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?