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.