Preparing for the Worst, Hoping for the Best

When the worst has happened - and I cannot honestly think of anything worse than having your child end their own life - I had thought it might alleviate my sense of panic about other potentially frightening life events. After all, what else could go more wrong than that? How much more could I actually hurt than I already do Yesterday, I realized how things could get worse: by losing our other daughter.

I'm a learned optimist, but I believe a born pessimist. Perhaps it’s an intergenerational defect that I inherited or something I simply copied from my cheerful but cautiously optimistic mother. She had a few sayings that led me to believe that she too may have had a marrow of pessimism. The first was erst das lachen, denn das weinen (first the laughter, then the tears); the second was always wear clean underwear in case you’re in an accident; the third was hope for the best, expect the worst. Both my parents are refugees - first generation Canadians who survived the horrors of World War II and along with loved ones lost, probably, some faith in circumstances always working out for the best. 

Yesterday, Don and I went to the weekend flea market on Terminal Avenue in Vancouver: he got a bunch of old LPs and I found a rosary with the five stations of the cross. I utter “I love you, Emily, I love you, Emily,” and then when there is a break in the beads, I  go on to the next station and say, “I love you, Mama, I love you, Mama,” and in this way we talk back and forth as I quietly flip through the wooden orbs, ending on a smooth wooden cross that has been repaired and feels like a righteous symbol of strength, which I am in need of. The loop of love.

After our flea market venture, we picked up Charlotte at her university and went out for some authentic Chinese dimsum in a boisterous, clattery restaurant where Charlotte already had accrued some happy memories with friends. We were feeling melancholy and grateful at the same time because a dear friend of Emily’s had posted a beautiful tribute for her on her obituary webpage and it had just been passed on to us. We sat in the car and sobbed for a few minutes before ordering our prawn dumplings and pork buns and fried rice and drinking cup after tiny cup of jasmine tea. The rambunctiousness of the eatery buoyed us, but we still felt overwhelmed with emotion.

Our plan was to take Charlotte to her lifeguarding job at five pm. After finishing up our meal, none of us could think of what to do to pass the time until she had to be at work. It was a blustery day and we drove aimlessly, me in the backseat and Charlotte feeling carsick in the front, with Don saying, “Someone just give me directions somewhere.” Yet none of us had ideas or fortitude to think of anywhere we wanted to go or anything we wanted to do. Finally, we pulled over in a residential neighbourhood, Don and Charlotte leaned back in their bucket seats, and we all watched an episode of Friends together on Charlotte’s iPhone. It has been a program that has cheered me up a few times in my life’s journey when I just needed some levity and little less stress. Charlotte, almost unbelievably, had never watched it, and loved it immediately, so I am delighted that I can share something with her that is new for her and already a balm for me.

We lay in the chilly car and laughed at Chandler being caught in a bank vestibule with a Victoria’s Secret model and Ross trying to ask Rachel out during a blackout in New York City as a cat attacked Ross’ head on that envy-enducing balcony of theirs. It was ludicrous and nothing could have been better in that moment.

We like to pick Charlotte up after her evening shifts and drive her back to her dorm or to the house we are still staying at here in Vancouver, but on this day, we collectively decided that she would take the bus back to university after her shift because soon we will be relocating to Vancouver Island and she will need to become accustomed to doing it on her own. Also, the days are getting longer and less chilly so it feels safer, all in all.

Charlotte agreed that she would call us as she was walking from her pool to the bus stop, about 10 minutes away. As we chatted and she walked, a black, collared cat nuzzled up against her legs and began purring and following her. We liked the idea of this being Emily popping in to say, “Hi sister, you’re safe,” and she didn’t want to leave the cat, hence missing the bus and having to catch the next one, some 15 minutes later.

We happily stayed on the line, chatting, and once she was on the bus, Charlotte promised to call when she was safely back in her dorm room. I got involved in my Duo Lingo Spanish and Don in sorting through his vinyls, and we lost track of time. Well after 10 pm, I realized Charlotte had not gotten in touch with us, so I immediately texted her to make sure she was safe. Being a girl who is continuously on her phone, I expected the read sign to pop up immediately, showing that she had seen my message and for the three bubbles to start vibrating, showing she was texting back. Nothing. I called. Nothing. Don called and texted. Nothing. We were able to track her on the find my i phone app and it showed her phone was on Burnaby Mountain, but not in her dorm. My heart rate escalated. We continued calling and texting with no response. I realized that if she had dropped her phone, she would have no way of communicating with us to let us know she was safe, plus she might be roaming about searching for her missing phone; worse yet, I imagined her robbed or raped or murdered. 

Within a few minutes, Don and I had decided we needed to drive the half an hour to her university and go looking for her. We were bundling up and as I was grabbing a fleecy blanket for the backseat to wrap her in, in case we found her on the forested mountain, the bubbles popped up and Charlotte wrote, I’m fineeee bruh.”

Call me!! I texted back. Prior to that moment, it had been building adrenaline - cortisone vibrating through my veins - but after profuse apologies from Charlotte who had forgotten and was in the dining hall having pizza with her friends, Don and I both just collapsed. We cried and cried. What if we had lost our Charlotte, too? It would be unimaginable. The worst and then the worst again could happen.

I was unable to sleep without medication and woke groggy and upset. I dreamt that Don wanted to adopt more children to “make up” for the loss of Emily and I was adamantly against it, saying things like, “Haven’t we suffered enough already?” None of it made sense as both of our daughters were alive in the dream and they were still little girls. Also, I was prepared to flee the marriage and my children to avoid any more pain by having yet more children to love.

I got up and moved to the sofa, covering myself in the blanket that I had put aside for the backseat in case we found Charlotte’s lifeless or shivering body. I tried to read for a while to break my mind away from the dream before falling sleep again, but as soon as I closed my eyes, it reoccurred , along with a kinked neck from sleeping on the sofa. Upon waking, I remembered a time many eons ago, in another life and another marriage, when my husband didn’t make it home. My mother got in the car to go looking for him, putting a blanket in the backseat for the same purpose I had. When he was safely found, having spent the night in his office (before the time of cell phones), my mother said quietly, “The funeral would have been on Tuesday.”

And so here I am. Carrying on the legacy. Preparing for the worst, hoping for the best. It’s not the way I want to live my life. I’m not sure I’ll be able to change it now, though. Once the worst of the worst has happened, how can we go on thinking that the rest of life will be fine?

The Privilege of Pain

My friend Kristi spoke these words - the privilege of pain - when we met in December and she ministered to me by bringing a big salad full of all the things I love and having a picnic at my kitchen table, all things, even napkins, provided by her. She also picked up my daddy, who doesn’t drive a lot these days, so he could be at the bungalow with us. He promised he would just read and mill around and be a gentle presence in the background of our reunion. Kristi brought cosy pajamas for both me and Charlotte and a fluffy blanket for Don that we all continue to shroud ourselves in when we watch TV on the sofa together. And, most importantly, she brought along the easy conversation that comes through life-long friendship. How natural it was to laugh and cry together. During this visit in the early days after Emily’s death, she spoke this profound phrase: the privilege of pain. The recognition of this truth was present for me immediately; I even asked her to repeat what she meant by this phrase, yet my brain and heart were not yet ready to process what this meant on a heart level.

And then I woke in the early hours before dawn today, swathed in the soft blankets of my sister’s basement bedroom in Seattle with my sweetheart snoring softly beside me, some two months later, knowing explicitly what this phrase meant to me. What it has become to me.

The privilege of pain is to see you, all of you, to really see you, even if you don’t speak. It is to silently or verbally acknowledge that you too have suffered. How? I won’t always know. But to really know at a soul level that you have felt and experienced acuity, intensity: unfathomable things, and that grief resides within you for a multitude of reasons, many of which you may not even remember or have pushed away.

The privilege of pain is to receive each of you who has shared with me - about your own children, your spouses, your lost loved ones or ones you are in the midst of losing, your own depths of depression, sorrow, anxiety - with grace and with knowing. I hold each of those confessions like a warm egg, a baby chick emerging. The crack is already starting, my hands ready to receive the fluffy warmth. Each story you have shared with me, through our visits, through the many, many notes, through voice messages and texts, they are gifts. They truly are.

That you have been able to share something profound with me because my grief and vulnerability and openness have somehow given your that forum, this has been an honour. It is my privilege to receive your pain because somehow, unfathomably, it does not make mine deeper, but rather transforms it and eases it. To know that we are in this earth school together, putting our boots on the ground and doing what we have to do to carry on because we have made this choice, sometimes just minute by minute or day by day: this is a pact that we now have together that binds us. To help you just a little bit by allowing you to share the grief of your lost babies; your years of crushing anxiety; your unimaginable losses or hurtful gains; your rapes; your near-suicides; the vigilance with which so many of you must live day after day, for fear a loved one of yours will end their lives; for the breaths you take hoping this day will not be your last because you may finally receive some respite; for the sorrow of children not born; of people lost in the futility of war and hate surrounding us; the shocking sadness of a true love being taken without warning and the wrenching sorrow of the long goodbyes; the chronic and persistent pain in your own bodies and minds; the parents who have faded away with dementia yet whose bodies continue to function; the memories of happier times or the memories we cannot let go of, even though the experience is long gone and the trauma remains. Oh, my. Each time I receive these emotions through your words, my own heart softens. Instinctively, when I read your notes or hear your words, my hands go to my heart. 

Thank you for sharing, for allowing me into your worlds, rich with florid, robust emotions. Some of your soul sears are as ancient as the old growth forests, many intergenerational and inherited and brought forth from and with others. Your depths are so cavernously rooted and sometimes as dank and dark as the innermost labyrinth of trees that have somehow managed and strained to flourish, their trunks accruing years of wisdom and strength and solidity. Know that there is beauty in your forests - so much - and it comes from the pain. There is no rainforest without rain. None of us is exempt.

Thank you for giving me a glimpse of your forests; thank you for letting me into the depths of your souls. I take none of it lightly, and I receive it with such gratitude. Your pain eases mine. How can it be? It’s the transmogrification of something sacred; there is a communion that unites us. It is compassion. It is grace. 

May your hearts be eased. I wish for all of you peace and continued growth through all seasons. I wish you much, so much, warming sun, but also the rain that helps you to grow. May we all become vessels of compassion. May we all make space for one another. May we look up and see the sad eyes, the frazzled parents, the unkempt child, the downcast heads, the tent cities of people living with inexplicable loss, literal and figurative, and see these people, hear their words, know their pain, so that selfishly, ours may be eased and there can be a fusion of our forests. This is the privilege of pain.

The Sun Still Shines Even When It’s Rainy

I know that all of this introspective writing about Emily and grief can get heavy - it certainly can for me - but the fact is that every day there are more and more moments of light. I don’t get slammed nearly as often, and when I do, I’ve learned some breathing techniques, how to gravitate toward gratitude, and how to simply shift my gaze to something different.

Grief does not need to be a 24 hour a day emotion, nor does it need to be one that I am obliged to focus on because I feel guilty if there are sunny moments or even hours in my day. I am learning more and more how to simultaneously hold joy and grief at once. I also feel reassured that Emily must be happy when I am not continuously focused on her, but rather on the joys in the present moment and the imminent future.

Just now I am sitting in a coffee shop with my sister Nicole and daughter Charlotte. Nicole is drinking a nonfat latte, me the same with a spritz of hazelnut and Charlotte has hot chocolate with whipped cream, being an unashamed non-coffee drinker. Of course, Emily would have been having a latte and have had strong comments about it, being a discriminating coffee drinker as well as accomplished barista. I am sure she is delighted that we are here. How wonderful to know this. 

Nicole is designing her garden, spring being just around the corner here in Seattle, Charlotte is studying for a midterm, and I, of course, am blogging. The music is just the right volume, with a just-right play list, including James Taylor and Cat Stevens. It is raining outside (of course) and we are sitting in a corner in comfy chairs surrounded by windows. I feel peaceful, wearing my new Rempel-girl-blue sweater bought from the thrift store we were at yesterday, and also with the new Jones Road Miracle Balm smothered on my cheeks, lips and temples, that my sister and I purchased and had fun experimenting with yesterday. So, yes, all is right with the world.

Do I wish Emily were here? Of course. I will always wish that Emily were here. But I feel satisfied that she is here in spirit, and I am not full of longing. I am content and comfortable and caffeinated. Later, there will be roast beast for dinner and some red wine and mashed potatoes and we will watch some Julia on HBO. I’ll probably read on my kindle and partake in some ephemera that needs to be completed. Just daily life stuff.

So I am grateful. I love the people I am with. There is a Neil Young and Crazy Horse tour coming up that we might just be able to make it to, and I’m okay with the rain. Life is for living. I’m here for it.

Vigilance

I’ve been writing about vulnerability, but it became evident during my most recent therapy session the amount of vigilance I have been living with for as many years as I have been a mother and beyond. 

Emily joined our family as a one year old, having lived in a social welfare institute (or orphanage as they are commonly called) in China for the first year of her life. The little that we know of this time is that it was very regimented and she was very sick. Nourishment was provided at certain times and if it was not eaten or drank during the allotted time, it was taken away. We believe Emily probably spent that first year fighting for her life.

When she came to us, she was in the fifth percentile for weight, and the first night in the Gloria Plaza Hotel in Nanchang, China, she ate an entire loaf of Chinese brown, sweet bread, and didn’t stop eating for months. We had to remove the ever-present fruit bowl from the dining room table because when she woke up from her naps she would scream “Xiang jiao, xiang jiao,” and eat as many bananas as we would give her. Banana was her first word , before mama or baba, it was xiang jiao. Before she found her voice, however, it took her several weeks before she even cried. She was mostly silent, mewing like a kitten when she wanted something, which was mostly food.

After Emily ate with abandon for several months (We were sure she would become a chubby child), she normalised to a healthy weight and lost her food obsession. After she got stronger, she never ate quickly and we never forced her too. She stopped demanding food, and ate what was given with gratitude. When we asked her what she wanted for dinner, her typical response was, “I don’t mind.” The one thing she did love was her Daddy making her gigantic weekend breakfasts. On weekends, if she woke up before we were out of bed, she’d sidle into the room and look at Don with that kind of embarrassed, don’t-want-to-ask-for-too-much gaze, and say, “Brekkie?” With Emily, it was very hard for her to ask for what she wanted, and Don was only-too-pleased to oblige.

In the first year of children’s lives, their identities are largely formed. We suspect Emily’s first year was one of both neglect and stubborn survival. On our trip to Mexico last week, Don and I talked about Emily’s older sister, Charlotte, who also spent her first year in a social welfare institute. She deals with issues of abandonment. For the first years, she never let us out of her sight, needing to know we were ever-present. She clings to us still: when I get up from a sofa we are sitting on together, she’ll grab my hand and hold on, trying to keep me in place, bodies touching. She tells us how much she loves us multiple times a day, texts constantly when we are not together, to let us know how much she loves us and also to receive reassurance. She is full of sweetness and light and effervescence, though some of it is borne out of that fear. For Emily, her defining characteristic or lack of one may have been with bonding. Our working theory is that she was never truly able to bond and trust and say what she needed or believe she deserved what she was given. With us, she was almost always satisfied, always grateful, seldom effusive, never clingy. She never felt entitled. Both of our daughters’ identities spring from the same root cause, but manifested differently.

When I reflected with my therapist on the many times that Emily needed emotional help and support and didn’t seek it because she probably did not even know it wasn’t normal to feel the way she did, and so disassociated or went into herself or perhaps even into another self, it brought up such deep sadness: all these times we could not help her because she couldn’t let herself be helped. Somehow she didn’t know how to ask or even know what she needed or that she needed anything at all. It’s heartbreaking. It’s soul crushing. It’s enough to destroy me. 

So all these years of vigilance - of trying to help, trying to control and normalise situations, trying to get to understand how to give Emily what she needed, yet never quite succeeding. All the cortisol. All the adrenaline. All the nights of sleeping on the floor beside her bed. All the thousands of nights where I slept so lightly so I could know every movement in the house and that everyone was safe. Dear Lord. I deserve a medal. Yet I thought it was normal. Isn’t this what parents do? Perhaps it is.

Now I just want to breathe. I can barely take care of myself. How have I managed a household and children and taught for 35 years and written blogs and books and just generally maintained? How have I actually done this?

And is this just life? Is this what everybody goes through? Is this the price we pay for choosing to come to earth? I’d like to just watch sitcoms and cuddle with a cat and gaze out the window for the rest of my life. I’d like cocktails on the beach and drug cocktails to put me to sleep at night and I’d like some damn peace on earth. The price of living here is just so high. Emily obviously knew this. It’s just so, so much.

Reliving memories with my therapist, and not the fond ones, was so horrendously hard. I cried and cried. I’ve just come from the bathroom and the wrinkles and sagging around my eyes are so pronounced: I look so very old and weather-worn. If people who haven’t seen me in a few months could see me now, they’d be shocked. I’m not the same person mentally or physically. I am going through the motions and, yes, I am healing, but I am also feeling the weight of a universe of grief. 

How can we choose this life? And who are we to judge for the people who choose to end it?

I don’t want to be vigilant anymore. I want to move to my house on Vancouver Island and go for long walks on the beach and grow basil and make granola and write delightful books that charm people. I want to go to water aerobics and bake pies and visit with people I love. I want Charlotte to come over often and I want us to laugh and play and make pizza together. I want to hug Don tightly each night and snuggle under our down covers, and I want us to hold hands and walk along the wind-swept beach, and live our easy dreams that entail music and laughter and good food and exploring old growth forests and bobbing around the island in our camper van, having little bonfires where Don plays his guitar for me. I want to bathe and read and sleep through the night, waking up having remembered no dreams, ideally having had none at all.

I want Emily to be a muted and beautiful presence that requires no more vigilance, just gentle joy.

That’s all I want.

Blame

Do I blame myself for Emily’s suicide? In no way - not for a second. Do I blame her? That is a more complicated question to answer. 

In regard to me, I am rife with imperfections, but I am also full of devotion, forgiveness and affection. I have been a mother of high calibre: loved deeply, listened carefully, sacrificed accordingly, done things I didn’t want to, asked hard questions, and slept at Emily’s bedside on the floor (we called it the cloud bed) many nights after she took a precipitous downturn in late September. I have taken her out for innumerable coffee dates where she would study and I would prepare school work or mark or write, and we would sit quietly until she would divulge some tidbit of her life, spurring a conversation I knew she found hard to initiate but so badly wanted to.

The coffee dates were my primary way in. They often worked. I didn’t often give advice, unless asked. I listened. I commiserated. I shared some of my own experiences of my teenage years that may have helped a bit. I did not suffer from depression, never have. I’ve been sad and certainly anxious, but whatever it was that dogged Emily was well beyond my purview, something for which I had no frame of reference. Whatever wisdom I could convey to her, I did. I have no idea if it helped or hindered, though she always listened with an open and curious heart. I know she wanted to find her way. I know she hoped that somehow she could find the one answer that would set her free.

The way in which she gained her freedom was not the sort I could ever let myself imagine she would take. Yes, I do believe she is free now, and for that I am glad, but the burden she has placed on her family and her friends is a sorrow and sometimes rage that I deal with on a daily basis. How could she do this to us? Yes, she avoided her own pain, but she transferred it to us. No, I don’t blame her, but at times I do find myself resenting her for this. Her poor friends: how they must wonder how they might have helped her, when, of course, they couldn’t have. Perhaps they at times blame themselves, when, of course, their relationships played out as most teenage friendships do: certainly with some tumult and stress, but also with deep love, respect, hijinks, and fun. Nobody should take the blame for Emily’s death. Nobody. This was not about any of us; this was about herself and her disease. 

I know that I do not blame myself; I pray that her friends and acquaintances do not blame themselves, either. This was her battle to fight and we could not help her, try as we might. May we all be free of blame and also able to forgive her.

Earth School

 

Nobody signs up for earth school, but it’s inevitable that we all matriculate. Nobody is exempt from the tutorials that are individually tailored to their unique curriculums, but some of us have our tasks delivered to us earlier than others, and some have the same lessons again and again because we never seem to learn.

I am a stellar student. I’ve always endeavored for excellence: never handed in assignments late, excelled in my expository and creative writing, found the most compelling ways to explain simple concepts, persevered, and strove to do well in subjects that eluded me.

In systematic subjects that required a more scientific grasp of the world, pride would sometimes get in the way and I’d wonder, “Why does everybody else understand this when I don’t?” And I wouldn’t speak up or get help. How foolish I now know that is. As a long-time teacher, I so love and appreciate those students who come to me for assistance, who don’t have chips on their shoulders, or pretend to know things when they don’t. These are the students who often end up excelling - because they ask for the help that they need, even when they're not even sure what to ask for.

I have been a most avid student of recovering from the excruciating loss of my daughter by suicide. From the first day, I asked my friend Rachel, who is a counselor, to give me eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy (EMDR), an approach that can help heal traumatic memories. She told me I wasn’t yet ready, and I resented that. I wanted to heal the first day. I didn’t want to suffer.

Within the first week, I was listening all night long to YouTube meditations and hypnosis sessions on reducing trauma, facing loss; I regressed myself to my inner child to find healing there; I found a brilliant therapist and made weekly appointments to go through all the hard stuff, even though I hated it. I would have done daily appointments if I could have.

I should be getting an A plus on this most challenging of graduate level courses. I don’t like to think of myself as a Type A person, but it appears I am. Give me a challenge, and I want to take it on. In this case, my challenge has been getting rid of the grief so I can access peace and acceptance and forgive my Emily for taking her life.

What I realise now, sadly, is that the challenge is not to get rid of the grief, but to feel it and face it head-on and to live through it. I hate that so much. Why isn’t there a magic formula I can follow? Why is it so creative and fluid and in no way linear or systematic? Why do I have to invent my own examination rather than take the same true or false test that everyone else dealing with a similar loss should be able to take, too? Then I could get 100 percent and just move on to the next challenge, which surely must be easier than this one. 

Oh, I wish it were that simple. Instead, it’s a rambling essay I must write that changes its thesis every few days and doesn’t seem to have a clear ending. It’s an invent-your-own-adventure novel that I don’t want to be writing at all. And also, why must I ask for help? Why can’t I just do this on my own, in the privacy of my blanket-smothered bed or tub of scalding water? Why do I have to share it and collaborate with others? I want to the how-to manual that will allow me to soldier through independently.

As I sit in the middle seat of the plane, on my way home from Mexico, surrounded by Canadian snowbirds also quiet in the knowledge of their return to rainier climes and more stark reality, I know that my earth school exam will be ongoing. I am grateful it has no time limit and that I don’t need to pass with flying colours. I just need to get through it. For those of you reading this, thank you for collaborating with me on this. It appears I can’t do it without you.

Healing on the Beach

Last Thursday, in the throes of our loss, with the rain in its perpetual drizzle, nothing felt motivating or worth pursuing. Don had gotten out of bed, had a shower and breakfasted, and went straight to lying on the sofa, wrapped in a blanket, back facing the window. That’s when I knew it was bad. We both needed a shake up.

I started looking at last-minute vacations online, getting Don involved. About 20 hours and a thrift store shop later, we found ourselves on a plane bound for Mazatlan, Mexico. We are rather famous for our spontaneity and we continue to impress. One of the things about having nothing on the docket at the moment, is that we are free to do whatever we want whenever we want. Our only consideration is our dear Charlotte and making sure she is feeling loved and protected. Our dear Emily, I am choosing to believe, is taking care of us, as she clearly let me know on the second day after she ended her life and my new one began. I am going to keep believing that. Every time something serendipitous happens or we barely make it somewhere (such as to the gate on time because we were enjoying our lounge privileges), I silently mouth the words, “Thank you, Emily,” and I feel the warmth of her heart and smile. It’s my turn to take care of you, Mama.

The beauty of this beach, the relentless waves, the blue skies…they all seem to beckon Emily to our hearts. We were surprisingly triggered at first by what I initially thought would be a healing respite from our grief. But as Don sagely said, “Better to be grieving here than in the living room looking out at the rain.” I agreed, as I sat out on the balcony on a Sunday morning, eagerly awaiting my cup of coffee on the beach, toes soon-to-be wiggling in the sand.

We have been blessed with many beach vacations, having lived in Asia for nearly 30 years and the entirety of our children’s childhoods. Emily has been to countless beaches, made thousands of made-to-order meals out of driftwood and seaweed and sand, and has frolicked with abandon on all fours, kicking up sand across continents. I spent hours everyday gazing from of our expansive balcony and seeing her in the sea, the sand, the stars…

In the Uber on the way to the airport in Vancouver, our driver regaled us with stories of his homeland, Korea. Normally, I would have stepped in and told him that we had lived in Seoul for three years and we would have discussed favourite foods and memories - and we all would have so enjoyed the conversation and made a bond through our shared experiences of his country. Without saying so, though, Don and I both kept quiet, only murmuring our acknowledgements of his knowledge, all of which we already knew. Somehow we had each decided without saying so that this reinvention would not involve us bringing up our pasts with random strangers. My ego wanted to say, “We are not some random retired couple from the suburbs who is going on their annual vacation to Mexico.” I wanted to share a part of me, but I also wanted to keep that part private because it now involves that other huge hole of Emily not being here. So better to keep silent and let him believe whatever he wanted to about us. It’s not my job to entertain others and it’s not my priority to feed my ego by telling of my own adventures.

I had the idea that coming to Mexico would make us anonymous, so we could be just like the other countless couples here, fitting a certain Canadian profile that perhaps I am not quite ready to enter into. I’m no longer the exotic expatriate coming home for the summers; I am now the settled Canadian who goes south for the winter. On top of Emily’s death, we are also undergoing culture shock and an entire reinvention. Along with filing papers for Don’s naturalisation and organizing repatriation details and claiming status, we are bidding goodbye to our old lives. There is mourning that accompanies this as well. We feel like fish out of water on this cerulean sea.

I’ve been playing with the idea of reinvention. On this trip, I thought it would be a bit of a new beginning: nobody knew who we were and what we were enduring. What if we were just a typical Canadian couple from the Lower Mainland, visiting Mexico? This seemed like a good time to try on a new identity.

When we arrived in Mazatlan and had collected our luggage and were waiting for the minibus to our hotel, who did I see but a girl I had grown up with down the road in Greendale. I panicked.  She was a friend on Facebook, had perhaps even reached out with her condolences, and there she was with her boyfriend, unmistakably a childhood peer. I panicked and dragged my suitcase and Don to another area of the terminal.

“Why don’t you just say hi?” he asked. But I couldn’t: I wasn’t here to face the ‘smooshy middle,’ as my friend Steph calls it: people I know and who are not in my inner circle, but who do know about the death of our Emily. The emotional energy that this would take seemed too much to bear. At the best of times, I am reluctant to see people I sort of know in unexpected situations. This felt impossible to me.

Fortunately, the worry abated and the week passed without me seeing her again, until just now when we were on the bus back to the airport and there she was, in front of us. I had already decided what I would say if I saw her, so I greeted her with a smile, exchanged niceties and told her I was sorry I hadn’t acknowledged her earlier, but it was just too hard to discuss our recent loss. Of course, she was kind and considerate and gentle, and it was a pleasure to have a short discussion. I was glad I had been able to say hello. 

But this is what I am faced with now. The same thing happened when I saw my aunt last week in a situation where neither of us expected to see one another. She didn’t have time to prepare her condolences so they were clunky and uncomfortable for me to receive, and I didn’t have the opportunity to say I was not emotionally up to discussing my grief with her in that moment. As my therapist has since reassured me, I can save all my energy for my own healing and don’t need to take on anyone else’s. I can simply tell people I don’t yet have the emotional space to discuss the death of my beloved.

The trip, in the end, was healing: the sun, the waves, the all-night pounding of the ocean with our balcony door open and the air conditioning off. The ‘black tequila’ in the morning caffeinated me and the strawberry daiquiris in the afternoon loosened me: the blue skies, the wind, the sun freckling my face all gave me a fortitude and renewed resolve. 

And Don and I were still able to stay in our own little bubble of solitude: just a couple of middle-aged Canadian tourists escaping the rain.

The Loop of Love

I’ve been so tired and so inactive. Dragging my body around the block in the drizzle has been nearly impossible. Getting on the plush carpet to do Pilates or stretching has been a constant push-pull of aching muscles and heart. My body has wanted to do little other than hibernate. Perhaps this is the natural process of grief.

The other day I came across a quote from Abraham Hicks about how 17 seconds of rapt intention on a feeling can completely shift your vibration: simply by holding a thought. I realized how concentrated I have been on all-things why and what’s-next, and how few of the moments of my day have been spent on positivity. Yes, I have also been intently focused on finding peace and relief from this pain. Yes, I have been, at times, laser-focused on exploring this and finding avenues of relief. But much of each day of the past two months has been spent being dormant and numb.

So what if I accessed the most positive aspects and love of Emily to me and I to her for several times for a series of seconds each day? How might I do that?

One of the aspects Emily is well-known for is her relentless activity. When studying, she would have her notes perched on her violin music stand, and while learning and incanting the formulas of physics and the tones of Chinese, she would be lunging, squatting, punching, strengthening…always active, always getting stronger.

Emily was an athlete: an avid volleyball fan and talented player; she could run and swim and hurdle and play soccer with the best of them. Her one achilles tendon was not that, but her knees. She’d had physical therapy for years to help them grow stronger, but there was a congenital problem that would have her knees popping out of their sockets on a regular and painful basis. So she trained hard - harder than anyone - just to be able to play on the varsity team, and even then, often she would have to sit out because of injury or strain. It caused her much emotional and physical distress.

But she was always about getting stronger and better, in every way. Until she wasn’t. Until she couldn’t be. And this I understand and forgive. I, rather, choose to remember this dogged persistence and the pleasure she took in her body being strong and agile. When she was a little girl, Emily would run everywhere on all fours: she would often choose it over walking. Lion Kinghad become a touchstone for her at an early age, and she would roar and run like a lion, with little respite. In the house, she would set up obstacle courses and hurtle over chairs and furniture and up and down stairs. In nature, she would do the same: scrambling up rock faces and running along the open beach like a wild animal. It was a joy to behold. If there were an Olympics event for being on all fours, Emily would have been a gold medal recipient.

So - how to channel that boundless energy and enthusiasm for the physical into my own bearish, burdened body and at the same time access my Emily in a meaningful way? 

I decided to use an anchor, and maybe an embarrassing one, to tap into the good energy of Emily for 20 seconds-ish and also to raise my heart rate. Every time I enter the bathroom, I keep the door shut an extra 20 seconds and commune with Emily through lunging or squatting or punching or doing something physical in a small, contained space. During those 20 seconds I completely and utterly focus on transmitting and receiving love to and from Emily: only positive energy allowed. I breathe it all in and then exhale it all out. It is transforming me. It is bringing me to the knowing that she is here, she is bringing me strength for myself. It is a back-and-forthing of enthusiastic energy that radiates from me to her and onward to others. I have loved this energising routine thus far. Multiple times a day I am channeling this anabolic and spiritual energy. 

Just maybe you can find your own anchor: it certainly needn’t be mine! But when you get dressed in the morning, or each time you glance in the mirror, or whatever small moments you have in the day that reoccur with regularity and privacy, perhaps you can take that time to access Emily or another loved one that you wish to retain and find the sweetest succor from. Then energetically activate the love that you have and the love your departed wishes to give to you. Focus completely and give and receive. Give and receive. The loop of love. 

The Gift of Sharing Yourself

Credit: Gretchen Schmelzer

There are times I just feel so lost without my Emily; I just want her to be here so badly, it takes me down. The intensity of this craving will shudder me senseless, often when I am not expecting it. These are early days still. I hope the random spontaneity of this longing will lessen. I am so grateful for this mourning house, to grieve and heal in. Don and I still need to be mostly removed from the world. We’re not quite ready to reenter yet, except in tentative, small meanderings with close friends and family and to do the diurnal, mundane tasks: shopping, banking, picking up and dropping off. This bungalow has been a blessing beyond words, keeping the world at bay so we can come to terms with this enormous tragedy.

The other day, I was well and truly taken down, beyond what I had experienced, except maybe in the early days of loss. It came on so heavily and so hard, that all I had were sounds coming from a seldom accessed vault of me. My grief could not be contained: not in this house, not on this street, not in this world. It bled out into the universe in fierce, sharp screams of pain. There were no words. I lay on the bed, alone in the house, untethered. There was no escape until my body became boneless.

I’ve found two times when I can access my Emily: when I am still and at peace and when I am on the other side of the stick: when I am in such turmoil that I have lost touch with the earthly realm and have succumbed utterly to the void. I am grateful for both, though I much prefer the peaceful path to my dear one.

On this day, after my heaving had subsided, I looked out through the window at the looming sky, so overcome with clouds and rain, and the marmalade daub of the setting sun. The clouds kept roiling relentlessly, never still, part of this universal imperative of a constantly shifting state. Nothing can remain static, nothing can ever stay the same. But such a sudden and shocking change had come upon our family and friends. How can there be any solidity when the universe is based on this principle? I cannot accept this kind of change, yet it has already happened. How do I make my peace with this? How?

Lately I’ve been thinking about vulnerability: how, since I have started writing, I have put it all on the line. I’ve always joked that I am an open book: I connect with people because I share my foibles, my hangups, the adventures of my life, including the dirty laundry. But this: this goes to the very heart of vulnerability - it goes to the molten core of me. That’s where my Emily sits. To share this, I need to dig deep, past many layers of what didn’t seem superficial, but now does.

Lying on that bed, looking at the silver-tinged clouds, I thought about how I needed to gather myself because Don would be coming home soon with our daughter Charlotte in tow to spend the weekend. We have been very conscious of not bringing her under with us, of helping her to navigate her own grief and our collective family grief, but not being too raw in front of her because she has enough to deal with and does not need to hold our sorrow as well.

As I huddled there, tangled in blankets, eyes bulbous and red, raspy breath and body noodle-limp, I knew there was no hiding my sadness from Charlotte. Don already knew that I was beyond repair for the day: he had seen the bubbly beginning of this meltdown, as I have witnessed many of his. This is the inner circle of pain that we have somehow both gifted and cursed one another with.

In this state of complete hopelessness, Emily came to me: It’s okay for Charlotte to know what you are going through, Mama. You don’t need to hide it.

 

“But she has enough going on,” I argued.

You can let her know that she doesn’t have to take it on, but it’s okay for her to see how much you and Daddy love me through this rawness. It helps her to also see the love you have for her. It helps her to know love at its deepest level. This is a gift.

‘How can it be? I just want to protect her.”

Protection is overrated. Just be vulnerable.

And there it was again. That word: the word that I had found action to accompany by sharing my journey through writing, by talking to Matt at the pool, where I had told him why I was there on that Thursday evening in January, because my daughter had ended her life.

“All this time, I could be writing and talking about grief just through my lens of losing you, but I am also talking about how you took your own life, Emily. I am going beyond that depth of grief, to one even deeper: the fact that you made an active choice. What can be more vulnerable than that?"

Emily’s words were spoken at a soul level, and that’s when I deeply understood what a privilege it was to have the ability to be vulnerable. It became clear to me that one of the things that Emily could not be was this: it was just too hard to share the depth of her pain, too hard to go to that place with others again once she had been in it herself, too hard to burden those she loved with what was ineffable to us, and what she probably could not even put words to.

Mama, your vulnerability is what will heal you. It is what will help to heal others.

That was the clear message. And my cry back was, “Why could it not heal you, Emily? Why couldn’t I help you?”

I couldn’t receive this gift, Mama. But others can. Please use it.

And so here I am, writing this, being vulnerable. Giving you my heart. Because I have this gift that Emily did not, and she wants me to share it.