Grief Made Me Time-Travel

“I haven’t felt this alive since June died.”

Old friends in a high school hallway on the night of our 20th reunion — photo belongs to author

In the months after our daughter June died from neuroblastoma, I sat in a plastic chair on our stone patio, in the far corner of the yard facing the wood line behind our house. It was spring in Maine. With exception of the birds chirping and the occasional passing car, it was quiet.

The most important people in my life don’t exist in these memories, such as my daughter, who was three years old at the time, or my husband who was likely working. June was gone. The only person I can truly account for on those days was my son who repeatedly stretched his legs and pressed on my ribcage in the tight quarters my belly had become.

I sat alone in despair, on the patio, watching the still boughs waking from a long Maine winter, waiting for a sign. 

I’d once read that the relationship between a human and a tree is reciprocal. A tree admires the human as much as the human admires the tree. It’s an unsung energetic exchange. I admired the trees. I begged them to notice me. A fragment of their energy might heal me in ways I knew I couldn’t quite understand. 

Before June died, I’d rarely thought about the trees. 

With both feet on the ground, I studied them while waiting for a cardinal to appear. The cardinal’s fleeting visit signified I’d go on living. A glimpse of a red wing was enough to carry me through the next few hours, into the evening, to bedtime. It signaled that June was there, watching, and waiting. She had never left. It reminded me to continue speaking to her even though she had gone, and to not allow my hopelessness to cloud my sight of what mattered most. 

I scoured the branches for the hopeful red until the little veins in my eyes bulged and the whites burned.

The cardinal reminded me that I was still June’s mother and that in an infinitely existing dimension, she needed me. She needed me to be strong for her older sister and younger brother, who also needed me. I’d like to think June needed me to be strong for them. I’d really like to think that somewhere, even in a far away space, she still needed me to be strong for her, too. 

………………….

The veil between life and death is like a pane of glass. It might be frosted for some on earth, but once you’ve made it to the other side, you can see for all eternity. There is no future or past. Everything exists at once, you just can’t ever go back. You must move forward. Maybe June and I existed together on the patio. June in her forward life. At the occurrence of the thought, I’d stop crying, remembering she couldn’t come back. That my pain may be causing her pain. Life and death were divided by a pane so paper thin that it had to be hand blown. 

There is no greater gravitational pull than that of being needed by your children. 

Here or not. 

………………….

When June was alive, I promised I would never leave her. As a parent, you make these sort of ridiculous promises. You don’t question where they originate, but it was likely in your bones because that’s where you feel it when you close your eyes. Nothing could ever come between you and your child. Nothing, I vowed to June, would separate me from her as we sat together on a hospital gurney. I made these promises to June, knowing I would some day die, and be forced to leave her. We would deal with that later though, like, forever later. 

Although, forever was not the forever I’d learned about as a child. When June had cancer, forever became eighteen months, the age June was when she died. Forever dwindled to months, then weeks, then days. Forever was diminished to one minute — the last minute of June’s life. 

There was no permanence to forever. Turned out, it was not exempt from the confines of time, but as long as June and I were both alive, I knew I would never leave her. That much was true. 

These hollow promises that I’d learned as a young mother, after June became sick, were never implied, but as long as this isn’t our only life, it’s a promise I intend to keep.

………………….

In my uncomfortable body, in an even more uncomfortable world, I sat in searing quiet. At one and the same time, I was on the precipice of life and the precipice of death. 

That’s when I fetched my Bluetooth speaker and began to scroll. I knew exactly where I needed to go. I blasted music that had nothing to do with my sadness, but everything to do with my grief. 

Scarface, Q-Tip, T.I., and Jurassic 5 boomed explicits over the speaker. Common, Nelly Furtado, and of course, Nelly, polluted the spring air. I played a Roots song called “Right On” over fifty-times in one month on Spotify after June died. Chingy came on from time to time, bringing me some comfort. I can’t think of an artist less ‘comforting’ than Chingy, but there we were. Me, Chingy, the trees, and the coveted cardinal. 

I time-traveled, floating on the beats of the music, over the ripples of an existential crisis, and deep into the black well of grief where I surfaced to find myself reliving my high-school experience. This is likely an unsettling concept for most, but not for me. After your child dies of cancer, high school looks pretty shiny and good. I relived conversations, and flirtations. I pondered interactions that I’d had with old teachers. I tried to put names to unforgettable faces. 

………………….

In what I now refer to as my ‘high school phase of grief’, I relived the past to temporarily fill the hole. To get through one day, or maybe just make it to bedtime.

All while, waiting for a visit from the cardinal. I’d weep when there wasn’t one. I’d sob when one appeared. 

Sometimes, it rained and I’d sit without an umbrella. Mostly, the March and April days were cold and raw. The raindrops on the swollen, exposed areas of my pregnant body reminded me that I could still feel. That my nerve endings still worked.

………………….

Nerves became a serious topic after June was diagnosed with cancer. The cancer grew in June’s nerve cells. Maybe June’s nerve cells never functioned properly. I know they caused her a lot of pain and suffering. Phrases like, ‘on my last nerve’ and ‘quieting the nervous system’ are like a blackout curtain. 

At the mere mention of a nerve these days, I’m out.

………………….

Through the music, I reconnected to a life that had slipped away without me ever acknowledging it.

I longed to return to that time. A time before marriage and kids. A time filled with micro-heartbreaks of friendships or relationships ending. A time before June, but most importantly, the time before she existed and then, ceased to exist.

It was at the woodline I began dialing old friends numbers to check in. 

“That’s what you’re good at Taryn, bringing people together,” a friend once said. “You’re the glue.” It felt like a burden then. It feels like a gift now. One I know I cannot waste because of how short this life is.

“La vida es tan larga, Taryn,” my Chilean sister Isabel said after I complained to her about how short life felt. Life is so long. “There is so much more living and loving to be done. So many more layers to uncover.” 

A refreshing perspective. One I needed to hear. One I think all fellow bereaved parents need to hear when they are hanging on the edge of their child’s death, waiting for the fall.

………………….

One day, I woke up and the luster of reliving my teenage years had subsided. It became an afterthought, so I let it go, but the nostalgia that filled me after losing June, remained. 

I often wondered if other mom’s also time-traveled after losing their babies. 

………………….

Two years after June died, I received an e-mail about my 20th high school reunion. 

Eagerly, I RSVP’d. 

………………….

The night of the reunion, a friend and I pulled up to the clubhouse on a small golf course where most every Junior High dance of our lives had been held. It hadn’t changed in almost thirty years. 

I wore embellished shoes that sparkled in the setting sun as we walked from the car to the main entrance. 

The room was bare with the exception of a group of tables boasting plastic table cloths. There was no DJ. The waitstaff, which I had imagined passing hors d’oeuvres, were nonexistent. There was a blank screen, the same one that I had presented my senior humanities project on, that hung at the front of the room. It felt promising. There was a laptop in the corner behind it playing music from the early 2000’s over a large speaker. There was a cash bar in the far back. 

“We just took shots in the car,” an old friend said to me as we stood around a table writing our names on tags.

Swathes of people stood mingling in the warm afternoon light. I stepped from one face to the next, embracing those I hadn’t seen in two decades. 

The lights were never dimmed. We never danced. We barely ate. There were no superlatives or slideshows.

But the set up and scenery didn't matter. What the event lacked was made up with the fact that hardly no one ever sat down. The three hours flew by. Hugs, laughs, and tears were shared with the familiar faces of the past. 

If nostalgia had an enemy, it would be the clock signaling the end of an occasion. I said goodbye to faces I’ll likely not see for a long while.

………………….

For what felt like a second, I was back in the bosom of my high school compadres. I showed up as myself without regret and hid nothing of who I had become after all these years. I am a culmination of life’s losses, but I didn't show up in emptiness. I felt full as I shared about June. When people asked me what it is I do, I explained that I write about her and what it’s like to lose a child to cancer. I write for other mothers, like me, who feel so alone when their child dies. For mothers who are searching for a story, or just proof that another human endured childhood cancer and lived to see another day.

Several old friends shared with me that they followed my blog about June. We cried when they said it had helped them cope with their own child loss and struggles. I could see and feel the losses in my friends. For a sliver of a second, our losses fused and we weren’t alone. 

For three hours, life then and life now, coexisted. 

For one night, I time-traveled. 

………………….

After the event, we returned to a friend’s house where we sat at a round table reminiscing of the evenings offerings. At the end of the night when we had sufficiently analyzed every situation and counted every missing person who didn’t attend, the topic of meeting each other, twenty-six years before, arose. 

“I remember the first time I met you,” a friend said. 

It was then, I knew I wasn’t the only one who time-traveled. 

The grief I carried for June after losing her, pulled me back to high school, and likely saved my life. At the time, I couldn’t understand it, but after the reunion it’s much clearer to me now.

Grief and nostalgia are so intricately entwined. Grief isn’t solely about a major loss like my loss of June. It’s bigger than that. It’s about the series of losses we all experience in our lives. There is so much grief in life’s transitions, such as that into adulthood. Nostalgia is the magic dust we sprinkle which has the power to bring us back. To momentarily erase the grief.

We all have it stashed somewhere on our person. 

You know, the dust.

On a separate note, I’ve been left wondering, can you call it time travel when it feels as if you’ve never left?

That’s the way June feels. 

That’s the way it felt to be with my compadres on the night of our 20th high school reunion.