Temple of Solace

I don’t always know what Enough is, but I know that too much is what is stuffed and piled and packed around my house. In an effort to lift myself up spirit, mind and body I have been culling my bookshelves and drawers ruthlessly boxing things up and carting them to local charities. I even took to shredding numerous old journals that are really nothing but scribbled out drivel that I needed to empty from my crowded mind so I could concentrate on other things. I thought I had done away with the journals when I found a few more today. They were tucked into the hard little overnight case put under the computer table here to put my feet on like a makeshift footstool. They were the last three years worth of day-to-day scribble of life stuff.
I sat down beside the shredder and opened up the cover to the first page of the first notebook and saw written at the top of the page August 11, 2006. My daughter, Seanna, died that same day one year later in 2007. The date stunned me. I turned off the shredder and just sat staring at the date thinking, “I didn’t know. I didn’t know.” On that day in 2006 I didn’t know we only had a year left and my writing reflected that. I talked about summer things and children’s squabbles and things I looked forward to and the things I didn’t look forward to. On all the pages that followed it was just our lives as they were then. Love, pain, fear, more love, more fear… And in between every line I saw pictures of us today, Seanna and I, doing the stuff we did the same way every day. The way we touched, the way we looked at each other, the way we sat together, played together, bathed and dressed and napped together. And I just kept thinking, “I didn’t know. I didn’t know.”

Eventually I had read my thoughts and details of the time between then and her death when I stopped writing, where the journal abruptly ends, and I set to shredding them all up while the tears gathered in my throat and just bulged up there. Soon the shredder was too slow and I was too…something…and I simply tore all the remaining pages to shreds and deposited them in the recycling bag. There were no special details about things Seanna and I did together that needed to be saved in those journals. All the details that mattered then or now are in my mind and heart. But I had a question that begged answering: If you’d known on that day you had exactly one year left together what would you have done and what wouldn’t you have done with Seanna?

It’s been a long evening since the journals met their fate and I’ve spent nearly all of it sitting quietly listening to a clock tick and wondering, “What would I do that I didn’t do?” I didn’t know. We were very affectionate and I told her constantly all the things I loved about her. So I wondered, “What would I do more of?” Still, I didn’t know. To be more affectionate or spend even more time in each other’s company would have been ridiculous as much as we were already huggy-kissy-hand-holding people. So I wondered, “What wouldn’t I have done?” I thought I’d dig up a few answers here. I spent a long time on this one, but I still didn’t know. We struggled to make sure she got the most out of being alive by putting our faith in the truism that ‘change is life’ and insisting she grow and learn to be independent as possible when she struggled as hard as she could to maintain the total dependence that was easier. I know that independence made her happier than she would have been otherwise. I wouldn’t take back any of the struggle.

Sitting here after all that musing I have to admit we didn’t lose anything by not knowing. Lord, but that’s got to be worth something, something real big, you know? I’m having trouble feeling that specifically. I still just have those tears in my throat and a knowing that I ‘lucked out’ big time in one way but still hurt too much to feel lucky yet. It’s been a while since her death now but I’ve been avoiding myself and herself, if you know what I mean, for nearly all the time since. It’s good I got rid of those journals, those makeship placeholders. Time passed needs to be acknowledged and I need to stop waiting for some mysterious future date to start living and enjoying my life again. This waiting, however, is not new to me. I’m a wait-er. Thankfully, I’m also a ponderer and I’ll give some more thought to this knowing/not knowing business.
steph

Last night I had a dream that was certainly prompted by Gail’s poem and all of the – sorry, I haven’t a word special and kind enough to describe everyone’s support.  This dream may interest you; it certainly made me smile.

Last night I dreamt the simple dream that I stepped out of the shower all dripping wet and heard Seanna’s voice mumbling and murmuring outside in what I supposed to be a hallway.  I didn’t recognize the bathroom I was in.  Regardless, I was soaking wet and my purpose was to take care of that problem.  As I began to dry myself I heard Seanna’s muffled voice ‘asking’, “See Steph?  Come in?”  Unsure of what to do, not knowing the rules wherever we happened to be, I didn’t answer.  I felt a great fear.

When I hesitated I heard again a mumbled, “Wanna see Steph,” and I said loudly, “Okay babe!  But I think we have to ask someone first!  There are probably forms to fill out or something!  So wait, okay?!”  But to her that was an affirmation and that was all.  “Yes” is “yes”; there is no “yes, but…”  Instead of coming to the door, however, I heard a rustling under the counter.  Curious, I reached for the door on the far left but it popped open before I could grab the handle.  Seanna?

Yup.  Apparently on the other side of the bathroom wall there was a closet or cubby of some type and she just weasled her way right through the hole in the wall (like the one in her Grandma’s house) and followed it through the base cabinet of the bathroom, knocking all manner of soaps and jars and bottles willy-nilly with a great racket, utterly oblivious to the mess and noise (she never changes…after all, someone else will be picking that up) and was almost all the way into the room, shoulder length chestnut brown hair escaping every which way from her pony tail, mumbling “see Steph?” while I laughed at her customary chaos, when I woke up.  …when I woke up thinking, “Jeez it was nice to see her again!  It must have been all those Soul Food people talking about she and I like that that brought her back.  Especially Gail’s poem.”  Thank you one and all.

My great panic and assumption that permission and forms were necessary were due to the vicious custody fight that was underway when she died.  The rules of the family court took away all of my access to Seanna except via phone until the custody between birth parents was settled, but she died before that happened.  So now, even now, still, when I dream about her being alive I often don’t see her face but only hear her voice.  I will always hear that voice asking those questions she asked me until the day she died: “See Steph?  Come see me?  Seanna go to Steph?  Now?  Soon?  Please?” 

She was a Babbler with a capital B, but the circumstances in the last months had their value: I can’t imagine the sound of her voice will ever be forgotten by me.  In my mind I held the sounds she made over the phone as tightly in my mind as I would her whole body to my heart if she were in front of me.  The absence of my person did not stop her from bringing me everything of importance to her, either.  She told me everything that hurt and where and when it happened and who she saw and what she did and how she felt and what she wanted and what she ate and what she drank and, and, and…until she cried because I wasn’t there to do it all with her.  Thus was every phone call and there was so much time spent on the phone.  I often thought maybe I shouldn’t talk to her if she ended up crying, but her dad said she cried when I didn’t answer, so I always answered.  I guess I’ll always answer.

Oh…the shower theme.  For our lifetime together Seanna showered with me.  I was the Seanna-cleaner.  I still feel lonely in the shower.

steph

Writing openly about my life used to be like water off a duck’s back for me.  I was Say-Anything Steph once-upon-a.  So many battles, big and small, seems to have whittled me down from feeling large to little in a twitchy, embarrassed-for-no-reason kind of way.   It aint purty!  So I’ve been consciously pulling my s___ together for the sake of … pride?  Yeah, maybe pride.  Pride goeth, I know, but there’s something to be said for sparing the world from another simpering, twitching, ever-apologetic mess.  I got down; I can get up.  Me big girl now.  *smile*

The point of this post is to share an experience I had yesterday and take solace here in the temple.  Actually, the experience has been ongoing since April when I begin what was supposed to be a year long “crisis support” program at the local hospital.  I brought them the crisis, but I’m still wondering when they’ll get to the support part. 

At the end of 2006 when I had to leave the house I loved so much because I was being abused by one of my stepdaughters I began do slide into a depression that spiralled as the events following my departure went wildly out of control.  Simply surreal, not to be believed, this is not happening to us, no way Jose kinda stuff.  The depression absolutely buried me when we buried our beloved Seanna last August, and that’s why I turned to the community care centre at the hospital for help in April. 

Every month that I have met the therapist and doctor since I started six months ago I have been asked the same questions about what it is I think is bringing me so down and why it is that I have no interest in life or plans or hope for happiness in my near future.  They have focussed on the depression but offered no grief counselling whatsoever.  In fact, they offer no “depression counselling” either; they just keep asking me over and over why I think I feel the way I do.  The psychiatrist asked me each time for the last three months why I don’t return to my regular activities, my normal life,  and why I am not content once again now that I am out of the depression.  And every time…as I have for six months…I have to remind him that my home is gone, my gallery that was my beloved work is gone, my job as Dorian’s bookkeeper is gone because he is bankrupt, my one stepdaughter (abusive as she was) is gone, and my other child, the child of my heart, is DEAD! THERE IS NOTHING TO GO BACK TO!  IT’S ALL GONE!

Barely controlling my feeling of insult – well, anger, really – that these basic facts of my life cannot be remembered, or least not gleaned from reading a simple chart or file before meeting with me again, I requested a different therapist, a switch that also comes with a different doctor.  If I end up with no “crisis support” from the hospital at all and am not allowed to go back there, I surely won’t be able to discern a difference.  Other than, perhaps, being free from the monthly insult. 

I have been embarrassed to be enduring this nonsense in my quest for solace and really should have just come to the temple once a month instead…heck…you probably would even have let me weep here once a week!  *smile*  You all are so kind that way.  LOL  But for so many years I told myself the story that I was the one holding other people together, my family, my children.  Yeah.  Such fairytales I tell myself!  And believed them because I needed to as a child needs to believe in Cinderella’s prince for a while. 

Nonetheless, here I am, feeling much better though still without any great enthusiasm for living, but I am Alive enough to have regained my sense of the necessariness of bearing witness to the witlessness that We, many of us, have to bear at times in life.  I bear necessary witness here in case someone else in Soul Food has or is being so sad and enduring the ridiculous dismissal of their entirely acceptable and understandable sadness, despondency, or simple exhaustion.

I am grateful for this wonderful temple and the solace of this place.  A place where I know words and tears and fears and questions and weariness and wonder and wishes and women are welcome to wait for healing and love and better days to come.

steph