Nesting

Charlotte is here with us this week at our new-to-us house on Vancouver Island, so close to the ocean, you can sometimes smell it and hear it, though not quite see it. We are camping in a house that has not yet gifted us with a working furnace or much furniture other than a new king bed that is perfect for Don and Moondog and me (and sometimes also Charlotte); a table and chair set bought secondhand by my grandparents when they first moved to Canada as refugees after WWII and then lovingly refurbished by my Daddy; and a loveseat I bought at the local Habitat for Humanity store that cost 170 dollars plus 100 dollars to bring it over in a truck. Don is in the king bed on Facebook marketplace as I write, looking for a utility trailer to haul all the things we both need, want, and are happy to collect second-hand and over time, provided we have something to pick them up with. I am huddled next to a space heater in the spacious kitchen, with my down jacket on over my pajamas, listening to the herons squabble outside as they build their nests and play in the trees of our back yard. How majestic and jurassic they are. It’s a new world. A new world without Emily, yet I feel her presence so deeply here that sometimes I could swear she is right beside me.

The Salish Sea is a place she loved: she built log houses along its shores to huddle under; she served countless orders of food meticulously plated on exquisite pieces of driftwood laden with sand and kelp and stones and shells fashioned into exactly what our wishes were; she bounded on all fours like a little lion and frolicked with Heather’s dogs here; and she walked the trails with gusto, always searching for eagles and seals and all the little treasures her and Don would pick up and pocket along the way.

I am convinced she is happy, no - DELIGHTED - that we are here: that we can now call Little River/Singing Sands our home. I am certain she wants us to nest, just as the herons are doing in our fir trees. 

Spring has come, and the mating dances have begun, little purple hyacinths are springing up everywhere: the buds, the blooms, the surge of growth exactly mirror what is happening to me. (Well, maybe not the mating dance, because I have found my perfect mate, and we are together becoming more perfect by the moment. Haha.) But this place: yes, it is magical and transformative. We knew that when we came here for the first time seven years ago, when our friend Heather found our house for us just a few days after we had left this beautiful neck of the woods neither of us had ever visited. She called us at the airport as we were heading back to Beijing after a summer spent mostly on the Pacific Ocean, saying she had found us the perfect place. We bought it sight unseen, and came back the next summer to find that, yes, it was perfect indeed. Heather had worked her magic, but that magic is part of the universal magic that crystallizes and makes all events synchronize into this marvelous life, even when we don’t know why or how it will all come together.

Maybe that doesn’t happen for all, and who am I to say this after losing the most precious thing of all, a child? Yet here I am, feeling my Emily and knowing that we are destined to be here in this moment, and knowing that we have found our home and it is time to nest.

A Ferry Ride

I am on a BC ferry on my way from Vancouver Island back to the mainland. Tomorrow I will be picking up my Donnie, my Moondog, and Emily’s ashes. Charlotte will join us next week for several days and our family will be complete again.

I came to our Little River house just outside of Comox on Sunday, and have been busy acquiring what is needed (including, for the first time in our life, a king bed!), setting up internet, and desperately attempting to get heat, which has so far failed. Fortunately, my friend Heather is both housing me and helping, all hours of the day and night, to make my transition a smooth one.

I will say that I have been on a bliss trip since arriving, in spite of hiccups like absence of heat and a washing machine that produces sediment rather than clean laundry. There is a heron’s nest in one of the many gigantic tree surrounding our property and prehistoric noises emanating from it as well as gorgeous birds circling our property, even their shadows majestic. The ocean (Emily’s Beach) is moments away, the air is among the freshest in the world, and our house is a wonderland of surprises and delights. I keep walking the wrong way because there are so many bedrooms! Being accustomed to apartment living, I am feeling exceedingly spoiled with all the indoor and outdoor space. This is a paradise I have not experienced as an adult, and I can’t wait to start gardening and decorating, and communing with the abundant nature.

The sea is rough on the ferry just now, the waves are roiling, and I am hoping there might be an orca sighting or two. It’s herring season so the whales are abundant. A little baby has been caught in a bay up in the north of Vancouver Island because she followed her mother there who was consequently beached and died. A helicopter is attempting to  drop a sling today to return her to her pod. She has been wailing for her mama, and the locals have been sending out sounds of her auntie, trying to lure her back to her family.

Emily has lured us here to our SInging Sands neighbourhood, to the beach she adored/s, and with the promise of tranquility, community, and unparalleled nature. Already, with just under a week under my belt and minus my sweetie and doggie and along with much industry, I feel renewed. My word of the year is reinvention and, my oh my, it is happening in spades. For one thing, all my lovely work clothes have been traded in for jeans and boots, a toque is necessary for beachy walks, which will be an at-least daily venture (a promise I made to my Emily), and my spirit feels so much lighter. At risk of sounding cliche, it is soaring with the many eagles I have already seen. 

How can one be so blessed and at the same time left with a permanent hole in my heart? Emily’s physical presence is not here, but her spirit assuredly is. Gratitude and focus on the beautiful moments I have been given is my way forward. Also, supporting those who also have such grief through my own learnings, intuitions, and messages from my Emily has given me tremendous purpose.

Purpose, peace, playfulness and passion: this is what I am being gifted. My thanks go to Emily.

Every Moment I Love You

Every

Moment

I

Love 

You

A friend shared with me recently why she named her daughter Emily. How delightful! We christened our Emily by this name for a few reasons:

• It honoured Don’s deceased mother

• My deeply-loved Opa’s name was Max Emil

• In Chinese, Ai(爱) is love; Mei (美) is beauty; Li (力) is strength or power - I May Lee is how it would be pronounced and how I often liked to say her name, loving her Chinese heritage, and recognising how each of those words pertained perfectly to who she was and how I felt about her

So now I have another reason to love the name of Emily, the name we gifted our forever-loved daughter.

A Note To My Emily

Oh, my Emily. I miss you beyond words. The grief that we feel is unimaginable. I just want to grab you and hold you and never let go. This morning I watched a post on my memories from Facebook with you and Charlotte singing The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow and it just took my breath away. I had to hold my heart and let the tears flow. As soon as I told your Daddy what I was watching, he began to cry too, just having the memory. Such joy. Such absolute, pure joy. You had a lot of that. You threw yourself into everything - and when you were happy, you were on fire.

I love how you and Charlotte loved each other so much. How much you loved her and looked up to her. How she made you laugh and how you came out of yourself when she was such a clown. How you gazed at her with unabashed admiration and how at the same time you were just so uniquely you. 

I also so clearly remember the day you two became friends, not just sisters. You’d been with us a few months already and you were busy gaining weight and eating all the fruit in the house, all the time. You’d wake up and shout, “Xiang jiao, xiang jiao” and we’d ply you with bananas. We had to hide the fruit bowl on the table because you’d eat everything in it, if you had the chance. You were busy finally getting strong after a year in a horrible orphanage just hanging on. Just hanging on. We saved you, dear girl and you knew it. You were so appreciative. You never took that for granted, but that year defined you. That year without us. It nearly took you under several times and then it finally did. I am so sorry for this. Just so sorry.

Back to your friendship with your sister: you were both under the big oak table in your tuktuk Thailand pajama-shorts and suddenly we saw you two just laughing and rolling on the floor. I don’t know what happened, but that was the spark, the connection that brought you two together and bonded you. We have it immortalized in a photo and I am so grateful for that. I think we shall frame that and smile every time we see it. It’s the most joyful moment I can imagine.

The day we met  you, you just mewed like a little shy cat. There was no other sound. But you ate an entire loaf of Chinese brown sweet bread in that roam in the Gloria Plaza hotel in Nanchang, China. Your little fists grabbed that bread like it was manna from the heavens and you mewed for more. Charlotte fed you a bottle of formula and you slurrped it greedily. Your Daddy and I just gazed on you, not believing the miracle of having you in our lives.

What a privilege it has been to be your parents these 17 years, dear girl. I will always be your Mama and Daddy will always be your Daddy. We cannot stop loving you, adoring your, admiring your efforts, and grieving the fact that you are no longer with us. I speak only for myself because your Daddy is maybe not there yet, but I do not blame you for ending your life. You were caught in some kind of pain that we cannot even imagine. Sometimes I think of the expansiveness of the grief I am in now, and I remember that you sat with an intensity of pain like this on a regular basis. And that’s what gives me compassion for you and forgiveness. I am so very sorry that you could not escape from that often enough to breathe with freedom.

It’s clear to me that you had incredible joy very often in your life. We watched you in action: your passion, your curiosity, your friendships, your laughter, your sense of humor, your playfulness, the rich, imaginary life that you had and shared with a precious few who know who they are. What a gift you gave us all through your too-short life, Emily. How blessed we have been to know you and  harbor you physically and emotionally. What a privilege.

We often wonder if you had been able to hold on just a little bit longer, let that cerebral cortex grow just a bit more, find the correct correlation of medication that could calibrate your serotonin consistently, just a bit more experience with the ups and downs and how to ride them - this was our wish for you. Oh, how we wished that and still do.

But if wishes were horses, we all would be kings. 

It feels good to write to you right now. I will probably share this with others because I know you will want me to. You’ve made it clear to me that my mandate is to share my grief journey, and to use your life and your passing as a way to help others heal. I hate that. I would rather have found my voice through any other means, yet somehow the loss of you is what has propelled me to write and talk to others. 

And so I will continue to do this, in honour of you, and also because you seem to be insisting. You are one of my most compelling reasons to go on, even though you are no longer here. How can this even be?

A Day Without Tears

 

Yesterday was the first day since Emily’s death that neither Don nor I cried, even though she was abundant in our conversation. We spent the afternoon with some of our dearest friends on their patio, huddled beside their fire pit on one of the first warm and sunny days of spring here in Vancouver, eating bratwurst and coleslaw. We were laughing and remembering so much of our extensive friendship history, and I thought how Emily loved each one of us on that patio and how she loved staying at Steph and Aman’s, hanging out on their deck in the summers, sleeping on their sofa, helping Steph prep food, intuiting what needed to be done and when. She was the perfect sous chef and bottle washer. By the time Charlotte roused herself from her torpor, Emily was usually done with whatever task needed doing. She loved keeping busy and being active. It was in her nature to help, to work with her hands, whether it be learning how to prepare beautiful food, make cocktails, fix gadgets, make machines, build stuff whether from sand or wood or nuts and bolts she had lying around, make masterful short films - she had a keen desire to create. 

When Emily was little she invented her own language that she shared sparingly. It had its own world and history. She and Don would go on long hikes in Hong Kong and she would school him on the history, teach him new vocabulary, give him quizzes on all things Card Language. It was ever-evolving and Emily kept notebooks of her thoughts, maps, treasures, the lexicon, as well as shields and representations of this amazing world she developed.

Occasionally she would let me in to this world also, though it was one she mostly shared with her daddy. They bonded deeply on their long treks, picking up bits and bobs along winding trails and beaches, that became part of the treasured world that they shared together. It was almost like Emily was reaching for her version of heaven through this creation.

From early on and until they end, Emily quizzed both of us deeply about our beliefs and different philosophies, probing, and all the while, coming up with her own belief system that accompanied her magical thinking, which could just as well be called faith as imagination.

As I opened my computer to write just now, a picture of Emily on the bed with Moondog and Catboy flashed across my screen. And there were the tears. Don came in to get something and sat on the bed and wept with me. We didn’t even need to talk. We just miss our baby so much. I believe she will always be building something magnificent in her new world and her creations will come out exactly as she imagines them.

Serendipity

 

We are in New Orleans in the last of our southern states tour, soaking in the hospitality, gobbling up the gumbos and beignets, and I am personally availing myself of a daiquiri or two a day, allowed out on the street, in the car (Don’t worry, I’m not driving!) and anywhere else you might find music floating out from somewhere, which is everywhere. What a vibrant city, full of people ready to tell their stories and to listen to yours. I’ve been called honey, bluebell, sweetie and buttercup. I’ve been hugged by waitresses, kissed on the lips, given amulets of appreciation, and listened to enough music to have developed an ear for blues and jazz that has my toes tapping and hips swaying in ways they’ve not done before. The city of New Orleans (or Nawlins as the locals call it) has restored my faith in humanity, if not in driving.

It was daylight savings last night and I got up early to record our 2 Chit Chat Chicks podcast with my partner in crime, Eydie, but she is either out doing her Sunday morning shop or availing herself of an extra hour of sleeping on daylight savings day, so I am ensconced on the sofa in our Airbnb, taking some yearned-for Leah time that’s been hard to grab on our road trip. How can there still be so many obligations, even when not working and on a vacation? I haven’t quite figured that out, but a big part of me is anxious to settle into our house on Vancouver Island next month and really begin our new life, post-Emily, in a new, permanent and exquisite part of the world. All the grace and love and opportunities we have had since Emily’s passing have been a blessing beyond measure, and, at the same time, have left us in a bit of a limbo, and had us craving routine and stability. These normalities have been vacant from our life since the saddest day I expect I’ll ever experience: November 24, 2024.

At a drag show, of all the places, I met a woman, Steffanie, on Friday night. In between watching the acrobatic and charismatic performances of some truly magnificent queens, we shared our motherhood stories and wept together and bonded and found a kind of sisterhood that maybe only mamas who have lost their children can have. Her story is vastly different from mine - an adoption gone awry, with beloved baby whisked away before a day was up, due to the birth mother changing her mind - but I viscerally felt her heartbreak. It touched a part of the live wire that now lives in me and is ignited by people who live with a certain kind of pain. I have a rapid fire signal for it now. Maybe I’ve always had it but wasn’t tuned into it.

New Orleans is full of magic, some of it conjured and some of it real. There are plenty of haunted and ghost tours and voodoo stores, none of which are of interest to us in the moment. The jazz and the blues are what is speaking to our hearts and unearthing our emotions, and they are to be had 24 hours a day in the city of sorcery and music and history and magic. As it happened, yesterday, we wandered past a teeny little store tucked away in the French Quarter that inexplicably beckoned us in. It was empty, save a lone employee (Donna Lee) and housed bits and bobs of jewellery and music paraphernalia. We got to talking (as you inevitably seem to do in New Orleans, especially when you have a life partner who has suddenly turned gregarious and also looks like an aging member of a band and is constantly asked if he is a musician), and as our life stories began to intertwine and fuse, we realised we shared some common experiences involving our loved ones and their pain. Again, we told our story to a stranger because she had been willing to share hers. We listened closely and spoke intimately. It felt like a holy time in a magic shop that had once housed a famous psychic who had been a close friend and confidante to the voodoo priest and famous musician Malcolm John Rebennack Jr. (known as Dr. John - one of Don’s favourites). This shop had been frequented by Jackie Gleason, Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan and the likes, all coming for readings from Mary, apparently a psychic for the ages. 

Donna Lee explained there was a portal in this building and the spirits were abundant and full of love here. She said she was disinterested in any ghost seekers or people looking to find evidence or non-evidence of the beyond. She was there because she believed there was a beyond and she was compelled by what was there, and the spirits that blessed her. Even my skeptical sweetheart took comfort in her stories and I felt both our energies shift as we spent time chatting with Donna Lee in her dark little spot in the French Quarter. We were blessed with something inexplicable in that tiny shop and Don walked away with a little gift - a silver angel coin - that he had noticed in the front of one of the cabinets and she had said, “Oh, you just take that. I think it’s meant for you.”

Our dear Emily is ever-present on our minds, whether we are talking about her or not; we can each feel when one or the other of us is overcome. We know when to give space or when to hold one another. It’s almost becoming second nature.

This city, for all its boisterous energy and beauty alongside quiet desperation and music that reaches out and grabs you by the throat, combined with spicy food and strong drink and fried chicken I’ve never tasted the likes of, is full of a radiating energy. I believe the spirits are present and are helping us with our healing here. Today we are visiting an out-of-town cemetery (The in-city ones you have to take a tour and we would rather have our own wander), and I hope to commune with the angels, including my own personal Emily angel. Sunday promises to be another spiritual day, and finally a blue-sky one as well.

Road Tripping

 

We are in Memphis, Tennessee. Don is browsing in Goner Records and I’m enjoying a coffee next door. On yesterday’s LP perusal, I found a cozy chair and read a few too many bleak bits of news, so I am here today to bring a little light into the world. That’s what Emily would want.

Here’s what’s been happening: we are down south picking up our car from dear friends who gratefully and gently used it while we were in China, and we are driving it back to Canada. We’ve been to Nashville, now Memphis, and our next stop is New Orleans. Then we are going to boot it home to Canada, pedal to the metal, because we are missing Charlotte and we also want to start getting ready for our imminent move to Vancouver Island.

I find myself talking back and forth with Emily all the time these days. Of course, both voices are mine (and I’m doing a lot of it out-loud, under my breath), but I just feel the peace washing over me when I converse with her, so whether people think it’s real or not, I don’t care. It feels real and I am honouring and loving our playful banter.

One of our favourite things to do is go thrifting and it’s a whole new can o’ worms here in the south: different merchandise, fun styles, lots of polite ma’ams and accents that I don’t understand, so I often find myself nodding and smiling, even though I’m not sure what I am responding to.

After a pothole-filled drive to the LP store (People living in Tennessee probably need to set aside a special budget for tires each year), Emily ‘said,’ “You guys make sure you have a good time. And don’t rush Dad. This is his happy place.” Hence, here I am in the vegan cafe.

When thrifting, Emily’s common refrain is, “Those look like pajamas, Mama, so they’re probably perfect!”, “Don’t buy it unless you love it,” and yesterday’s was, “Don’t feel obligated to buy something that you know I’d wear - our styles are radically, different, Mama.” Also, “You look so cute, Mama.” That is sweetness I will take, every loving spoonful of it!

We’ve been listening to live music on Beale Street each of our evenings here in Memphis. It’s pretty quiet as it’s early in the week, and I’m thinking tourism and the economy here in Memphis is not what it used to be. There are a lot of boarded-up places and hard-living is evident throughout this city. It’s a place definitely tinged with heartbreak, ongoing reconciliation and a complicated history. 

Last night we heard a woman named Baunie and her small band singing the blues. She was truly magnificent, though the bar was nearly empty. It felt a privilege to be in her space listening to her soaring, booming voice, her beautiful energy coming through her bodacious body. Don got very emotional, and did some full-on crying in the bar and I just rubbed his back and let him feel it all. As he said, “They don’t call it the blues for no reason.” So true.

During a break, we went to speak with her and Don told an abbreviated version of our Emily story. Her eyes welled up for us, and she said, “I just couldn’t even look your way when you were cryin’ because I knew I’d cry too.” She told us she’d be praying for us and talked about all the child angels in heaven. It was very touching.

We are settling into crying, laughing, enjoying, mourning, remembering, forgetting, doing and not doing. This is the routine or non-routine of our life right now. I truly hope there will be more of the happy and less of the sad. The shift is already happening. TIme is indeed passing. Our grief remains, but our capacity to hold it grows.