My Daughter Died and This Is How I Honor Her Every Day

“Instead of accepting the death of my daughter, I keep her near”

A brick dedicated to June on summer island — photo by author

“Shhh,” my brain whispers. “She might be here. Keep looking. Find her.” 

I am on an island off the coast of Maine sitting in my sister’s living room on an oversized chair. My three and six year old children are in the kitchen around the corner with their Auntie. I can hear their laughter and thudding feet as my eyes continue to scan the living room. 

I’m looking for my daughter June who did not travel with us on our trek from Maryland to the island. She never had the opportunity to visit the island because she died from neuroblastoma three years ago. 

I pause in one of the corners of the room where a bright white light filtering through thin cotton curtains catches my attention.

During the day, it is not only my eyes that are drawn to the light. It is my entire being including my soul which aches inside my chest cavity to find June. The light is where my 18-month-old daughter now resides. 

Since her death, I’ve come to rely on one simple and comforting thing: no matter the distance I travel, light is light. 

For the first few days of every trip our family takes, I leave my pain behind. Eventually, it finds its way back into my every day life once the newness of a different environment wears away. 

That is when I remember I have practiced sitting with my pain. Unlike the environment, it is not new. I know it intimately. I cannot escape it because the escape is more dangerous than the embrace. I can survive the embrace. 

I sit on the oversized couch remembering how to find my way back to the light.

………………….

The sun sets and there is darkness, too. After June died, darkness dressed in its quiet cloak hovered over my wilted body as I laid in bed. 

I refer to those quiet times after losing June before sunrise and after the sun set as the shoulder moments of the day. It was in those transitional periods when I was forced to listen to my breath, an audible suffering. When, without distraction, my thoughts boomed so loudly they became deafening. 

Today, I am hopeful as I slip into the sheets and turn off the light. I embrace the last few moments of my day’s wakeful consciousness by opening my eyes wider and staring deeply into the ceilings once abysmal darkness. 

“She’s here. She’s all around me,” my knowing challenges my logical brain.

Since June passed away, I have developed an overwhelming awareness of my ability to create my internal and external realities.

It’s a gift June left me.

Since learning the fragility of this one life, I don’t let a moment pass me by. I am selfish now. Each one I claim as mine and then fill it, jam packed, until it’s bursting at the seams with every thing I love, including June. 

For this reason, no one can argue with me that June doesn’t exist around me because I’ve created a space where she does in both the lightness and the darkness. Those are my guaranteed ‘today-moments’ with June. 

I’ve seized them as mine and injected them with her.

My logical brain sneakily seeps into my knowing without fail. If she is here, then I should be able to see her, right? “Find your way back to her,” my brain, influenced by every mothering cell in my body, persists. 

It is guaranteed that June and I will find our home within each other again one day, but not today. So instead, I search the air and the empty spaces of the rooms where I sit. 

Instead of accepting the death of my daughter, I keep her near. 

It is the loneliest and emptiest of spaces where I find her and I remember everything will be alright. There is nothing more to fear. 

………………….

When I look for her our separation becomes palpable. Still at times, unbearable. 

Sometimes in the darkness, late at night, there is a feeling I abandoned June. A feeling I am abandoning myself. 

It arises as a deep aching that travels through my bones connecting the constellation of my body where it temporarily stops in my joints and is stored. The stars of my joints burn brightly with inflammation.

Ironically, grief also makes certain aspects of living more tolerable. What’s nagging knee pain when I have my life?

………………….

How did I lose a part of me? My brain wants to know. Losing myself when June was diagnosed with cancer makes sense. Feeling as if my entire existence evaporated after she passed away, does too.

But losing June? 

My children, while completely independent of me, I find in a crowd and say, “This one’s mine.”

I introduce them to a group of strangers who ask, “Which kids are yours?”

Where are you June? My soul is asking.

………………….

In today’s society, I am forced to casually lose my daughter over and over again when I am asked trivial questions like “How many kids do you have?” 

I respond with two because it feels like less of a burden on the person who asked. Therefore, less of a burden on me. But then, in front of a crowd of strangers and with little support, I lose June all over again. 

Subtracting June from my life’s equation when she is already gone reduces me to the negative. It’s unfair. 

It’s all one big confusing mess. 

I am a mother aching to speak my truth to a world that couldn’t possibly comprehend nor (let’s be brutally honest) want to hear it.

………………….

Our children grow, a slow, then fast separation from our wombs. Our bodies a temporary hotel of nourishment and comfort. 

Then, for the most unfortunate of parents, there comes the tragic, unforeseen and permanent separation. The one people often don’t discuss openly. Instead, it is whispered amongst mothers over cocktails as they tongue the last bit of bacon out the backs of their molars before sipping their dirty martinis while their husbands finish the last nine holes of golf. 

Bacon wrapped scallops weren’t the best idea, one mother thinks, as she notices a drop of grease on her crisp white embroidered lapel. 

“Kids get cancer,” another mom says in disbelief, “like it’s something that actually happens to people.”

“So tragic.”

“I feel so terrible for her.”

“How does she continue living? I feel like I would die. I’d just give up.”

“I know. I would do the same. How do you recover from something like that? I never could.”

………………….

I am the woman and mother they’re gossiping about. The one who lost her child to cancer. The woman forced to survive a scorched earth while at times desperately approaching people appearing to be holding out water cups only to find they are empty.

I am not a fly on the wall so I cannot say these exact words have been spoken, but I speak from my truth. Everything I’ve written above has been said directly to my face which leads me to believe it has also been whispered behind a closed door. 

“Kids get cancer, like it’s something that actually happens to people.”

“So tragic.”

“I feel so terrible for you.”

“How do you continue living? I feel like I would die. I’d just give up. You’re so strong.”

“How do you recover from something like that? I never could.”

It’s hard to be the spectacle. 

………………….

So, I look for June. She saves me in ways I was unable to save her. 

By now, you think I’ve lost my mind, but what if I told you finding June is one of my favorite moments of everyday in my new life? It helps me to be calm and sit with the discomfort of her being gone. It helps me to stay present in my body. To love my living children. 

When I am lucky, June finds me. She send me the signs I need to keep going. The number 22. The hummingbird floating outside my window as I sit and drink my morning coffee. Her birthdate tattooed on a lobster boat (922). 

9/22 — June’s birthday #’s on a lobster boat

On days that I don’t receive the signs, I create the moment with June. I meet her here on this page. I channel the love I cannot physically pour into her through hugs and kisses into fumbling through words and thesauruses to find a better way to explain just how much she still means to me. 

………………….

One chaotic day, during the lowest of my lows, I created a safe space to connect with her in my closet. 

Today, I walk into it and shut the door. I sit in an upholstered floral parlor chair that I dragged up from the basement dinging the freshly painted wall. (Another thing that is pretty low on the grief-ometer is chipped paint). 

The chair sits under the window between my dresser and shelving. I keep the shades closed, but the room holds a dim light. It’s so quiet there. Inside the closet, I can’t hear the voices of my three and six year old children who are likely screaming, might be fighting, telling Alexa to turn the music up, or just playing jovially together. They know where to find me. I tell them before I disappear. 

Sometimes, I sit in the closet with my feet firmly planted on the carpet and thunder booms loudly outside of my window.

“Hi, June,” I say.

Let me ask you something: If you were me, what would it take for you to live every day after watching your child slowly die from cancer?

You must get creative to appreciate this one life after experiencing tragedy.

I close my eyes and rest my palms facing upward on my knees which I decided to cross. I sink into the back of my body, traveling inward between my spine and esophagus, just behind my heart. 

I find June in my heart.

After she died, people used to tell me she lived in my heart. I’d wince. What does that even mean? I’d think. Do they see her there? Is that supposed to be comforting? A pang of resentment because the vastness of the ocean of misunderstanding between us became evident.

Fast forward three years and I find her in my heart. I can always feel her there. It’s usually where I go first when I am looking for her just after I close the closet door and sit down in my parlor chair.

I stop briefly and feel around for activity. Mostly there is pain. But June lives there, so I try to let there also be love.

“Hi, June,” I whisper.

I sit like this for five or so minutes and get comfortable with my thoughts. I try to let them flow out of me which is almost easy to do, like water cascading down a mountain. There is little resistance as the thoughts flow out and away from me. They’re meaningless. Thoughts of what I will make for dinner. How I will fit in my workout. When I will finished folding laundry. 

Trivial stuff after losing a child.

Sometimes, I turn on music and meditate. Other times, when the thoughts are more persistent, I play a guided meditation to help me move forward. 

I pray. I pray for the desire to continue to live. I pray for my living children’s health. I pray that June will visit. I pray that one day I will meet her again. I know we will never know one another as the exact people we once were. Deep sorrow pours from body down the rocky cliffs. 

June is gone. Her body as it once was is gone. Proof exists in her ashes which sit on the dresser beside me. 

My eyes are closed, I’m trying to drop into a meditation as I picture her delicate skin and tiny white front teeth. Her blue eyes. Lashless lids. Heart-shaped lips. Her delicate fingertips with their dainty nails I once refused to cut out of fear of accidentally harming and putting her at risk for infection. 

At this point in my mind’s eye, I can almost see June. There is light inside of me that has shifted from immense pain to curiosity. 

I try to recreate her face. The one that once stared so innocently back into her Mama’s eyes.

I pray again and ask this time that God and the Universe allow for me to remember June organically. Not the June from the photos that I scroll at the end of each day. Not the June in a frozen snapshot or video, but really, remember her. To conjure a candid moment that I haven’t forgotten. But it seems these days the moments I remember are the ones from the photos.

I was so afraid of June dying that I documented almost every minute of every day of her entire life. I’m grateful to have captured it with a lens. 

From the chair, I pray that she will visit me again.

And she does, but the new June is a ball of light floating toward me in a dream. A bubble hovering over my son’s crib in the stillness of the night. An orb on the ceiling as I fall asleep. It’s never June’s perfectly outlined jaw or gentle eyes. 

How can I recreate June looking at me? I plead with the closet, the room, the skies. 

The thunder subsides.

Tears fall down my cheeks and onto my lap.

Every day, the new me meets the new June. 

How will she appear today? I wonder each morning I open my eyes.

My body, its energy, its cells, will never stop looking for the perfect being that was once a growing part of me. Nor will my brain tell it to stop. This is life after losing a child and I’ve been through the worst so I call the shots now. I create my internal and external realties. 

Both, I choose to fill with June.