Finding Happiness
Yesterday, I walked by the Echo which sits between the toaster and the blender on my kitchen counter. Normally, it displays the time and temperature with an icon to reflect the weather like the sun, but this time it said, “Smoke Daddy’s Brisket”. I stared at the screen. I was on my way back to the sink to return the strainer I emptied in the garbage. One of my daughter’s favorite things to do. She gently and lovingly taps it on the inside of the trash can liner, meticulously eliminating every bit of shredded cheese, every crumb, and every last strawberry stem. I don’t have time for that, or the patience, so I slam it against the trash can, and rinse the rest down the drain. Now, I’m staring at the Echo with a strainer half-full of soggy wet food dripping down my arm, in complete disgust.
Alexa has been known to write fairly offensive messages on the screen of my Echo, however this particular one eclipses the rest. Not only because it was utterly insulting, what about Mommy’s Brisket? But because it forced me to openly acknowledge the guilt I have been suppressing since June died. Once in my life, I had been a good wife. Once I had enjoyed cooking. Once I didn’t mind cleaning. I actually liked vacuuming until June got sick and we did it every day as part of our routine, killing time before the neverending hours of the day killed us. Then one day I woke up and she was gone, and my passion for the roles I’d once fulfilled were gone too. Now it’s been a little over a year since she died, and some things I used to enjoy have started to return, like my short term memory. I remember things again, more often than not. It’s a convenience more than an enjoyment. I can retain information. I can study for an exam and pass. My memory is intact. Sort of a relief because it was gone for a long, long time. Other things have yet to return, like my love of cooking for my family.
Nevertheless, I spend the majority of time when I am home and awake, in the kitchen. Emptying lunch boxes before they get moldy, scrubbing the endless million bits of water and baby bottles with a bottle brush before they, too, grow mold. Flicking curdled lumps of milk out of the tip of the bottle nipple with the tiny brush that unscrews from the bottom of the bottle brush. Inevitably, I always bend and break it. Wiping out the refrigerator which somehow is always filled with my or my daughter’s hair. How is the refrigerator a vortex for hair? I spend mornings and evenings bathing my kids in the kitchen sink, so I don’t have to do the backbreaking work of bending over a bathtub to wash my daughter's long, extremely tangled hair. I only do it once a week because it takes forty-five minutes from start to finish. Doing it once a week is likely where my problem begins and ends. First we apply the shampoo and perform a solid scalp scrub to free the sand and dirt from the previous week's preschool playground adventures. Next, the conditioner, which needs to sit in her wrapped hair on the top of her head for at least fifteen minutes if we are going to have any chance of brushing out the knotty dreads that have formed in the back. Finally, the painful wet brushing. It’s not painful for her, the wet brush is a miracle tool. The wet brush has saved my hair brushing relationship with my daughter which was on the fritz for many years. The wet brush allows me to place bristles on her head. It’s the act of me using the wet brush that’s painful. Instead of ripping through the snarls, as I’d much prefer, it gently glides over and around them, which results in me working on one patch of tangled hair for ten minutes. At the end of it, my right hand, arm, and brain throb. But that’s okay because at least for those ten minutes, she played in the sink with her dolls. She only screamed once, and never tried to push or swat me away.
The rest of my time in the kitchen I spend packing and unpacking lunches, making various meals, several at one mealtime for different people, plus endless snacks in between for the kids. I wipe up crumbs off the kitchen counter ten times a day which fall from thin air.
Sometimes, I do things I enjoy in the kitchen like stand at the kitchen counter and write. I like to do all of my newspaper reading in the corner of the kitchen, near the medicine cabinet, while my family is in the living room playing games or watching television. I sneak off to the corner, where no one can see me, and peruse the local paper before hearing “Mama! Can I have some strawberries?” Perfect, I am conveniently leaning on the refrigerator. “Sure, hunny, one minute!” Which buys me thirty more seconds to finish the article I’m reading. I spend a lot of time complaining to husband how I no longer enjoy cooking, but do it anyway because people in our house need to eat. Maybe this is where Alexa gets the hairbrained idea I should smoke a brisket. Course I should! I live in my kitchen, where mom’s dutifully smoke things! As if I even knew how to smoke something other than a cigarette. Alexa, what makes you assume I know how to smoke something? You have no way to track my tobacco sales from age sixteen to twenty-six, sorry, that was before your time. I don’t smoke anything.
The kitchen is the room I live in in our house. If the kitchen is neat and tidy, the rest of the house can be a dumpster, and I'm happy when my head hits the pillow at night. If there’s a sliver of a grape or a peanut butter spoon in the sink when I wake up, God help me. I equate the cleanliness of my kitchen to the level of happiness I will achieve when I wake up for the day. If the sink is empty, but hasn’t been scrubbed out from last night's dinner, I'm starting out at a ninety–five percent. If there are dishes that magically appeared overnight, remove another ten-percent, and I am starting my day at eighty-five percent.
The morning after the evening June died, I woke up and I felt zero percent. Zero percent alive. Zero percent happy. The same percentage I imagine one feels when they no longer want to live. I imagine this is what it feels like to die from a broken heart. To flatline from grief. I’d never heard of someone dying from grief, but maybe I’d be the first. Although, I figured there had to be more, so I looked it up. Google didn’t mention others, but told me the emotion of grief can be linked to cardiac damage. I believe Google because I can feel grief wrapping itself around my heart and it hurts. I can feel a reminiscent charge of energy that still illuminates my heart, but as it turns out it’s only the static energy left over from the last couple years of suffering. It’s an energy I’ve tried so hard to eliminate before it kills me, but it sticks to my insides like a plaque. My heart wants to stop pumping blood because it knows June’s heart no longer could. A couple of paddles to the chest, a futile attempt to bring me back, would do nothing, but shock me into a deeper level of despair, loneliness, and hopelessness. I spent every day half-alive in this dark place for months and months after June died. Every person around me inadvertently reminded me of how very much alone I was. How no one could ever truly imagine or understand what it was like to lose a child to cancer.
My belly continued to expand despite how lifeless I felt. It reminded me of why I had to claw myself out of this dark hole, eventually. If I couldn’t find a reason to live within myself that would tether me to this earth, I needed to find an anchor outside of my body. My children were the anchors.
I opened my heavy eyelids on a bitterly cold March morning, and stared at the bedroom ceiling. We had been up all night with my older daughter who threw up her entire bedtime snack of strawberries and yogurt around midnight, in our bed. Husband carried her to the bathroom leaving a trail of pink and red chunks behind them as I followed rubbing her head, dodging the debris. Upon entering the bathroom, she promptly threw up right in front and to the right of the toilet, splattering the vanity which I hadn’t cleaned in months and was littered with toiletries, old makeup, toothbrushes, globs of toothpaste, and tarnished jewelry. June had taken her last breath only hours before and now my living daughter, albeit with a stomach flu, was sick too. My nine-month pregnant body, swollen and exhausted, had nothing left. After changing our daughter’s pajamas, bringing her a bowl to continue to throw up in, laying a towel down on our bed, and draping a wet cloth over her forehead, I lay down next to her and cried myself to sleep.
“How can I live life when I wake up void of happiness? June is gone, how can I ever be happy again? I’ll never be happy again.” I told my therapist. I had no desire to procure happiness, but deep down I knew I needed it to continue on with my life. It terrified me. I’m going to die a miserable human being. People will remember me and say “It’s such a shame. After her daughter died, she just stopped living and then she died.” It was a constant push-pull I couldn’t escape. It tortured me. I wanted to keep living, but I didn’t know how to live without happiness.
I sat for months in my misery because I had no other choice. I was paralyzed with grief and nine-months pregnant. I gave birth to our son and then returned home, still paralyzed with grief, and now up all night again with a baby. I had sunken to the bottom of an olympic size swimming pool of grief. Through the clear blue water I could see the faces crowded around the edge of the pool looking into the water, trying to figure out if I was going to be okay. Is she breathing? Will she ever be the same? I could hear muffled voices yelling out to me here and there, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. I lay very still. Blinded by the light from above, trying but not really trying to make out the blurry figures. Unable to move.
Then suddenly, I woke up and a microscopic part of me yearned to be happy again. I could feel it. A feeling other than grief. It felt strange, but I was interested in feeling it more. It also felt like a betrayal to June and disguised itself as guilt for me, so immediately I pushed it away. Then I woke up one day and decided I had a choice: I could succumb to the anguish, but I’d live a short miserable life. Or, I could see what it felt like to get in touch with that distant desire to be happy. Suddenly, the number of years I lived became of importance again. Not all at once, and not indefinitely, but here and there. Day by day, I didn’t give up. I dedicated myself to watering and feeding that seed of desire to grow into something bigger than me. I became hopeful again. I realized happiness is not betraying June, unhappiness is. I know June wouldn’t want me to live a life of turmoil. What if she’s watching me from heaven as I have a complete temper tantrum? As I throw away all the good that’s left in life, after she herself didn’t have the blessing of counting her years on earth?
Very recently I had my first taste of happiness I know I can take with me everywhere. It is a happiness no one can take away from me. It’s both big and small at times, but it has stayed and never left. I’ve created it by sitting in my misery and rediscovering who I am and what I love, and what matters most to me. Part of it involves my relationships to all of the things in my life that give me my identity. Something I lost when June became sick. I’ve started over. I’m in charge now. I’m carefully crafting my new identity based on how I choose to live my life, today. I am choosing to be happy. To my marriage, I am a wife. To my peers, I am a friend. To my parents, I am a daughter. To my in-laws, a daughter-in-law. To our house, a homemaker. To my children, I am eternally their mother. Nothing will ever change that. I learned that by embracing all of these roles and doing them with love, I can be myself, and that usually the relationship is reciprocal and the love is returned. I learned that despite losing June, I still have life and in that life there will be happy moments.
During June’s treatment someone once said to me, “Without joy there is no pain and without pain, how can we experience joy?” and I thought, “Oh my God. You’re right.” It seemed so simple, yet so provocative. I’d never experienced pain on this level. The good moments were magnificent, and the bad moments, excruciating. It was a high and a low I’d never known existed.
Today, I know I will always feel eternal pain surrounding the loss of June. I now know that I will also feel immense joy, unlike any joy I had ever felt before June became sick. The exciting part of this for me is that immense joy comes in small unexpecting packages like when I peck twenty kisses on my son’s perfect little round cheeks, or when I smell my daughter's sour, earthy hair before the big scrub. Maybe I wouldn’t have acknowledged these as gifts before. Maybe they would have passed me by. The childlike lens I see life through again might be temporary, but then again, it might not. I’ve also discovered new joys that never struck me as anything but a chore before. Despite cooking no longer being something I enjoy, I do love placing the meals in front of husband and the kids and hearing the echo of everyone’s special requests: more water please, can I have lemonade?, we need another fork, a napkin, more noodles please! I sit down to eat my own dinner well after they have finished and for some reason, this makes me happy. It reminds me of my Nana who never ate with us. When we started our family, I set the expectation that I, as the woman, wouldn’t be left in the kitchen to eat a cold dinner. But that mentality made me resentful when I saw everyone eating without me. Now I let it be messy, and disorganized. I know the second I sit down to eat my almost cold dinner, because now my kids are on to other things, that my son will crawl over to me and pull at my shorts and throw his arms in the air because he wants me to pick him up. I push my meal aside and place him on my lap. It’s not that food isn’t important, it’s just that the food isn’t the most important. It’s simply the conduit to everything magnificent I am about to experience.
