been exactly a year since June died when the door first presented itself. I realized then, that a year is nothing after your child passes. I would wait longer than a year to move. People once told me before I had children, that after you do, time speeds up. I came to wholeheartedly agree after I had a child, and another. Time kept going faster. Then June died, and somehow time sped up more. I was not prepared for this. Time even ceased to exist in the depths of my grief. It was as if I blinked my eyes after June died and a door appeared. The blink was a year long blink, but it felt like a nanosecond. Now, the opportunity I’ve been asking for has arrived, but I don’t know if I am ready. I wonder if I will ever be.

When I consider if I am ready or not, I consider the whole picture. I consider spending another year in a house filled with tormenting memories of running June’s lifeless body to the sink and holding it there, hovering, for the tenth time of the day, waiting for whatever was left in her tiny stomach to come out. Mostly bile. Waiting for the nausea to subside, for the time to speed up so I could administer another antiemetic. Scouring the medicine cabinet next to the kitchen sink for something else I could give her to treat the nausea until her next dose of Zofran was due. These thoughts enter every time I walk into the kitchen.

I think about the painful memory of driving June home one last time from the hospital. The same hospital where she was born. The memory of cradling her on the sofa in the living room as she died. The place in our living room I sit down in every day to write. Each time I do, I look up and out at the rest of the room, as I did in the final days of June’s life, as I held her in my arms, eight months pregnant with our son. I sit in the corner, on the stained blue couch, and I look out and I see a year, a memory, a compartmentalization, the past. June is no longer in my arms, but it feels as if she just was. Every morning, I open my computer in the very space we spent June’s last days on earth, and it feels as if no time has passed. The energies keep bringing me back to this couch and corner because it’s a familiar and invisible connection to another time and to June. These same energies haunt me as I type instead of holding June. The words on the page are sometimes the only proof I have of the passage of time.

Memories like these are the reasons I’ve been praying for an opportunity to move. Memories like these are the reasons I don’t want to return to our house when a vacation has ended. They infiltrate my life, penetrate my soul, and if I am not in my house, briefly, they stop. It is when I enter the garage and step out of the car, the flashbacks begin. It’s part of a trauma response. I’ve decided if I remove the stimuli, then perhaps the trauma response will go away.

Several weeks ago, I traveled to the state where we intend to move to in search of homes. Before the trip I blindly chose several locations to view properties based on important details like school systems and ceiling height.

I know nothing about the state or area other than my husband grew up roughly fifty miles west of where his new position will take place. There happens to be a major bonus which is that we will move close to extended family. My in-laws live close to the first location I pinned on a map to look at houses. I chose that location because of the relative closeness to my in-laws, school systems, and because I liked the name of the city.

The day I met the realtor for the first time was exhilarating and terrifying. We traveled together to look at the homes I found in the town with the nice name, halfway between my husbands future job and my in-laws current home. The homes I asked to see were lovely and brand new with tall ceilings. The school systems great.

The realtor informed me she scheduled three appointments to see the homes that first morning. She affirmed that I’d made a good choice by picking this location. She and my husband attended high school together and had grown up nearby. My Google search was paying off. To be equally distanced from family and work meant we had a narrow window of towns to look at. I feared regret. I felt both fortunate and burdened to decide where our family would live.

The day arrived to meet the realtor. We walked into the first home. A model home. It was brand new, and no one had ever lived there. It was staged with furniture and decor by a professional. We toured the first floor. I followed the realtor as she opened every door to see what lurked behind: a garage, a coat closet, a storage closet. I walked in and out of each one, following in her footprint. I closed the storage closet door, ”That’s a good space,” I said. She turned to look at me. 

“Did you see the book?” she asked, a few steps ahead.

“The book?” I asked.

“Yes, the one in the storage closet,” she said.

I turned around and walked back to the closet. I opened the door to see it was mostly empty, with exception of a couple of five gallon buckets, an end table, a lamp, and two books sitting on the table in the far back. I crossed the threshold into the closet, and walked up to the table. The book resting there read, “Honest June”.

A wave of chill jolted me. Every hair on my body stood up. The feeling dissolved into warmth of an embrace. The energetic embrace of June.

Now I know that the energy that lives in the walls and the air of our New England house, energies of suffering, but also beautiful light, white, energies of June, they don’t have to stay when we move. They can come with us. I cannot package them, but turns out I don’t need to because energy travels. The good will travel with us, and the triggers I’ll leave behind.

The home is fours walls, but the energy in our home is expansive and unconfined. It’s infinite.

The door arrived, and we are stepping through it. I have faith it is not the first, and it won’t be the last. I am supposed to find and knock on every one. I am supposed to keep living. We will move and in doing so, our family will move ahead. I once feared June wouldn’t be right there when we did move, but now I know, she’s already waiting for us.

Siphoning the Fear and the Trauma After Losing June

It’s a new year and despite the promising events on the horizon for our family, including a fresh start in the form of a move out of state, I have very little to say. The last two nights just after my son was placed in his crib, June’s former crib, and my daughter, husband, and I retreated to our room, fear cast itself upon me, again. Fear comes and goes for every reason, but I try to control it. I ask it to leave. I ask it to leave me alone.

As my two counterparts drifted asleep, I was left wide-awake staring into the darkness. Waiting for the negative energy to envelope me and feast on my still, anxious body. From bed, I watched the door frame which I could achingly make out in the light of the moon, waiting for shadows to pass by, or worse, stop and stare me in the eye.

These shadows are physical and metaphorical ghosts of my past. Some shadows live in my head, and visit when I am most vulnerable, usually on the cusp of sleep. They come in the form of repetitious thoughts I cannot control: The day June died. Her perfect heart-shaped lips. Her father’s eyes when we found out the cancer had returned. What June would have been like when she grew up. The painfully beautiful life her father and I would have given her. These are the memories which live in shadow and repeatedly come out to haunt me when life grows still and quiet.

There are other shadows I live in fear could visit at any moment. They are shadows of the future. Shadows made up of anticipatory grief and anxiety. I must be ready for them when they do visit. I wasn’t ready when June got sick. I wasn’t prepared for the catastrophic upheaval June’s ultimate death created in my life.

Now, I fear being unprepared for other unpredictable life events of which my rational brain knows I cannot prepare for. I realize no one could ever be prepared for their child to die of cancer, but the residual trauma that lives in my every cell makes me believe I have to prepare. It’s the same trauma that tells me I should prepare my children for the end of the world and asks my husband, “should we build an underground shelter?” It’s irrational. It’s as unpredictable and surprising as the trauma of June’s diagnosis.

It’s the same trauma that shoots cortisol through my blood stream when my son throws a toy and it makes a loud noise. My body cannot differentiate between a loud noise and something terrible going wrong. My body believes a loud noise equates to something terrible having happened. Loud noises were not part of my trauma with June’s diagnosis and treatment, nonetheless they are part of my trauma now. My body cannot translate what my mind is saying. My mind is telling it breathe, that everything is going to be okay, which I have physical proof of because June died nearly two years ago, and I have survived, and yet, my body won’t buy in to what my mind is selling. How can I convinced my traumatized body of what my mind now knows, that actually, every thing is and will be okay.

I am a mother who has suffered trauma. I’m not talking about childhood trauma, although that too, exists. I am talking about the trauma of being told your baby has cancer. The trauma of watching your daughter die. The trauma of my hands being tied behind my back as I watched her wither away in front of me. This trauma rears its ugly head randomly and makes me believe the shadows will appear. I must keep a look out. The shadows are real. The trauma tells me I have no defenses. They’re coming for me.

The trauma keeps me on my toes. It sneaks up on me while I float in pristine waters on my back gazing at the sky. It rips me underwater just as I start to feel peace flood my body. Just as soon as I become comfortable in a new environment.

The trauma that ended with June’s death makes me believe everything is mine to lose, and that some day it will be taken from me. I truly and bitterly understand the phrase, “nothing in life is guaranteed” and now I must figure out how to live with it.

It is in these moments I beg my brain to turn off the torture. I wonder if this is life now after losing June and instead of fighting against the current of trauma, perhaps I should just succumb to it.

Fear seeps into where fear should not exist, in the safest and most familiar spaces, like my home and my bed. It continually takes from me. As I suffer silently in the presence of fear, I ask the Higher Power to take the fear from me. It’s the only thing I have left to do. It’s the only thing I haven’t done, today. I’ve done everything else I can do in a day to evade the fear and heal the trauma. Nothing works. I stare into darkness and pull the covers up to my chin while watching the door, and I whisper:

Please take my fear.

Please take my fear.

Please take my fear.

I make sure to add “please” and finish with “thank you” to show I am respectful and utterly grateful for a better outcome than what I have so far been given in life. Despite June dying, I am still grateful for what I have.

In some twisted way, I am grateful for the trauma because it’s a reminder of what I have survived. When my body responds to a loud noise by jumping, briefly shouting, fearing the worst, and shuddering when I realize everyone is okay, I am reminded that I have overcome one of the most horrific situations any parent will have to endure. I am standing here today, alive and almost well. My trauma response reminds me June lived. While I hope to not live with a trauma response for the rest of my life, I know I can learn to live with the trauma.

“Please take my suffering,” has become my daytime mantra just after I wake. Still in my pajamas, I sit on the edge of my bed in the light of the picture window with my eyes closed and whisper words of gratitude. I let the sunlight penetrate my face. I absorb the first few rays of the day and I thank the heavens that I am alive to spend another day with my children and husband. I say good morning to June and tell her for the first time of the day how much I love her. I don’t know if she’s able to hear me. Every day multiple times a day, I package my love for June which consists of I love you’s and snippets of the days stories, and send it into the Universe hoping it will arrive to her. I love you, June.

I have an understanding about life that many have yet to come to understand. It’s intrinsically entwined with my trauma. It’s an understanding I can feel, as well as think. I will forever know it and never not. I’ve tried to erase it. I’ve tried to forget it, but it’s an understanding that still exists at the bottom of a bottle and is quite honestly, more terrifying when I arrive there. I avoid the bottom of the bottle.

Grief which has temporarily erased my memory has almost let me for a moment on several occasions forget, but the understanding comes back because it lives beneath the surface of grief. It lives in my bones. It exists deep within my subconscious as I lay sleeping. It exists in my every minute of watching my living children. Constant, careful’s and get down’s because the next second could result in death.

I’m talking about the fragility of life.

I express my gratitude for what I have in the shadow of fear of what I could lose. If I don’t express my daily gratitudes aloud, then the fragility of life will take over and kill me. A swirling, reckless mix of fear and gratitude in the glass menagerie of life.

Fear is the byproduct of love being taken away too soon. Like in the case of June being taken from me, being taken from our family, being taken from earth. Fear is the opposite of love. This I know.

Grief is love and it really is lovely because I make it that way. Grief is the continuation of love that I have for June. I know I will love June until the day I die and therefore will also grieve her until I die. Grief is loving a dead child. Grief will accompany me into old age. I am okay with that as long as my love for June doesn't interfere negatively with my daily life or interactions with my living children. When it interferes negatively, because it will, I know it’s both hurt and fear rising to the surface. I don’t push it away, but I channel it into something else, and hopefully more productive. If I can channel negativity surrounding grief back into love, then grief becomes lovely again.

The shadow side of grief is the one that I could live without, but there is a shadow to everything and everyone, so I accept it and try to learn from it. It’s the side that interferes with the love and tries to obscure it. If it takes over, it strips me of love, it strips me of the will to live and if I let it take over, it becomes me. The shadow side of love is fear, the shadow side and not coincidentally, of grief is also fear.

Grief is both love and fear. Fear is the side of grief that sometimes lets itself in when you’re least expecting and takes over. It’s also part of trauma. The ego doesn’t know fear because it’s an invention of the mind. The ego is self. The ego is pure and at conception, the ego is only love. The mind invents fear and allows it to penetrate the ego, but the ego doesn’t want it, spends it’s life rejecting it in search of love. Grief is love, and the underbelly of love is fear. 

Please take my fear.

Please take my fear.

Please take my fear.

If fear is taken, love stays. Grief stays wholesome within love. Grief unlike love is penetrable, despite grief being synonymous with love. You might wonder how this is possible, and I’ll explain that grief is porous. Love is not porous. Love is impenetrable. Nothing will ever be a true synonym of love, for me, except June or any of my children. June is love. If I can rid myself of the underbelly of grief which is fear, then I can live as one with June and my children in a state of love. 

How can I live in love of June when there is constant nagging fear trying to penetrate my grief? How can I move forward in love when I am dragged back by fear to the fact that June is dead? June will always be dead. June will never live again in my life.

At night, I stare into the darkness. The box that holds June’s ashes sits on the bureau next to our bed. I wonder if she can read my thoughts from wherever she is as I try to fight off the negative energies swirling around my body. In the darkness, alone, I ask for June for her protection.

I have days when the fear from the trauma visits, but nearly two years after June’s death, I am clear on my stance. I know there is hope. That despite not being able to feel nor see the hope, I know not every day will be like today. Fortunately, because I’ve discovered the hope in a situation wrought with despair, I know one day I will wake up and both feel and see hope again. I tell myself the worst has come. The worst has gone. There is life to still live. The underbelly of grief is ugly. It’s painful. It’s scary. The underbelly of grief is not me and I’m going to continue to work on how to penetrate it with love. More love.

Every day I wake up, I welcome love and reject fear. I feed my body what it needs through meditation, yoga, and proper nourishment. I care for my mind, my body, my soul.

Everyday I live, my soul comes a little closer to June’s. I imagine that one out of one-hundred I love you’s will reach her. The trauma is not me. The love is me. The love is June.

So when my son bangs two pots together, I run to him and pick up him up. I lift his body to my chest and breathe in his intoxicating smell and kiss his milky cheeks over and over and tell him how much I love him. I am not going to let the trauma ruin me. If I did, I wouldn’t be the Mama that June died knowing.

The Things I Don’t Say (to the optometrist two weeks after you died)

“Do you want to see

the insides of 

your eyes?”

“Not today,

but thank you,”

I say.

“I ask because

I learned

the hard way.

People

don’t always like

to see the insides

of their eyes.”

I smile,

gesturing

I understand 

without affirming

I feel 

either way.

Once, I saw

the insides

of my eyes,

before you died.

I enjoyed it, as

I once 

enjoyed packing

rotting pockets

of flesh

with saline soaked

gauze. 

But then, you

became

the flesh, and

all patients,

they became you.

I stopped caring

to see the insides.

It began 

on the inside.

Disease no one

could see

with the naked

eye.

Show me the insides

of my eyes.

I will show you

the emptiness

of the ocean floor,

barren of life.

Show me the insides 

of my eyes. 

You cannot mistake

the loss that lingers

there in the rounded

backs between the

delicate pink veins

and soft whites. 

Show me the insides 

of my eyes,

but I forewarn you, 

I cannot promise

heartbreak 

won’t follow

when you

look away.

Through your eyes

you’ll show me 

the insides of mine.

Together,

we will see the

brokenness

of life.

So, politely,

I decline.

For us both.

Not today.

Not today, will you show me

the insides

of my eyes.

The Imprint June Left On Me

I first noticed the tattoo on my arm during June’s treatment for neuroblastoma. I don’t remember if she was receiving chemotherapy. We were in the hospital, but which one? I can’t remember. Was it Portland or Boston? Once detailed memories are slipping away. Bleeding like an unrecognizable tattoo. Fading away into an unrecoverable abyss that is my mind.

The word tattoo is not the appropriate term for what it is I am referring to on my arm, but I like the implied permanence of the word. Tatuaje in Spanish. This is a mark. The word mark can be used to refer to a tattoo. I’ll stick with tattoo.

I don’t have any professional ink tattoos, and this is as close to one as they come for me. I’ve wanted a tattoo for as long as I can remember, but I’m as indecisive as the next person as to what I would get and where I’d place it. Indecisiveness stops me from getting a tattoo.

I fear the permanence of the ink. What’s worse is I fear the permanent ink starting to become dull and bleed into something I can no longer make out, and yet, still very much inked below my skin. No longer the crisp image it once was. I imagine touching up the tattoo one day, but then it would no longer be in its original form. For some reason, this terrifies me.

It’s the same reason a memory terrifies me. What is the original form of a memory? It’s the event. Doesn’t have to be an event. Could be a nuance, a sniffle, a look, a smile. A snapshot of any one thing that was a part of our lives. Now part of the past. A memory is made up of factors we can replay, but ultimately, details get left out. Unless we write them down, paint, draw, or photograph them, we may lose the memory. Similarly to how the tattoo will never be the same after its creation.

The details which make up a memory might linger with us for years. A scent associated with the event. The color of the sky the day she died. How smooth our favorite mug felt in our hands as we sipped morning coffee. When it comes to June, I didn’t think my memory would allow for details to drop off. What I have learned since she died is that some memories are not more loyal than others. A memory is not a moment in time we can presently return to without unintentional alteration’s regardless of who the memory is about.

The memory is of utmost importance to me because for a while I believed it was all I had left of June. However recently, I am discovering there is more.

The tattoo that I am referring to I discovered on my body several years ago is in its original form. It will grow into its potential with time. It will never disappear and the lines won’t blur. They will deepen as wrinkles do with age. The thought of this makes my body feel warm. An imprint of June that will never die.

A tattoo denoting what my body cannot forget because although time is unforgiving on the mind, it’s very giving to the body. Time gives us wrinkles. Time takes away from us too, but I prefer to focus on what time has given me. Disease took June, time did not. I look forward to what more life has to offer. I am perfecting the balance on the scale of life.

The tattoo represents what my body has endured. What I’ve survived. I am not discussing the black circles under my eyes from years of crying, although those too, I’m afraid, are now permanent.

I’ve learned in these last few years that the body moves forward with time but it is nothing without its past. Our bodies represent the culmination of life’s experiences. Individual markings on individuals. I see the tattoos all over my body when I step I out of the shower. I’m practicing noticing the marks my children have left me with gratitude and not distaste.

Caring for June was an experience that reverted me to my original form. June’s diagnosis stripped me of the outer layers I had padded myself with over the years based on who I thought I had wanted to be. When June became sick, I was reduced to my only my body and my motherhood. Everything else in life was cut away. Nothing else mattered. I became a one-dimensional snapshot of a human. A cardboard cutout. It was as if my body had forgotten my past. As if there was no future for my body. As if I became a memory of myself. Does a memory have a memory? Does a memory have a future?

When June died, she was far from her original form. The perfect baby I had given birth to only a year and a half earlier, had been altered by the toxicity of medications, chemotherapy, and surgery. Like a memory, like a tattoo, June would never again be in her original form. Still perfect, yet altered. The distance between June after chemotherapy from June before chemotherapy was obvious. The distance did not only grow between June and herself, but it was most obvious between June and her peers. The tumor robbed June of her potential to be healthy and grow like other children. The chemo robbed June of the healthy parts she had left like her hearing and fertility.

The tattoo I refer to is in the shape of lines. They can be found just above my left wrist on the inside of my arm. This skin is still some what supple because it’s the underside of my arm. There are no white spots where the melanin has died. The lines themselves look like I took a tiny X-Acto knife and made shallow cuts diagonally from the outer edge of my inner wrist up my arm. It’s a spectacular thing because I’ve never cut my arm as one would need to do to create this design. It evolved with June and with time.

I look for the symmetry on my other arm, but there is none. There are no fine lines and the skin on my right arm is bland. There is no symmetry to this tattoo. Symmetry is something a mother of a child with cancer often looks for in tiny lumps and bumps. Something a mother of a child who died of cancer looks for in herself and her living children. Symmetry doesn't set off internal alarms. Symmetry is to be embraced. I can let go of the notion of symmetry here because I’ve finally realized the origin of this tattoo.

If you look closely, the skin on my left inner arm just above my wrist, under my watch band, looks like the skin on a snake that is about to shed. The veins give the skin a bluish hue just as a snake’s skin has before it sloughs off. The lines are connected by scales. The scales slightly less apparent than the lines. At times during June’s treatment, the mark of lines on scaly skin were bright red. It was a reflection of the time. The time I carried June.

Unlike the snake, I will not outgrow my skin. I cannot escape it although I’ve wished to. I do not need new skin to continue living. My skin may become worn out like a snake’s, but it’s the only skin I was given for this lifetime. The new me is learning to appreciate my old skin. The tattoo makes it a bit easier.

Today, a stranger may not see the tattoo from a distance. It’s not angry as it once was. I notice it in the light of the sun that shines through the window at the kitchen sink while I wash dishes. In the sunlight, it looks as if it was created with white ink. The scales become obvious. With time, this tattoo will not fade. If I had to guess, it originated when my first daughter was born. June solidified it’s existence when she was born and more so, after she became sick.

June progressed from a newborn to an infant and in that time she clung to me like an infant primate does to its mother. Initially, I was baffled, irritated, and confused by this behavior. Constantly holding June prevented me from completing daily chores and making meals. It became worrisome when I had to leave her with someone else and go to work. I’d peel her away from my body. My eldest daughter never attached to me in such a way.

June’s attachment became the natural process. I’d read articles and heard strangers whisper about how one should never constantly carry a baby around. A baby should develop independence, learn to crawl, and one day, learn to walk. June never met these milestones, but it wasn’t because I carried her.

June and I became one. She wouldn’t have it any other way. I had no choice, but to rise to the occasion. I picked her up because she needed me. Then I found out she was sick. It felt natural to continue to carry her for the rest of her life.

That is what I did.

My body will never regret not setting her down.

The tattoo on my left arm just above my wrist is the mark of June. It is made of lines created by pinched and twisted skin compressed by June’s body. For every day I carried her, the lines grew a little deeper. It’s a mark of proof that she did exist. She was right here. The mark of a memory. This arm lives to tell the story. It’s an imprint that will never be forgotten because as I age, so will my skin, so will the lines. I run my fingers over them and remember.

To remember

not that

June is no longer here.

To remember

instead that,

June,

is never gone.

The Quake

The most terrifying part 

of the most terrifying part 

was 

not knowing. 

Nothing beyond

the most terrifying part, but 

an imaginary wall.

Could have been 

concrete.

Could have been

brick.

Angrier than

concrete.

Angrier than

brick.

It was charged with

revolt,

out for 

revenge,

surged with

disbelief.

The wall that came 

after the most terrifying part,

which was your death,  

was a tsunami.

The most terrifying part 

of the most terrifying part 

was the thought

we might survive 

the tsunami,

after losing you.

The most terrifying part

of the most terrifying part

was the anticipation.

Vast lack

of preparation.

For death and moments

that follow, one

cannot prepare.

We would not survive

the quake

that was your death.

This, I felt.

No life jackets.

No higher ground.

Useless props,

on the 

stage of death.

Still, we braced 

for impact.

A form of

emotional anticipation.

Reflexive reaction

in an uncontrollable

situation.

The most terrifying part

of the most terrifying part

was the impending doom

in the final days.

The awareness, 

of what would inevitably

transform

our reality.

One evacuation route.

Only three of us

could survive.

You, our precious fourth,

we’d be forced to leave 

behind. To hand

you to 

a different kind

of caretaker.

The most terrifying part 

of the most terrifying part

was saying

our goodbyes.

Knowing we’d never see, feel, hold,

smell you, again.

A forever goodbye.

How does one brace

for that kind

of impact?

You existed.

We were one.

Then, the most terrifying part arrived.

Death separated our souls,

leaving your altered body

intact.

An empty vessel

I couldn’t let go.

I clung to you,

tossed by the wave,

which broke my strength.

I held on, but the time came,

to release you.

A forfeit of happiness

exchanged for

eternal sorrow.

The most terrifying part

of the most terrifying part 

is the three of us 

did survive.

Nearly two years later,

I am scarred, taking inventory

of what is left.

What does any of it mean,

if we no longer have you?

The most terrifying part

of the most terrifying part

is that

the quake

cracked me open.

It showed me things,

I can never unsee.

Tumble after tumble,

the breathless dive 

that became 

the aftermath of your life, 

left me lucid,

separated,

but still alive.

As I lay

pinned to the ground,

I don’t notice,

the water lulled

back to the sea.

I barely notice,

the boulder

which crushed my chest

being lifted.

My chest cavity

splayed open, but

it is not my organs

on display.

From the crevice that once

was your home,

my womb,

peculiar and colorful flowers

begin to grow.

I don’t notice

your soul as it

sprinkles

seeds of growth

onto mine,

but I know they came

from you

because in them,

I see, I feel,

I smell, you again,

for the first time.

The most terrifying part of

you dying

is accepting

my new life,

and new growth

in the wake of

your death. A perspective

shift. In

allowing life’s divinity

which I could not see before,

to be seen.

Beauty, lost

in the quake

slowly returns.

Like water,

to the ocean.

Like strength,

to me.

I am learning not

to look away, not to fear

the beauty of

new life,

new growth,

new perspective,

because the more deeply

I stare into it

the clearer it becomes:

I am staring at

the reflection

of you.

The Weight of Holiday Cards

Holiday cards are a sensitive subject for me. A subject that turns dreadful at the arrival of the holiday season. It’s a nagging dread I need to resolve. It may naturally resolve in the coming years, as Time the Thief hoards the minutes of my days until years have accumulated in the Time Vault. Time leaves, but the experience of time exists eternally. Years morph into memories, and as memories often do, they vanish. I’ve learned certain memories in the Vault do not age, they do not vanish. They stay perfectly alive in their present form, regardless of how many years ago Time took them. A simple photograph can recall a memory that was locked away and forgotten years ago. A forgotten photograph when it is reflected upon frees the memory from the Vault. As the memory floods our being, we are transferred to a past present moment. A moment frozen in time. The closest we will ever come to reliving the past. Many moments of my life are locked in the Vault never to be recovered. Other moments I can take out, admire, and refile such as family memories, all thanks to the Holiday Card.

It’s our family’s second holiday season without June. Despite Time sweeping last year’s holiday into the Vault, tidying up scraps of emotion the holidays recklessly left behind, there is the inevitable recurrence of this annual, and at times, unbearable, holiday occasion. I am forced to reconcile with it again. There should be a law that when a child dies the family skips all foreseeable holidays for a minimum of five years. The public would have to acknowledge this law, and the families would be allowed to live peacefully in a holiday-free vacuum.

“What’s wrong?” a friend asked me in the supermarket a few days after Thanksgiving. It’s Thanksgiving week and June is dead. Has everyone forgotten? The emotional hangover of living the juxtaposition of another Thanksgiving without June while still counting my blessings had a firm grip on me. It wasn’t planned. It just happened. I am heartbroken and I am grateful. The two exist separately. Not all is bleak, but the facts are the facts. June is gone. You cannot change cold, hard facts. It takes time to shake the holidays even after they’re gone.

Holiday cards are the initiation phase in the drawn out month of December. They are also part of the consolidation phase as they trickle in well after the New Year. Can I liken the phases of the holidays to June’s treatment? Everything comes in phases and before I climb the mountain I need to know how many miles up and and how many miles down. Most people like to know what mile they are on as they climb. I am no different. Often, I apply a phase to a dreadful situation because it’s applicable to everything in life and because phases end. Putting life’s situations into the box of “it’s a phase” helps me see the end. Seeing the end helps me breath in the middle.

I’ll complete this year’s holiday phase just as I did last years. Until recently, I hadn’t thought of what the meaning was when June’s oncologist said, “Congratulations, you’ve reached the consolidation phase.” I knew it meant we were on the last mile of a one-thousand-mile hike, but I had failed to notice what it actually meant. I assumed it meant the last, or the end phase, why else would he have been congratulating us? Consolidation has several different meanings however, but they all point to strengthening. Bringing everything together. Consolidation is a collection of pieces, which in June’s case were the various treatment options she had completed, that together would make June stronger by placing her in a position further away from the cancer. June wasn’t stronger, however, and the consolidation phase of her treatment wasn’t affirming of anything but her death. The end. The definition of the consolidation phase will always signify the end for me, as it did in the beginning. I don’t care what the dictionary says. We didn’t finish the consolidation phase, but still I apply phases to everything. If nothing else, it’s a useful tool that helps me to survive the present moment. It keeps me a little closer to June and at the most basic of levels, it helps to reach the end of my current affliction: holidays and the cards they bring. I imagine the consolidation phase of holiday cards begins around the New Year. The beginning of the end.

I walk to the mailbox once a day as dread infiltrates my lungs from the thinnest wintery Maine air. The air houses dread and I am an innocent bystander passively breathing it in. It tasteless, and weighs my body down. ‘Tis holiday card season.

The first holiday card of 2023 arrived the day after Thanksgiving. An eager sender, someone I used to be, mailed it just in time. Years ago, I remember the wheels turning leading up to the first week of November. I’d begin perusing photos on my phone of my children which mostly consisted of them sitting in one another’s laps reading books or eat messy snacks on the couch. I’d pick the perfect candid and upload it onto Minted. One year, I used a photo of June and my oldest daughter sitting on the couch just after they had finished yogurt. Thanks to technology, I edited the yogurt off of June’s chin and transformed it into a glowing holiday card. I added photo bloopers to the backside of the card which I noticed is usually left blank (so much space! Nothing to say?) which included a couple of photos of Bella, our black lab-boxer mix, who had inserted her muzzle front and center into the photo. I sent that card in 2021. It was the last holiday card I've ever sent. It’s the last holiday card both June and Bella ever graced.

Now what?

June is gone. A holiday card could never capture the essence of our family. Bella is gone too. 

I’ve belabored creating a card this year. Everytime I broach the subject, I am drained of creativity and left with a blank page. Except, I do have a recurring odd image that comes to mind. It’s the number thirteen. June died on March thirteenth. I recently came to learn the meaning behind the number thirteen. It would be enough to suffice that a holiday card with a giant number thirteen on it and some gothic Angel wings in the background would speak to the way in which my heart was torn from my chest and how it continually aches with each passing holiday. There is questionable blood dripping from the bottom of the one and the three. The card screams more of a Friday the thirteenth essence than of a holiday cheer essence.

I wonder if the receiver might understand the message? Left to interpretation, based on the coloring, font, and eeriness I believe the card would accurately convey the idea. But why thirteen, you might ask.

“What’s your obsession with a holiday card?” My husband wants to know.

I don’t know where to begin, so I don’t bother. A holiday card which my mother referred to as our “Christmas Card” was a yearly staple. It was the time of year we put on our red petty coats with black velvet lapels and posed in front of my mother’s horse. There were matching hats with red bows. Innocent smiles. Maybe the smiles were fake, but I mostly remembering them to be genuine. The kind of smile you give when you’re only asked to smile in front of a camera a handful of times in a year. Something my living children will never understand. Back when people exclaimed, “Oh! Let me get my camera!” and disappeared in the house. Christmas cards at our house were planned and the camera already in-hand. There was no shopping around in past photos you could edit on your phone. Christmas card photos were staged. Outfits laid out the night before. They were a family event. The memories of my childhood holiday cards are locked in the Vault. A snapshot in time. They can be pulled out whenever because they exist in print.

The holiday card marks the passing of time. Growing older, getting bigger. Adding another year to our lives. When I return to the memory of the Christmas card I can recount almost every one, and what my sister and I wore in the photographs. I can recount what we were doing. Did we go sledding that day? We sure did. I wore my aquamarine onesie snow suit with neon pink stripes on the shoulder. Our cheeks were candy apple red and we were standing in snow up to our knees after a storm. The newest addition to my growing body, my big, round, adult teeth, sparkled white. The holiday card marks the passing of time and life’s subtleties that otherwise we might forget.

Now, I cry at the thought of making or receiving a holiday card.

Fuck the holiday card. 

What’s it worth to me anymore?

What’s the holiday card worth to anyone?

I know I sound all bah-humbug-ey, but this is where I am living right now. 

The last holiday card I made, where I edited the yogurt off of June’s chin, I had created just two short weeks after the oncologist delivered the news that June had “No Evidence of Disease” (NED). The premade card I found online had the caption, “There is so much to be grateful for,” which fully encapsulated our year. In the photo I had chosen, our oldest adoringly nuzzled her face into June’s chest. June, with her big white toothy grin, smiled at the camera. Our two girls. My husband and I adored our girls, and collectively, we as June’s family, adored June. This card says that. I am staring at the card now which I have since framed. I can see that I forgot to edit a tiny bit of yogurt off of June’s top lip. This brings me so much happiness.

I sent our last holiday card of 2021 to the oncologists office, which I hoped would communicate to them how grateful we were for everything they had done for our family. Perhaps I was in denial, but it also reflected how great we were in the face of pediatric cancer. June was still very sick from chemotherapy, but the disease was gone. I sent the card to friends. It communicated that we were okay despite being handed life’s worst circumstances. We had so much hope.

The holiday card is layered. Last year, the first year our family celebrated Christmas since the passing of June only eight and a half months after she died, we spent a month in South America. We stayed with my Chilean host family. We celebrated a Chilean Christmas. Chilean Christmas is not much different from a Christmas in the United States. The overt difference is the weather and the palm tree outside your window when you wake up on Christmas morning. There’s no snow. It’s not grey and cold. It’s pure blue sky, dry heat, and a warm breeze. It’s glorious. In Chile, I escaped the holiday. We escaped. We escaped the cold of winter. We escaped facing relatives who were as heartbroken as we were that June had died. We escaped the wrath that Christmas had become after losing June. The moment we stepped foot onto the plane to Chile, now physically a family of four, we left our holiday traditions behind.

When we returned home in late January, I realized there was one holiday tradition we did not escape. There they were. A pile of holiday cards stacked neatly on the counter. Happy people, sending wishes, with healthy kids splayed across glittery green and red foiled paper. In the depths of my grief, I was insulted. The ugliest part of grief, victimhood, reemerged. How dare happy people send me photos of their happy, healthy children, placing their lives on display for me to see! How dare they not know! I ripped open a few cards, gleaning what I most feared which was happy, healthy children indeed. Some happy, healthy children on hot vacations like the one we had just returned from. Parents holding cocktails on a beach while their happy, healthy children made sandcastles and floated in clear blue, warm waters. The waters looked happy. Everyone smiling. Everyone together. Full families represented. No dead children to mourn. Then, it occurred to me that perhaps they’d sent a quick note on the back briefly acknowledging life without June on this first Christmas. I’d flip over the card to the back blank side to see nothing. No note, no sentence, no line, no word. Nothing. No acknowledgement of what we continued to endure. That despite the boastful happy, healthy holiday greeting, there was no sliver of humanity tucked into the envelope. “Fuck this,” I said after opening a couple, throwing the pile in the trash. 

In the absence of a card, I deliberately mark the passage of time, and I am reminded that my life is not whole as it once was. How to explain this to my husband? What is the meaning of all of this? The holiday cards holds the meaning of which I assign, however much of the meaning is inherent. A beautiful memento amid a neglectful childhood. One of the only mementos I carried into my family’s life when I became a mother. A tradition I cherished before June became sick.

How to let go of the holiday card. How to cut the strings of emotion tied to the holiday card. These things I wonder.

The Friday after Thanksgiving when the postwoman delivered the mail my daughter watched her leave it outside our garage door.

“Mommy! A package!” We walked down to retrieve it. There on top, was the first holiday card.

“What’s this mommy?” she asked holding up the envelope.

“It’s our first holiday card, do you want to open it?” I tried to sound excited.

“What’s a HOLIDAY card?” she asked.

In that moment, I realized it had been two years since she last opened one. She was three at that time. She’s now five. I reminded her of how we used to collect and hang them on twine using miniature clothespins behind the Christmas tree.

“We collected so many! You used to love opening them,” I told her.

“Really! I don’t want to open that one,” she said with a frown as she ran into the house with the package. 

I stood in the dimly lit garage staring at the card. “What the hell,” I thought to myself as I tore it open.

I’m certain I won’t be hanging holiday cards in my house this year, but I haven’t thrown it in the trash yet either. It was glittery, green, and red, boasting a Christmas tree. I think of the last card I sent. Of the others I sent before that one. I know I didn’t send a card to be boastful or thoughtless. I sent a card to spread love and positive energy which naturally begins and ends with my children. I understand now that the cards sent to our family after June died, the first Christmas without her, were not meant to be hurtful. I don’t take them personally anymore. I am no longer a victim.

As for the cards coming this year, the first is still sitting on the trashcan in the garage next to a dirty coffee cup. I know if I decide to bring it in the house it could leave a glittery trail behind it which might be nice. The vulnerable part of me is afraid, but the courageous part of me says it’s all going to be okay.

The number thirteen holds many powerful truths. The number thirteen signifies in numerology the end of a cycle and the beginning of something new. Symbolic of life and death. Signifying the end of one era and the beginning of another. It also signifies growth during a period of difficulty. June died on the thirteen. I can see things more clearly now. I’ve uncovered so much meaning since last holiday season. It occurs to me that one day, I might be more than okay.

Maybe I’ll send out that bloody number thirteen this year.

Maybe it will be dripping with glitter glue.

No bloopers. Nothing more to say.

Definitely left up to the reader to interpret.

But seriously, my quandary of holiday card or no holiday card is that I want our holiday memories to be secured in the Vault in print. I’m just not ready yet. The day I am ready is the day I’ll know how to also incorporate June. The day I can represent the oneness of our family despite June being gone. Something I constantly work on every day, regardless of whether it’s holiday season or not. How to intertwine our lives with June’s death.

One day, I’ll have it all figured out. I’ll be able to see through the pain. I have faith that day will come. The day I’ll dip into the Vault and think, “My God, what a beautiful life it was.”

On Bereaved Writing

Last weekend I led a writing workshop at a healing retreat. I don’t have an MFA and I am not a journalist. Initially, when I received the ask, I (full-bodied) rebuffed the notion. I have nothing to offer. I am one bereaved mother, among many, trying to navigate my place in a world that is entirely new to me since the loss of June.

One-and-a-half years after my child died, I am relearning how to get out of bed in the morning. The first moments of my day often begin when it’s dark, and when my consciousness doesn’t yet know if I am alive or if I am dead. A fluctuating theme or fear, depending on the day. I have nothing to offer.

I’m relearning how to talk to my living children, and how not to scare them when I talk (in front of them) to June. I’m learning how to talk to June just enough so she doesn’t think her Mama’s forgotten her while simultaneously convincing myself I haven’t completely lost my mind (yet). Some days I don’t utter her name at all because I don’t have any of this quite right. The expectation is I never will. The bar is extremely low. Navigating my new way of being is awkward and uncomfortable. I worry when I don’t say June’s name, that June on occasion, thinks I’ve forgotten her. It hurts me to think it might hurt her. On those days, I release the pain through tears as I fold into the sacredness of her being. Through my writing, I know June knows that her Mama is always thinking of her, as I edit the words aloud.

Resolving how to incorporate all three of my children at once into any given situation is something I continually work on. The one who is not here is left out, unless it is she, June, who I am spending time with. The two who are here, my living children, are always left out when all I can see is June’s face, and when my brain will only allow for me to replay the days from a hospital room where she and I spent time together.

The semantics surrounding the death of June plays into everyday conversation between me and my kids. For example, when I tell our son he has the most wonderful big sister in front of my living daughter. I wince because what if June heard that? I vow to tailor the statement next time to, “you have the most wonderful living older sister,” or “you have the most wonderful sisters,” just in case June is listening from the rafters. I scold myself I cannot give my brilliant eldest daughter the recognition she deserves. Recognition that doesn’t live in the shadow of her deceased sister. These thoughts originated after June died. They have not changed. I am learning how to cope and apply meaning so to continue on with life. I have changed, however, and it’s no longer odd to me that I am experiencing identical sentiments to those which began just after June died. I cannot shake these sentiments. They continue to emerge as I try valiantly to incorporate all three of my children at once. Had you asked me in the days following June’s death, I would have imagined that I’d have most of this figured out by now, one-and-a-half years later. I don’t have it figured out yet, so how could I possibly have something to offer?

How do I address my dead child and my living children at once? The three of them incarnated at the same time, nearly coexisted on earth together had June not passed eight weeks before our son was born. An almost fully formed version of my son existed inside of me while June and her sister lived and breathed the air outside of my body. The four of us together, living, thriving, surviving, occurred once. Now, the divide of death separates my three children. My three babies, as they will always be, yet now my eldest daughter and my son and June exist separately. It’s one or the other. It’s life or death. Living or dying. Living and dying are my reality. Both are representative of my children, and now directly representative of me. Life is the present moment and death is what’s hanging over that moment. Death is not synonymous with June, although June has a knack for also hanging over my every moment.

When I was asked to lead a writing workshop at the healing retreat by a fellow bereaved and dear friend, my gut told me that I had nothing to offer. I let the thought sit. I rolled it around in my mind like a ball of clay. It began to take shape. I came to understand what writing means to me and if it means this much to me, then it might mean this much to another bereaved parent, and maybe they haven’t discovered it yet. Discovered that writing is healing and by constructing a feeling on a page you are giving language to the bodily sensation evoked by a situation or memory surrounding the death of your child. Writing is pouring the feeling onto the page and having it land there, almost magically, in the shape of words. The pen is the fountain, my hand which holds the pen, the portal. My fingertips which type on the keyboard are the transcribers of my emotions. I shed emotions into words and leave them on the paper. Leaving some suffering behind when I walk away. Letting that suffering go, maybe this time for good. Walking away a tiny bit more healed with a better understanding and inner knowledge of myself.

I liken my writing process as a bereaved mother to the process a nursing theorist might take. Nursing theorists give language to the nursing practice. Without theorists, there would be no measure to quantify or qualify what nurses actually do. By writing theories, nurses are articulating what exactly they do for their patients in their practice, as well as how they do it. Nursing theories are the foundation in the evolving standard of nursing care. Nursing theories provide a guide to all nurses. Similarly, writing is a guide I create for me. It’s a memory I create for the future me to reflect back upon. Writing is the overarching story of my life where I apply meaning to something that I may have otherwise overlooked. Writing takes my day to day and makes it whole. With my writing, like nurses and their practical theories, I create a framework from which I am building a new life.

Again, I wonder, what do I have to offer?

I am a bereaved mother in practice. 

Is anyone born to know how to act as a bereaved mother? 

To feel as a bereaved mother feels?

To not completely shut down as a bereaved mother desires?

With my writing, I offer a guide for other bereaved mothers. 

With my writing, I offer a guide for those trying to understand the bereaved mother in their life.

I am quantifying and qualifying my existence, holding space for myself, and fellow bereaved parents while they also suffer. We do not suffer alone. And within great suffering is great healing. From suffering, comes the ability to suffer, comes the ability to grow, to learn and to (one day) no longer suffer. Suffering is a choice, grief is not. I grieve and so many days I choose to suffer as well. I could choose not to suffer. I cannot choose not to grieve. For me, grief is love. Grief is the prescription to loving June. To getting better. If I chose not to suffer, it would look like denial, unacknowledgement of my grief, or a common phrase I often use in conversation, “stuffing my grief.” Choosing not to suffer looks like not allowing myself to feel what I feel. It looks like not allowing my tears to fall. It appears like I am harboring grief. When I cry, suffering is emitted through my tears. Afterward, there is less suffering inside of me. When I write, I evoke the suffering. This I have learned since June died. When I write, I suffer greatly, but then a period of grace follows. The rainbow after the storm appears. This is my framework: the framework of a bereaved mother. I offer no promises, but I can offer hope.

If you are looking for inspiration to begin writing as a bereaved parent, but cannot find it on your own, this writing prompt is for you. A slice of my writing workshop I’d like to share with all of you.

Remember: You don’t have to be a writer by trade or by degree to love and enjoy writing. You don’t even have to enjoy writing for it to begin to heal you.

1.     You are forever connected to your child. As a bereaved parent, I invite you to consider a phrase that most all of us have been told/read/heard since our child has died: “Everything happens for a reason.” The is a phrase that no bereaved parent should ever have to be told by someone else. For a moment, let go of beliefs surrounding this topic, and allow yourself to believe that everything does happen for a reason. Write a list of why you are the reason you are the mother or father of your child. 

A Poem: The Lightbulb

I remember the night,

the lightbulb in your room

died.

I don’t remember events,

only you.

You were in my arms.

Furtively, I looked up,

was that a hiss?

Considered replacing it.

Considered asking

someone else

to replace it.

Fortunately, for us, there were

two bulbs

in the ceiling light.

Before bed, each night,

while you sat tethered to

a tube feed

downstairs,

on your play mat,

I’d flip on the light.

I’d tidy up your crib,

fold your blankets,

rearrange stuffed animals.

I’d drape several blankets

over the rails, so you wouldn’t

wake up fearing

shadowy spaces.

I’d do this every night,

in half-light.

Half-light became my life.

For eight months, I thought,

“I’ll change that bulb,” but then,

you died.

The light became synonymous

with my life.

Half of me dead,

the other half alive.

Barely alive.

Ready to burn out,

at any time.

Then,

I gave birth to your baby

brother.

A new life.

It occurred to me,

I didn’t want him to begin his life

in half-light.

I thought about changing the bulb,

that was once in your

room, but now belongs to

him.

A stranger to you, sleeping in your

crib.

Did you two meet, in the in-between?

The between time, after you died,

before he took his first gulp of air.

Every night, I flip the switch of the light

that once belonged to you.

Each time I do, I think about

changing it.

I don’t.

It’s the only constant.

The bridge that closes the gap

between you and your brother.

From your life to his.

From your room to his.

From your crib to his.

It makes time

not so linear,

for a minute we all exist,

together,

when I flip the switch

and on goes

only half of the light.

The Healing Spot

I am crying, my face hidden under a cold lavender-scented towel, in a dimly lit room. There are ten or so other people in the room, but I can’t point them out, despite having spent the last sixty-minutes together. Twice weekly, I come to this humid, hot room to cry, sweat, and cry some more. Usually, in that order.

Tears are the book ends to my yoga practice. I kiss my children goodbye and hustle to my car, tears already forming before I’ve left the daycare parking lot. I let a couple stragglers out as I make the drive. I’m saving the big cry for inside the studio, however. To cry in my car is to risk being seen. There are days this small detail is of no importance, however most days I don’t want to be seen by wandering and curiously judgmental eyes. I don’t want pity cast my way. Crying on the mat is different from crying in the car. I don’t worry about other people watching or accidentally spotting me. For all I know, they come here to cry too.

I drain the well of tears. I physically feel them flow from my insides out. They don’t originate in the tear ducts as most every tear you’ve ever considered might. These tears emerge from my womb. I hope along the way before they exit through the ducts, that they pick up the reckless debris my body has collected and held onto all week like the constant and magnified worries since June’s death. There is no such thing as a small worry anymore. I cry tears in hopes of letting today’s worries go, in hopes that later I’ll spend an extra couple of minutes present in this body where June once lived. I cry because the separation of my body from hers is at times too much to bear. I cry because I know bits of her DNA still float around in my bloodstream. I cry because unless someone tells me otherwise, I believe her bits of DNA are still talking to my bits of DNA. Something I have totally made up, and yet it makes so much sense. A lost translation because although our DNA interacts, there’s no more physical proof of June interacting with the physical proof of me, her Mama. Bits of her and bits of me interact inside my body which leaves me feeling like I must find her on the outside. So I can, too, interact with her. Finding her is not a conscious desire, but a physiological one, one that developed as June was developing in utero. It’s part of the innate inheritance of motherhood. Find your baby when your baby is gone. How can you find your baby when your baby is forever gone? You can’t. My mind knows this, but my body won’t accept the knowing. I shed these very worries onto my mat. It might all sound like lunacy to you, but this is my life.

The yoga studio I attend classes at conveniently moved down the street from daycare a few months ago. Bar none, it has saved my life. I roll out my mat that’s infused with five years of sweat. It’s beginning to disintegrate, leaving navy blue particles all over my body as I press myself firmly into the floor.

When I first arrive, I throw my towel and whatever excess clothing I wore into the studio on the floor in the corner, and lower myself onto the crumbly mat. I like the corner because it feels the hottest. I like the corner because I feel protected. I like the corner because I know that when I am doing a sun salutation and tears are rolling down my face that the wall a foot in front of me won’t notice. I like the corner because I don’t have to look at anyone, not even myself because there exists no mirror. Yet, even in this room, I am guarded. Even in the safest of spaces, I am continually guarded. I am a product of the culmination of all of my life’s experiences. I am the product of a woman who has gruesomely lost her child.

Child’s pose is my first pose. It allows me to stretch the mother parts of me like my hips and my shoulders which carry a thirty-pound toddler around most days. It allows me to close my eyes. It allows for the first tears to form defenselessly. It allows me to be in a space with my thoughts, alone, but not entirely alone because if I wanted to I could tune into the whispering voices around me. I come here on days I am afraid to be by myself. Afraid the thoughts of panic and worry will completely take over and kill me. I give my body and mind to the mat and the ground beneath it. I give my mind to June, the Universe, God, and to the Guides and Angels. I set a prayer of intention for my practice. Intention makes me feel better. It’s the beginning of letting the worries subside. Letting the world melt around me. The beginning of allowing myself to go within, deeply, within. To allow the thoughts to graze me, but not longer penetrate me, until the teacher, speaking to a room, which feels like she’s speaking directly to me, says, “Think of where you are holding on,” and then says, “and think about how you can soften.” I repeat this mantra as I lay with my eyes closed breathing deeply into my diaphragm. When she tells me to think of where I am holding on, there’s one thing that comes to mind, every time. It’s undoubtedly the same, one person, every time. I am holding on to June. It’s no surprise for those of you reading this right now. Of that, I am aware. I don’t need to write it. It’s a given. I am holding onto June. I hold onto June so tightly that sometimes I become twisted and contorted around the idea of her. Wound tightly like an elastic band waiting to snap. Inevitably, I do. I snap. I snap at people in my life, especially the ones I love, including my living children which leaves me low, low, low.

Other days I hold onto June as if I am hanging onto a crescent moon. Those days are some of the most terrifying. If I let go, I will fall into nothingness. Into space. Banished for all eternity, a breathless, floating dead body, never to be recovered. Would I decompose? I think of people who don’t find their missing loved ones bodies. I know there are parents who never find their missing child. We are some of the fortunate ones. We had June’s body. The body that betrayed her. The body my body created to only betray her. These are small examples of where my psychosis surrounding June’s death takes me as I am wound and wound again, clinging to the memory of June. I don’t want to hold on so tightly, but if I let go of June, even just a little bit, I feel closer to death. By holding onto June, I keep her alive and in turn she keeps me alive. She makes life worth living. Which makes the lives of my loved ones surrounding me a tiny bit easier. Maybe even enjoyable. I’d like to think, enjoyable, too. I subscribe to the June newsletter, not because I cannot “get over it” or “let her go”, but because it’s the only way to move forward. I know I have said all of this before, but it’s the metaphorical medication I need a big swig of right now. I am at risk of falling, at risk of letting go to the very thing that is providing me with the energy to continue on, and yet, society is supporting me in letting go. Society wants me to move on. I refuse. I refuse to sweep June under the rug. I refuse to deny myself of feeling everything I feel around the death of my daughter. This is healthy. I know somewhere between the trauma and the psychosis, and the natural flow of energy it takes me to keep June alive, exists the healing spot.

The idea of softening appeals to me for all of the reasons I’ve mentioned. The more distance from June’s death, the dimmer her image becomes. The more difficult it is to remember the contours of her face. A face I had spent hours studying while she slept in the crook of my arm as we sat just the two of us, alone, in the quiet of a hospital room. A face I once knew as well as my own. The separation between us becomes more cutting when I am left with only an image on a screen or scraps of blurred memories and no voice, no mannerisms, no smells. The more time separating me from June makes the pain that much more unbearable. It turns June’s death into a permanence that I am forced to reconcile with again and again. In this unwilling reconciliation I drag my feet like a man bound at the ankles and wrists being forced to walk the plank. A knife is being held to my throat as I balance on the very end of the wooden board. In my periphery, I can see someone tying a weight to where my ankles are bound. My last thoughts as I sink to the bottom of the ocean are of June. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t accept this. I can’t accept that this is a reality. I won’t. I won’t. I won’t. I hate you, world. I hate you, life. I hate you, Universe. God, I don’t know what to say to you anymore. 

How do I soften? I think softening has an implied benefit. It will help to release the pain and to let go, but not in the way of letting June go. Just the pain associated with June’s death. I say, just, as if it’s simple. It’s not simple, but if I find ways of softening June’s death, quite literally, her death, perhaps it will soften the daily blow of the memories surrounding June and her life. Perhaps, every time she enters my mind, the thought of her won’t leave me feeling battered, bloody, bruised. Softening might help me to remember the beauty in June and the beauty she has left me, despite no longer physically being here. Softening would help me to associate the memories of June with happiness. How do I soften around what I am so desperately holding onto, my daughter, who died of cancer? How does one soften that memory?

When I think of June she is as soft as they come. An Angel, wrapped in a warm cashmere blanket, silk feathers for wings. Baby fat to the high heavens. June is soft. June’s disease and death are the antithesis of soft. They are unbearable and harsh. They lurk in shadowy corners waiting to jump out and scare the shit out of you again and again just when you begin to feel some joy, or a bit of relief. They are a Chucky doll under your bed waiting to bite your toes off. The monster in your closet watching you sleep. It’s what that guy sang about in that song, “I Always Feel Like Somebody’s Watching Me.” June’s death is a nagging feeling I can’t shake and every time I’m alone it’s staring me in the face. The death of your child is so overwhelming that your brain doesn’t allow you to process it. Your brain is selective. Your brain only allows you to see what it thinks you can handle. Then it allows you to dream of your deceased child. A brief interaction with June while I sleep. But when I wake up, the reality is my brain watched June die and there was nothing I could do to save her. I had no other tools. Reduced to a helpless bystander, I sat in the front row during June’s death. 

“Think of where you are holding on. Now think about how you can soften,” the yoga instructor repeats.

How do I soften those memories? Time is the enemy. Will time settle its debts with me and give me something back? Or will time continue to take my memories and say it’s enough to suffice, and that we are even? Fuck you, time. I hate you, too.  Still, somebody, please tell me, I want to know, how do I soften? I know without a doubt where I am hanging on, but how do I soften? Why do I feel like June’s death is watching me? Even when I choose not to see it, it sees me.

What I learn in yoga, by turning inside, is that there is no fast track to the continual grief I am experiencing. There is no quick fix. The emotion must flow. If it stays, it becomes stagnant, and other things will fester from it. I could get sick. I cry my tears. I think about what I am holding onto. I cherish that even just my bloody fingertips get to hang from the tip of the moon which, if I steer away from negative thinking, is offering me so much light and life. The mere fact that I get to touch June with my mind, although painfully at times, is worth it.

I am working on softening around the death of June because within softening is healing. When I figure out how to do it, I will let you know. 

June, my love, the love I have once had and the greatest love I could ever lose, you are the love of my life. You are not harsh or cruel. The memories at times are those things because instead of you being here with me, it’s them. The days when the memories take over of you lying sick in a hospital bed, frail and weak, unable to eat, vomiting, and filled with the toxicity that is chemotherapy, I am cursed because the memories cut away at me. They overshadow all of the joy and happiness you continually bring to my life. I am so grateful that I knew you. By holding onto you, I can soften. I can do both. It’s becoming clearer that the answer isn’t about letting you go, it’s about cherishing the little I have left of you and not allowing sadness to take over and temporarily erase it. I have a choice as your mother. I had a choice as your mother when you were diagnosed with cancer. The choice now is no different than it was then. I can give up or I can persevere and be the best mother you’ve ever asked for. We have made it this far and I am still your mother. Why stop now?

Love, It Is Love

“Yours was the first face that I saw.

I think I was blind before I met you.”

First Day of My Life, Bright Eyes

I’ve been knocked around by grief the last few weeks. I haven’t felt the wallop of grief like this in a while, nor did I first acknowledge that it was grief at all. In the period of time before I recognized it to be grief, I thought I was symptomatic of dying. Name the illness, I had it. Name the ache, it was mine. The feeling of impending doom wouldn’t let me alone. I thought my healthy living children were also dying. Another figment of my wildly cruel imagination. I lost my memory, again. I forgot to stock the fridge and to do the laundry, despite both tasks constantly staring me in the face when I chose to not leave my house day after day. My voice echoing in the emptiness of the fridge as I yelled to my children there were no berries for the tenth time of the day. Just as quickly as I closed the fridge, I’d forget we needed food until the next ask occurred (don’t worry, we have plenty of canned goods in the house). Laundry piled high in corners of various rooms in our house. Just as soon as I’d walk into the living room, one of the only rooms free of a laundry pile or strewn clothes, I’d forget about the two weeks worth of dirty clothes stinking up every other room in our house. My husband asked me multiple times a day, “Are you okay? Have you lost your mind? Are you taking drugs?” The drugs question bemused me in my state of stone cold sobriety. I think I am okay. No, I still have my mind. No, I’m not taking drugs. “What kind of drugs?” I asked once. “The ones making you act like you’re on a entirely different planet,” he said. What is going on with me? I wondered. Finally, day fifteen into grief beating me to a pulp, I realized who the culprit was. “Weird,” is all I could think. The constant blow to the head by grief prevented me from forming a further thought.

I don’t count the days since June’s passing, but dates inevitably add up. Throwing me back into the ring forced to face grief. I’m down, I’m up. I’m down, but because of the most recent blow, I can’t get up as quickly. I stay down. I see stars. I close my eyes and slip into an unconscious state where there exists no pain. No death. No me. No my children. No my child who is no longer here. No my child who has died. No dates. Suddenly, I’m conscious, on my two feet, and fighting back, against my will. Fighting for my identity. Fighting for meaning. Fighting for the will to live. It’s too much expended energy, so I succumb. I slump in the ring, surrounded by grief, and instead of sending blows to the head, it disperses itself upon me like a weighted blanked. I can think again, but I can’t react. I am too weighed down. I slip into meditation and allow the thoughts to flow in and out. I stare grief in the eyes. What more do you want from me?

After June died, I purposefully didn’t count the minutes and seconds because they added up to days, and eventually would add up to years. Years from the last time we were physically together. I couldn’t bear the thought. I hated time for being a thief. I gave myself permission to let the counting go.

I know the approximate time June died because I was there. I lived it. I don’t know exactly if that time was 11:04pm or 11:05pm because I was holding her and not paying attention to the clock. When I looked at my watch it said 11:09pm. There was not a doctor or nurse standing in the room to mark the time as they do after attempting life saving measures on a patient. Instead it was a friend or sister that told me. Maybe it was my husband. I don’t remember those details specifically either. For me, June was here and then she wasn’t. Maybe it was 11:05 at night. Time is not of a necessary concern on my long list of concerns. The general time matters I suppose, but I do not apply it meaning and I do not hang from it. It is not a beacon of hope. The time she was here is now gone. Time in relation to June is a sharp contrast of life before death and death after life. To June time does not exist. To me, time in relation to June hurts, so I try to let it go. Is it me letting go of the pain? I think this might be me letting go of the pain, but not before reliving it again.

These last few weeks I’ve allowed myself to travel to that time. The last few days of June’s life. Does it serve me? I cannot know right now. Time, that asshole, will show me one day through the unfolding of life itself. Can it be of any importance to time travel to when June was still alive? The time the word Mama came from her perfect heart shaped mouth. What good is time travel? And yet, I can’t stop myself from boarding the time travel vessel. It takes me back to her where I am forced to acknowledge that she did, in fact, die and that she is, in fact, my child, and that this is, in fact, my life. For a time traveling moment, part of me says, “No way,” in total disbelief. It’s the type of disbelief that merits proof. So, I look for June. In the house. In the car. In the rear view mirror. I travel in time searching for her, but inevitably I end up on the day. The day she passed away. I end with the time where she, her soul, was no longer physically here. Her breath gone. Her heart no longer beating. I end with the time that came after June went away. I end with death.

Where there is an end, there is too a beginning. I’ve thrown this notion in the metaphorical trash a million times. I didn’t feel or see a beginning until well after June died. Again, I am applying time, but time is a loose and abstract construct. Where there is an end, there is a beginning is the only concept of time that serves me. That’s all that matters now. At my core, I believe in a beginning despite the utter rebuke I feel for it after Junes ending. I’ve watched the end come to many things in my life and I’ve watched what grows from the ground where something has died. To grow from the ashes is still to be alive. I feel alive because I feel pain, upset, sadness, anger, heartache, and love. To feel is to be alive in a human body. I am alive. I have begun to live again. Where there is an end, there is a beginning and our family is a testament to just that.

In grief I feel like I am dying, but I know that being knocked down has its purpose. I know that when I am lying flat on my back after grief punches me in the gut that what’s actually dying is the pain. I am letting go of pain. It hurts more to let the pain go than to keep it with me. June will never come back, I know this now. I have come to terms with the loss of June being permanent, but still, it physically hurts me to write. When I am knocked to the ground, I lay in hopes of the earth absorbing a little bit more of my pain. After I’ve been down for a while, like I have these past couple of weeks, I begin to realize I will be stronger if and when I get up. June is not pain, June is love. I am not letting June go, I am letting pain go. The love I have for June will only continue to grow like the flowers after the earth has singed.

I look for June all around me. I look for love. I see her in the evening before the sun sets in the purple and pinks of a cotton candy sky. I see her in the gigantic tree across from my kitchen window which I admire as I stand and wash endless dishes at the sink. As I walk into the house I stop and I admire June in the flock of geese squawking overhead as they make their journey home. She makes me grateful I am home. I feel the love. I admire June in the breeze that wraps itself around me. I admire June in the earth that I am so fortunate to walk with my own two feet. When I walk I remember what it feels like to have once had June be a physical part of my life. The contrast of her no longer being here gives me overwhelming appreciation for a few steps. I know what it’s like to love and be loved. I know what it’s like to adore and be adored. Is there any deeper love than that of a child for the person she firsts opens her eyes to on this earth? I was the first person June saw when she opened her eyes on earth. I was given the honor of gazing firstly into her eyes. Our souls meeting as humans for the first time. I admire June with my children in the stars at night. “Which one do you think is Junie, Mama?” my oldest daughter asks me. “I’m not sure hunny, that one or that one,” as I point, “which one do you think?” I ask. “I think that one, Mama. It’s the brightest star.”

We stand admiring you under the infinite galaxy, us, tiny little specks from the floor of the earth. We stand and see all of your beauty. As we stare at you, our brightest star, you stare back in wonderment of our beauty. We are eternally your family. Your soul has left this realm, but our souls will forever be entwined. I’ll continue to look for you, June, in the beauty that surrounds us. I’ll remind your brother and sister as they grow older that energy does not cease to exist, it only takes a different form. I’ll pray that one day, they too feel you wrap your arms around them in a warm fall breeze or that when the waves lap the sandy beach, they feel you're calm. That they will always turn to you when they feel lost in this life, for you are love, beckoning us with your brightest star.

Choice

I’m talking about fear. Fear of something terrible happening. Fear that lives beneath the surface. Fear you do not consciously fathom becoming reality. Tangible fear. You may ask, how can fear be tangible? Fear becomes tangible when it embodies a human. Can you reach out and touch me? So, too, can you touch fear.

I am no stranger to fear. Is anyone? Formative years of my life were plagued by fear. Wasn’t everyone’s? I’d imagine the chronically late person picking me up from practice lying half-dead in the middle of the road somewhere. Fear is a child who has been forgotten more than once.

Fear infiltrated my life in other ways. At eight years old I developed a fear of rabies after watching the headliner on the evening news: Stay Inside, Human Rabies. From that day forward, I’d sprint off the bus down the long driveway to our house in the woods, breathless by the time I reached the front door. In one-fell-swoop, I’d jam the key into the lock and close the door behind me turning to scan the field across from the house. No animals, today. “You know where the guns are if I am not here,” my stepfather said the day he taught me and my sister how to shoot a rifle. For protection. From wild animals. The ones that had rabies. Had he intended to drain our fear by replacing it with control? A sense of control staves off fear, yet the baseline of fear never goes away. The, what if?

Nightmares of a controlled situation turned fruitless haunted me. In the nightmare, the foaming mouthed coyotes are charging the house. No one is home. The eight-year-old me just ran off the bus through the front door to the cabinet of rifles I know how to use. I’ve forgotten how to load the bullets. The guns are useless to me now unless I figure out how to load the bullets. In my dream, I realize control is made-up. Have I known this since I was eight? Adults in control of a situation are just pretending. I load the bullets.

As I grew older, I’d try to control my fears by reading about them. I’d analyze the literature. I went to work in the field of my fears. When I feared my families alcohlism, I tended a bar. When I feared I’d end up a spinster, I planned weddings. When I feared my loved ones were going to die, I became a nurse. When I feared my love ones dying of cancer, I applied to graduate school to become a nurse practitioner so to one day become an oncology nurse researcher. Then, I found the tumor. In that order. The tumor that grew inside of June.

When June was diagnosed with cancer, there existed one treatment option, which for June was all wrong. It didn’t work. Loading the gun meant nothing because the bullets were blanks. There were rabid coyotes already in the house.

In the wake of June’s death, I asked myself, “Could I have done something differently for June?” I lived under the assumption that we didn’t do everything possible because June died. Because she’s not playing upstairs with her sister and brother right now. Because although we had weaponry and ammunition, it didn’t kill the cancer. 

My stepfather didn’t keep blanks in the cabinet, but in the nightmare that’s all that existed. It was too late. I loaded the gun anyway. There was no other option. The impact of being hit with the blank bullet was better than not being hit at all. I might survive the attack. I kept firing. What was my other option? To just give up?

I imagine my eight-year-old self standing in front of the glass cabinet deciding which rifle to use and which box of bullets to load which are, unbeknownst to me, all blanks. I imagine the oncologist sitting at their desk, in front of a stack of textbooks and a laptop, flipping through pages in search of the treatment option for June. The oncologist knows there is only one treatment option, but continues to review the literature anyway. The coyotes are encroaching. The tumor is growing. I load the gun. The oncologist confers with their team. They make their way to the little room we sit in as a family awaiting a choice. Which will it be? Life or death? We don’t get to decide. The only choice we have is how we will react to the loss of control when we are presented with one option.

What if? I feared.

What if the treatment doesn’t work?

What if the toxic treatment nearly kills June?

What if the cancer returns?

What if these bullets are blank?

But, what if?

“You can’t live in the ‘what if’, Taryn,” my husband said to me more than once during June’s treatment.

The big what if that I want an answer to is this: What if it all worked out? What if the bullets were real? What if the treatment worked? What if there was more than one option? June might have lived.

I can imagine that we had it right all along. I can imagine the oncologists did, too. I can imagine June lived to see her second birthday. I do imagine what our lives would have been like if it all worked out. 

I also wonder if this is what life looks like when it does all work out. The life I live today. What if everything is going to be okay?

To whom does that choice belong?

Town Council Meeting

On the evening of September 30th, as the last few waking hours of September were upon me, I felt a pull back into September. Time travel into the past. A pull I can now control and less often allow myself to succumb to, but it was in this pull which had enveloped me, I realized I didn’t want September to end. I let it take me. Who have I become this month? Here are the highlights:

In the month of September, on a warm day, in front of a line of cars waiting for the man holding the sign to turn it from STOP to SLOW, I jabbed two metal stakes into my lawn attached to a sign that read “September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month”. 

In the month of September, I survived my thirty-eighth birthday, June’s third birthday, and Bella’s thirteenth birthday, in that order. 

In the month of September, two days before June’s birthday, I went before the Town Council and accepted a signed proclamation which I had submitted in August deeming September as Childhood Cancer Awareness Month in the town of which I live. I delivered a speech in honor of June and all the children and their families who are impacted by Childhood Cancer to raise awareness and bring our community’s attention to the devastation childhood cancer is having on it’s children and families.

In the month of September, I shared the Town Council footage with anyone and everyone I love who would listen to me. Now, I’d like to share it with you.

My speech is approximately three minutes long, however the video itself is closer to nine minutes. My only ask is that you watch until the very end, and to please share with anyone and everyone you love.

On Your Birthday, June

Today is June’s third birthday.

Happy Birthday, Junie. 

On a whim, I decided to buy your birthday cake. I happened to be out doing errands, and although it didn’t make the cut on my list of things to do, it suddenly became the only thing I needed to do. Had I thought about buying a cake, I might have planned it. After perusing the options in the glass refrigerator, taking into account what your sister would like and what your daddy likes, I settled on a two-tiered red velvet cake with vanilla buttercream frosting.

I asked the woman behind the counter to please write June on the cake. She asked if I wanted to write Happy Birthday, June. I hadn’t mentioned it was June’s birthday, and writing Happy Birthday, June was not something I had considered.

I hadn’t realized I was purchasing a cake until the moment I stepped foot in the bakery. I typed the bakery name in my GPS and allowed the voice to blindly take me to a bakery I’d never visited before. Suddenly, I was pulling into the bakery parking lot. Before I could digest what was happening, I found myself standing across from a woman behind a glass counter filled with pastries.

A line of people started to form behind me and was growing longer. I could feel the pressure intensifying as I tried to decide how to leave the bakery with something we all wanted. The truth was, what I wanted I could not find in a bakery, in a glass case, or in a cake. What we all want we will never have. I’m forced to settle. I try to decide. How do you know what you want if you’ve never considered it? I could not decide. “I don’t know,” I said to the woman. Her eyes flitted to the couple standing behind me, and then to the couple behind them. “I think just June is okay.” “Okay,” she said as she bent down to lift the cake in her arms and bring it out back. “Actually. Could you also write Happy Birthday for me?” There it was, the eye-roll, accompanied by a sigh. I was asking for this. Or was I? Tears welled in my eyes. Don’t you know, June won’t be eating her birthday cake? Of course I didn’t ask for this. None of this makes any sense to me.

“Will that be all?” I knew it wasn’t all. I had to tell her. Before I could decide if my decision making skills were flawed, I heard myself saying, “I couldn’t decide whether or not to write Happy Birthday because this cake is for my daughter who died.” Tears, lots of them, run down my face.

“Oh,” her eyes soften. “Can I bring you anything else?” 

“A lemon bar,” because what the hell.

She disappears to the back of the kitchen with the cake. I walk to the far end of the pastry case, where I’m out of the way. I notice water and cups free for the taking. I fill a cup with a few sips to quench my sandpaper tongue. It’s as if after I’ve spent hours crying, and the well of tears is dried up, the reserve is the moisture from my mouth. I imagine the tears I’m crying being freshly squeezed from my tongue. None of this makes any sense to me.

“What do you think?” she says as she returns, displaying the cake in her hands.

“Happy Birthday, June!” it reads. 

The exclamation point. It’s not right. It’s out of place. There’s nothing emphatic about June’s third birthday. Why is there an exclamation point? I want to ask her. At that moment, I knew June was the more appropriate option. 

“Beautiful,” I say because I have already burdened this woman enough.

“I can ring you up here.” 

The line of people now wraps around the bakery. After I pay, I step to the area where the tables are and people are sitting eating pastries, drinking hot coffees. I watch the woman carefully place the cake in a box, taping each side closed. I wonder where this woman’s help is as people chaotically meander about the pastry case.

“Here you go,” she says.

“Did I purchase a lemon bar?” If not, I was happy to leave.

“Oh! Yes, you did. Sorry, let me get it for you.”

“It’s okay, I just threw a lot at you.” I say.

She stops. She looks at me. I see her contemplating a response. “No, you didn’t.” 

She hands me the bar. I lift the cake off the counter. I walk outside into the warm sunshine. 

I don’t know if what I did was right. At times, I don’t know what the right thing to do is. I have your birthday cake and that’s all that matters. Now we can, not-so-emphatically, but rather, gently, lovingly, and in the most unaccepting way, celebrate your day. 

As I drive home, I decide I’m going to scrape the exclamation point off the end and eat it. I’m not sure exactly why I have to do this, but then again, you’re not here to celebrate your third birthday, and none of this makes any sense.