I’d Do Anything To Be ‘Just’ Mom Again
One of the perks to living in our Maine town is the measly twenty dollar, unlimited access, beach pass offered which gives rights to three different white sandy beaches.
It’s usually spring when the kids and I drive to the town hall to buy the pass which holds so much promise after surviving another Maine winter. Bare, barely budding trees make it hard to believe summer will arrive. Another year has come and gone. I could never have imagined one of these early chaotic years as a family would be the last year of my daughter’s life.
After June passed away, my newborn son and I drove to town. The sight of a budding bush amongst a backdrop of sparsely wooded trees forced air out from my lungs that I’d been bitterly holding onto since June died. A punch to the diaphragm. These buds were lively and offensive proof that life, despite June dying, continued.
The winter, like June’s life, would also end. Although, unlike June, the winter months would one day recycle. Maybe this is very much like June. I’d like to believe June has been recycled in many ways, including in the air we breathe. It brings to me thinking, I’d do just about anything to have the opportunity to breathe June in once again.
As my son and I drove to the town hall, like I imagined many normal mothers in my town did, I knew it was time to wake up from winter and to stop holding my dead breath, but I couldn’t. This year was different. I couldn’t wake up from the winter of June’s death.
I whipped the car into a strange driveway. My eyes flittered as if I was frantically examining the scenery, but it wasn’t the driveway or house I saw in front of me, instead it was the details pulled from the the depths of losing June that replayed. A curtain dropped over my eyes in the weeks and months after June died, as I tried to retrace my steps back to her in complete darkness.
I backed the car out, and returned to the safety of home. It had only been a few weeks since her passing. It was too soon, but it’s what the old version of me would have done. When I was just mom. It brings me to thinking, I’d do anything to be just mom again.
For my children, the pass promises beach days filled with collecting hermit crabs from the cool, salty inlet and plopping them into a pail that has become the day’s aquarium. For me, it’s the promise of endless sky, salt tinged air, and warm sand over the tops of my feet. The promise of spending time in a place no one can ever tell me to leave.
On summer days when I‘ve packed enough snacks, and decidedly skipped naps, I watch the reflection of the melting orange sun on the pristine waters as my children splash in tidal pools at my feet. I welcome the night air as it lowers itself onto us. I look up into the sky and spot the first star of the night. “It’s Junie,” my daughter says as my eyes meet the star which we were both eagerly awaiting. For my eldest daughter, the first star of the night is always June.
I close my eyes with my chin tilted upward. When I open them again and see the star, I know that all three of my children are visibly present with me. Then, I close them to test my other senses. To see if I can still feel June without seeing her in the star. I’d give anything to see June again.
Peaceful summer days are packed and promised into the flimsy circular decal which I peel and stick to my front windshield every spring the moment we exit the town hall.
The year before our son was born, June and I ventured to the town hall together. Instead of flinging my son’s car seat over my arm, it was June’s. She and I walked together quietly through the entrance, and as we approached the counter to request the season pass, I set her on the floor next to me. In every exact way, I did the same with my son, only a year later.
A sick parallel in time. One, I could never fathom. One, I cannot change. The mother I was, the life we had, swept away from me like the water from the inlet. It takes the tide six hours and twelve-and-a-half minutes to go from high to low or low to high. Its as if the last year of June’s life was the tide. Draining, pulling itself away from me. If one year was the equivalent to one tide, June would have been gone in six hours and twelve-and-a-half minutes. That’s how fast it went.
The first time the two girls and I went to the beach was two days before June’s diagnosis. I had been anticipating June’s first beach day since she was born in September, eight months prior, on the first day of autumn.
The beach was part of the induction into our family. It was my opportunity as a mother to offer my children all of nature’s beauty, then selfishly watch it unfold in the reflection of their eyes.
No one knew June’s body was riddled with cancer that first spring day the girls and I went to the beach.
We arrived and I laid out the beach blanket. I emptied a bag of toys onto the sand. I reached for June, but she cried when I removed her from her car seat. Unsure of what to do, I placed her back in. This was not how things went with my firstborn. This was an induction gone sour. As June shrieked, I pulled the canopy over her face to protect her skin from midday rays. I handed her a baby yogurt and tiny spoon. Yogurt was the only thing she’d been willing to eat in weeks.
This is how she was in the photo. In the only photo I have of her on a beach before we knew she had cancer, in the beginning of the last year of her life. She’s wearing a dainty red, sleeveless cotton jumper. Her hands and feet are sticking straight out into the open air. In excitement? I don’t know. Protest? Probably. Her eyes are squinty, and looking off into the distance. Minutes later, with no real explanation, she threw up the yogurt she had just consumed, which in the photo, is delicately displayed on her lips.
I had no idea that in the next ten months, June would be diagnosed with cancer, begin treatment, go into remission, continue treatment, but ultimately, that the cancer would return. June would die. It would all happen in less than one year.
I learned that promises which span a lifetime don’t exist. The meaning behind small details like beach decals quickly lost all of it’s significance. Losing June is a tragedy so complex it’s hard to fathom.
Layers of complexity like those that make up June’s wardrobe which now sits in a plastic bin at the bottom of my closet. The dainty red jumper is one visible layer of the child I lost. Each layer denotes an experience in the final year of June’s life. Each outfit a layer in the traumatic existence we came to live.
I gave birth to my son in May, eight weeks after June died. The excitement around collecting the beach pass and paying my meager twenty-dollars was absent.
After June died, I lied to my oldest daughter, who was three at the time, and said that the beach wasn’t open normal hours. The bereaved mother in me told her that we could only go to the beach in the wee morning hours, when unbeknownst to her, the parking was free. That’s what we did because the grieving mother in me couldn’t fathom returning to the town hall without June for the decal.
Instead, for two summer months before the clock struck nine, I gathered our belongings, my son in his car seat on one arm, and my screaming daughter in the other, and carried them to the car before it cost me twenty dollars to park for the day.
It was so much work to build the walls of grief around me, and likely more work than succumbing to the task of buying the pass, but still, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I was blocked by my brain from passing the hall’s threshold without June in my arms.
The day came when I had no choice but to let the wall crumble. It had become too much work to maintain. My living children wanted the beach. It was late August when my son and I drove to the town hall. He was quiet like June had been.
“May I also get a copy of my son’s birth certificate?” I asked as he sat quietly in the car seat at my feet, as June once did.
“Of course,” she said. “I’ll just need–”
“Oh! How many children do you have?” The woman sitting at the far computer asked.
“She has three! 4, 2, and an infant! Wow, three under five!” the woman helping me said before I could respond.
“My daughter June died,” I said. “She would have been two in September.”
The woman kept her eyes on the computer and didn’t look at me. She stood when the paper exited the printer, and turned to hand me the birth certificate and beach pass with her eyes cast downward. She never looked up. The other woman’s eyes averted back to the screen in front of her.
No one said anything.
Heartbroken and exposed, I lifted the twenty-five pound car seat and flung it over my arm. I walked out drowning in my grief, shedding tears I no longer cared anyone saw. I was at the mercy of a world that was unable to acknowledge the burning pain of losing a child. I expected it to be tough, but I hadn’t expected this.
I clipped the car seat into the holder, opened my door and threw the pass and certificate onto the floor. I gripped the steering wheel and screamed. Screams that emanated from my postpartum womb, as I sat suspended in June’s postmortem life. I oscillated between postpartum and postmortem. Postpartum. Postmortem. Dueling tsunamis. I was in the middle and would drown regardless of which won because both ended in the irrevocable loss of June.
On September 20th, a year-and-a-half after June died, I returned to the town hall again. My son now one-and-a-half, and my eldest, almost five.
This time I had an asking and an offering. I returned with a proclamation asking that the month of September (in our town) be acknowledged as Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. I stood in front of the town council and shared an abbreviated story of June’s life and the toxic toll of pediatric cancer on children, their families, and the world. I asked the council to sign (watch the video here).
In my initial mourning, I never imagined I would be presenting to the town council, advocating for the month of September to be recognized by the town as Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. Tearfully, they accepted.
I dedicated that night to June. As I walked out into the September evening, just two days before June’s third birthday, and spotted the first star, I said, “It’s all for you.”
And it is, it’s all for you, June.
Two weeks ago, I returned to the town hall for one last time. We moved out of state and before we did, there was one last thing I needed to collect: June’s death certificate. I’d purposefully put it off for two years. For two copies, it cost twenty-one dollars cash, nearly the same as the summer beach pass, which reminded me I would not be purchasing one this year because our family would no longer live in a beach town in Maine.
The woman behind the counter was not the same as years before. Then again, neither was I. She smiled at me as I handed her the form requesting two copies of the death certificate. She glanced at the paper, stared into the computer screen, then disappeared into the back room.
“Sorry, it’s something on my end,” she said when she returned several minutes later, glancing my way.
“Do you need help?” The woman sitting behind another screen asked.
Are those tears in her eyes? I wondered as she told the woman she was all set and handed me two copies.
I walked hand in hand with my son, now almost two, out the double doors and to the car feeling a smidge stronger. I set the certificates down on the middle console, and buckled my son in his seat, shockingly composed.
I climbed into the car and lifted the certificate to read. The reasons listed as to why June lost her life were boldly typed there in front of me. It was like learning why June died, again, for the very first time. The notarized paper marked a new finality to June’s life I hadn’t yet experienced.
I dropped the pages, and grabbed the wheel. I wailed into the backs of my hands. For the last time in the parking lot of the town hall, I screamed out all the tears I had left in me.
I’m grateful to never walk through the those town hall doors again. I’ll always have the experiences on paper. Several good, a few terrible. They’re part of my story.
I am a mother in mourning, a bereaved Mama, and sometimes, a grief stricken mother on the days I have to perform hard tasks such as requesting June’s death certificate. In these last few years, I’ve learned I am also a strong mother. I can survive the grueling tasks continually doled out by life, and still show up for myself and my family.
I will forever have three children, two by my side and one on my shoulder. The one on my shoulder likes to grace the sky at night, and I look forward to seeing her there, although I’m getting better at closing my eyes and knowing she’s here regardless of seeing her or not.
No more beach passes, and likely no more birth certificates. A chapter of my life is closing, but I’ll always leaf back through it. I have lots of documentation from the town hall as proof.
As we begin this new chapter, I exist today as the woman and mother I am because of where I have lived. I’ve learned to find the beauty in the most terrible memories. If you asked me what I’d change about my life, I’d say everything and nothing at once.
I know that tomorrow, despite having lost June, does have promise and I intend on finding it in the most unsuspecting places like window decals. There’s a whole world I’m unaware even exists. A world I have yet to experience. One our family will venture out and find together.
This is not the end, it is just the beginning. Life has no guarantees or promises, except for the ones we make to ourselves. I promised myself when we moved that I would make life good.
Based on how quickly life can change in a year for the worse, I know it also has the potential to change for the better. The curtain is raised. The tide is coming back in. I didn’t drown in the tsunami that was June’s death in the aftermath of my son’s birth. Life does go on, and I am getting the first glimpses of how great it can actually be.
