Breathing in Spite.

So I think I've found my writing voice again. This is a relief. All of the happy kind of drained out of me last year after losing my beautiful 16 year old niece, suddenly to cancer. Stupid fucking cancer. This is something that had never touched my life before. I didn't think it would, I hadn't really considered it. Up until now, I've had some heartaches but nothing like that blow. I thought that I was pretty tough, you know? I am pretty tough but not that tough. Every now and then it rears back up and kicks me square in the chest. It knocks me to the ground and steals my breath sometimes. It truly physically does.

I lost my voice, my inspiration, my perspective while I worked this out and tried to recover. It's not all worked out by a long shot, but maybe one day there will be an end to the big, impossible knot that has tangled itself around my heart.

She took my breath then and she's always going to take it.

I feel like a different person a year later. After crawling part of the way back up this hill, I feel 20 years older. I'm more afraid and I am more aware of the people around me who can be here and gone in that horrible flash that leaves you shocked and spinning until you fall down. It takes a while to recover and stand back up, I guess. Everything is different now. I categorize things now. Important, not important; ugly & beautiful; now & never. I have no time for ugly and I have no time for unimportant. I am also more sure that life needs to be less complicated.

Every now and then, when I am out, I catch glimpses of her in strangers. It used to horrify me, but anymore I am glad that she's imprinted in me and unforgettable. I've stopped wondering why it happened. There is no reason for it. It's a waste and serves no purpose. I just have to move forward and stop trying to salve the anger with reasons.

So I'm happy to be back and I appreciate, very much my readers. Thanks for hanging in there during the big slump. I've been blogging in one form or another since about 2004 and I am glad to be able to contribute to the crazynet sometimes. I'm not looking for condolences, I honestly can't stand to take any more. This wasn't supposed to be a vent about loss, it originally started as a thanks for clicking follow and leaving comments sometimes.

So thanks for that.

Isn't she wonderful?

Strawberry for Shanni.

It's 5 months later and I suspect that the wind is never going to stop being knocked out of me whenever I am confronted with something that shoves her back to the front of my mind: which is almost everything. I'm probably not ever going to actually heal up. Hopefully, I'll stop being terrified that it will happen again. Maybe I just have to live with having this horrible thing being stirred up from the bottom of my very most base fears all the time. I don't know.

So I got a tattoo today for her. I was going to get a ribbon to represent chordoma, but for me- that represents the terrible monster that took her away. I thought about getting a blue balloon tattooed on me, but to me that represents letting go of her. I don't want to ever do that, not really. Maybe that's my trouble. So I got a strawberry because to me, it represents her charm and the way she turned me into a complete fool.

She was mildly allergic to them. They were her FAVOURITE. The situation was much too sad. So I let her have them. I ALWAYS let her have them. (So did everybody else, I've since learned, even her mama.. haha). But my heart was mush when she looked so terribly sad that I couldn't stand it.

Just like I can't stand this.

Anonymous Questions

Formspring.com left me with an anonymous question in the night that I am trying to work out to myself. The anonymous tone of this website, intended for silly distraction seems to also bring up a strangely honest strain of delivery from the answerer, if the right questions are asked. Some answers can be comfortably belayed by witty and funny answers, others not so much.

When being asked questions about yourself anonymously, you can't formulate what you should say based on what you think would appease the person asking, so you have to answer based on your own satisfaction with your response (honestly?). So to whomever asked, if you are reading, you hit a very raw nerve.

The Question:
At the moment, right before sleep and dreams take you, when the stars fade away... what is the thing that terrifies you most? Seems innocuous enough of a question, with what would be an outwardly stock answer. Being me, I can't really ever just let things go that simply though, and I toyed with just bypassing this with something ridiculous- but that would have nagged at my conscience for pretending that it didn't bother me at all, so I answered:

I've answered, deleted and reanswered this about 20 times now.

How strange that I should get this question. I woke up sobbing in the night, because I'd had a terrible nightmare that my son had been murdered. I'd dreamed as far as a funeral preparation when Neil woke me up. I want to forget it because it's going to haunt me for days. I haven't had a nightmare in probably a year that I can remember, so weird.

I know it's cliche to answer, "Something happening to my kids", so I'll try and put it more eloquently for those who don't understand the deep impact of that statement: I used to have all kinds of phobias for my own life, but they've since transformed into fear for the lives of my children. Having children is like cutting your heart out and letting it walk around outside of your own body. It's constant emotional torture and you never get used to it or feel comfortable knowing you've taken a risk that might completely destroy your life, should that heart be taken away or hurt. Who can live without their heart? You never get used to slowly losing control over that heart and it's nearly impossible to bite your tongue when you know it's headed toward pain or possible danger (real or implied).

This is why mothers are ALL lunatics; we are all living in constant fear of something happening to these reckless little pieces of our own hearts being carried away, and if we no longer have them, our blood won't pump through our veins and no air will get to our lungs and we'll wither away. That being said, you cannot let your kids live in a safety bubble, so you have to basically kill a part of yourself so that you can allow them to take steps in their lives to become successful, free thinking people unto themselves- which is what you want, right? Because if you don't do that, you run the risk of severing the bond yourself and it will all flutter away.

So call your Mom, A-hole.

I lost my niece in October and I saw my sister's contorted face in a hotel room as she fell to the floor repeatedly, begging God and anyone to make it stop, and I held her up because she couldn't even walk and knew that there is just nothing that can make that heal. Nothing and nobody. There are no pills, no magic answers to soothe, no salve and I don't believe that time heals it- it just drags it out. It will be a fresh, gaping & crippling wound for ever for her. I can't think of anything more terrifying. I can't even think about this without trembling.

I am thankful that I got to wake from my nightmare last night.

I'm glad of this question, I do hope more, less entrenching questions arrive than this, though. It rears it's head up and then must be buried for a while in joy so as not to completely consume and turn me raw.

So there. I was upfront and serious for a minute. Now enter my contest, there is only one day left.

The World Got Smaller...

... Did you feel it?

Last week, my beautiful, 16 year old niece passed away in surgery she was having to remove a tumor that was growing on her top vertebrae and into her lovely brain stem. Such a shock. Such a blow to my sense of safety and well being. Such a blow to my family.

I can't even find the words to express what an extraordinary child she was, although I have been struggling to do so since the day it happened. Even in writing her eulogy last week, I don't feel that I could ever do justice to her. Nobody really could. How do you stand in front of five hundred people and tell them that what has happened is okay? That we loved her enough? We did love her. She never ever stopped smiling. Even in the hospital, undergoing very frightening and devastating treatment, she smiled though it. I would have crawled inside myself had it been me.

Everything about her was special. She was beautiful, she was funny, she was vibrant, she was witty, she was fun to be around. She was not like your regular, run of the mill, moping teenager. I loved her. People loved her; they adored her immediately. This is not something that I am making up in her absence. There were over 500 heartbroken people at her funeral last Friday, if that says anything about the impact she had on the lives of people who met her. People wanted to know her and be around her, be a part of her life. She was captivating and she stole people's hearts quite by accident. The children's hospital shut down at 2 o'clock for a whole hour in her memory during her funeral, because her surgeons could not make the 6 hour drive, but her nurse did. Even the operating room stopped. I want to go around and shake people until they realize fully how much the world is missing now that she is gone. I still can't make her be gone in my mind. How can it even be true?

The thing that reverberates in my mind and shakes me is that nobody saw this coming. 10 weeks ago, she was a normal, healthy teenaged girl. We did not know the tumor existed until late August when she was in an accident and they just happened to spot it on a scan they did to check for damage from it. There was no damage from the accident, aside from a mild concussion she sustained. Just this horrible growth that has apparently been there since her birth. We didn't know. It was such a shock.

I wish I'd have made it to the hospital in Edmonton a few hours sooner than I did. I went to see her twice after she'd passed away, and I touched her hand which was too cold. I can still feel the coolness of her skin where I touched her in my hand and it's days later. It seemed to penetrate through me. I wish I could have said goodbye to her before it was too late.

I'm home now, thousands of miles away from my sister and her children and my family and it is strange. Things are where I left them in my rush to get to the hospital, not expecting at all to be going to her funeral. People who never knew that she existed are carrying on around me, not knowing what sparkle is missing from this pitiful earth now- not having been touched by it. Do they even know what has been stolen from them? How lucky I am to have had her touch my life and so deeply impact it, as young as she was.

We let 300 blue balloons go at the end of her funeral. The wind came up and took them all at once in a massive group. It was a beautiful tribute, but what can you say after tragedy has laid its perverse hands on you without consent? Has violated your security? Has stolen from you?

I don't know. I just miss her.