Author: sheilahjfrench

12 January 2018

The air around me is humming today.

Inside the furniture is splashed with sunlight and shadows. A red throw spreads across the couch with Livia’s paperback lying open on it. The stuffed snow leopard from her donation to World Wildlife Fund lies with its face to the back of the chair. Leo sighs.

Outside the trees and shrubs simply wait. They are content with the mostly invisible changes taking place within them as the season slowly progresses. The sky is shiny gray and the air mostly still. Occasionally a breath catches a frond in the tree fern or a branch suddenly dips as a squirrel leaps.

Does this act of describing change things? No. I am here. I am calm. I am satisfied.

22 April 2017

I think what’s happened is that I’ve accepted it. Not in any kind of “it’s okay” way. In fact, I’m not sure that acceptance is the right word.

You could say I’ve accepted the reality of it. The finality–in this realm, at least.

It’s more that my cognitive dissonance has cleared. For the last 4 years I have not been able to reconcile what happened with my beliefs about what I expected to happen or what should have happened. My belief that something like this couldn’t or wouldn’t happen to my child or to me.

I think I have stopped fighting reality. I see that this is my life now: I will not see both of my children grow up.  I will never see Vaughn again on this earth. My life, no matter what happens in it–good, bad, unremarkable–will be without Vaughn, at least without Vaughn in the flesh, until the day I die.

So it is not a happy acceptance. It is more of a sad realization that my beliefs about what can or should happen are pure imagination.

Nevertheless, it may be some kind of grim progress. It may give me some sort of floor from which to rise.

March 2017

Nobody understands how every single moment can be so hard.

The kid next door is practicing sax. Vaughn can’t practice any instrument.

Julie’s so glad to be back in California so she can see all her children more often. I can’t see Vaughn no matter where I live.

Vaughn’s friends are graduating from college. Vaughn never even got to college.

Every moment of my life has Vaughn’s absence automatically built into it. So it’s a different world. Different than when every moment had Vaughn built into it.

March 2017

This just in:

There’s not going to be an alternate ending. There’s not going to be a chance for a do-over.

This is real, even though it doesn’t jibe in any way with what I expected of my life.

Losing Vaughn will be part of the context for all the present moments in the rest of my life.

February 2017

Okay Vaughn, I will write to you, which means I will write to myself. You’ve been calling me and calling me–haven’t you? Or have I been calling and calling myself? To write–to look–to acknowledge. The computer Mahjong screen says NO MORE MOVES, and KQED is broadcasting Marketplace, which bores me. I’ve run out of ways to distract myself from my need to look, to acknowledge.

A spring storm is sweeping across our land. As usual, I welcome the rain. The early darkness it brings suits my desire to close down–the hum of raindrops and the rustling of branches in the wind create a kind of numbing, insulating background noise. So much more suitable to my state of mind than the bird calls of a clear day–broadcasting their jarring, terrifying optimism.

Maybe it’s not even optimism–more of a foolish determination, despite everything–fallen nests, unhatched eggs, prowling cats–to move forward into the day, into the new season of birth, into the sky.

How I resist my similar impulses…because how could that be right?

There have been a pair of hawks around. I saw one make a kill just 6 yards or so away from me. Plunged down like a dark lightening bolt and then straight up again, a struggling something–gopher I hope?–in its talons.

I think of you, and your Dad when I see those hawks. I feel like you’re communicating to me somehow.

I hope you’re saying: ‘I am near. I am free. All will be revealed.’ (That’s what Dad told me when I talked with George Anderson.)

Yes Vaughn, you are here. In my heart always and forever.

And so I sit here, writing these words–trapped in this moment that seems to go on and on.

I don’t want to complain. I must accept that this moment is as it is. I must accept my sadness and confusion. I will attempt to accept the beauty of the bird calls too, as they fly free on the next sunny day, the foolish creatures.

January 2017

The only way I can be okay is to forget for awhile. Not that I ever forget–but part of me does. I can feel okay when the part of me that remembers is quiet. Pushed down even–maybe–sometimes.

The part of me that can be okay–who is that? It would be nice to say that it’s the part of me living in the present moment, but that’s not necessarily true. Sometimes I’m actively distracting myself so I don’t have to be here. And even that feels good compared to remembering.

Reading back on this I can see what needs doing is to redefine the meaning of being okay. I suppose I need to recognize that I’m okay even when I’m sad and in pain. Accept that sadness and pain are what’s real sometimes.

Wanting to be happy and ‘not remembering’ is clinging. Not wanting to be sad is pushing away.

I hear a little voice sometimes–no, not really a voice or even a whisper. More of a subtle shift, a little click-clack like the turning of a combination, that seems to beckon, or even insidiously order me to STOP being okay. Stop being in that place of not remembering.

But not remembering what?? Like I said, I never forget. Maybe it’s this: Don’t stop remembering WHO YOU ARE–a mother who lost her child. Don’t forget your identity as a grieving mother. Don’t take off those mourning robes.

Hell if I know–sometimes I need to wrap those robes around me and feel the knives cut and slice me, to try to figure out why. Other times I need to be that other person–the one who’s still here, the one who still believes it might be possible in this dimension to touch the true meaning of life.

19 January 2017

The clouds still puff up to the south. A little bird cheeps across the sky in front of them. And the bare grey branches of the chestnut shine after the rain.

I c0uld join this world. But I can’t. Because it is all merrily manifesting away while Vaughn is no longer manifest. No longer here in the manifested world.

I suppose you could say that I’m here whether I want to be or not. But to willingly join in? To voluntarily step forward, say ‘OK, I’m in’? That’s another story.

That would be leaving Vaughn behind. How can I join a world he is no longer part of? How can I abandon my baby?

And yet this is what acceptance appears to demand.

Maybe I’ll find some other way around it. Be able to look at it from a different perspective. But for now I’m on the edge: observing the world but not really prepared to fully step into it.

2016

Right now:

I am totally without physical pain. I am not hungry or thirsty. The air I’m breathing is deliciously fresh. The spring weather’s gorgeous, and I’ve been outside–walking Leo and gardening. My skin is perfectly comfortable–neither hot nor cold.

A breeze from the window occasionally brushes over me. I can see a squirrel in the blooming Horse Chestnut outside my bedroom. The house is even relatively tidy.

I have half an hour before I need to start getting ready to go to a dance class.

Livia is healthy and happy and our relationship is strong. I have no man-drama niggling at me.

I can rest in all this. Rest in all this even knowing that Vaughn is not here –not physically. But he is not suffering. Much of me believes he is happy and at peace.

I can rest in this–now–the way it is. I don’t have to follow my mind on a trail in search of misery.

2016

It’s as though sometimes you’re here, and we’re holding hands. You’re here–in my heart, my mind–my darling baby–how could you not be with me?

And there are periods where I am just going about my life. As though you were across the country, like Livia. I’m not aware of her every second, but I know where she is.

Is it so different?

2017

I have asked the gods for mercy for my child. I have asked the gods for mercy for my child.

I know I have to relinquish him to their control