Once Upon a Long, Sad Month

Once Upon a Long, Sad Month

October 1, 2014

October once was my longest, saddest month. Child Cancer Month—September—ended yesterday. Families who have lost a child to cancer don’t walk away at the end of any month. Their awareness does not shift to another disease or cause. Throughout September, I read about children fighting cancer, those who are winning, and those who lost. Photos revealing the ravages of the disease haunted me. Photos of those mourning the loss of a child to cancer resonated with me. Photos of children smiling in spite of their near-Sysyphean challenge gave me—give me—heart, because each one reminds me why this illness cuts so deep and stings to the quick of our souls. Children—their smiles, their innocence, playfulness, bright spirits, and hope for and dreams of the future—reflect everything we hold dear about children.

However, for those navigating the alien paths of child cancer, the tremendous challenges they face anchor them in the present. The future is too uncertain. Their razor focus is on the daily realities of living with, treating, and managing the illness. Advances in treatment mean that day-to-day reality of child cancer sometimes ends. Children go into remission and many are healed.

Other families and their children aren’t as fortunate; remission and healing are elusive and a child dies. They then are faced with navigating the alien path of how to live after child loss.

Not just during Child Cancer Month, but every month, I navigate that path over which I began stumbling on November 2, 1986, when my seven-year-old daughter Alexa died.

I still fall often, but not as much as in the early days, weeks, months. I’ve devised ways to plant my feet in a more secure stance. I look ahead before stepping. I also have devised ways to pick myself up when I fall. I don’t stay down as long as I once did.

One stumbling area that kept me down—keeps me down—too long is October—the anniversary month. I say month rather than day because the worst grief is not always on the anniversary of the death. For many, the days, weeks, and, for me, the month preceding are fraught with emotional and psychic peril. On this day, we were at Shands Hospital. On this day, Alexa had her last chemo. On this day, she made beautiful cards for a friend’s new baby. On this day, I hid from trick-or-treaters. On this day, our dear pediatrician said . . .

The first year, October smacked me in the face. I crept through it, the memories of that last month hobbled me. As more years passed, a vague sense of unease washed over me during October as I remembered where we were and what we did “on this day…”

Hardest were the Octobers I lived in the northeast away from my home state of Florida. September’s killing frost decimated my garden. October days meant trees barren of leaves and often-gray skies. Less light, less sun let the cold seep into my bones, reminding me of a deeper chill from that 1986 October. In an odd twist, and a blessing, by November 2, I often was not crushed and broken as I was in the preceding days. I had survived another year of loss.

It’s not always the anniversary that hurts deepest. Often, the days preceding an anniversary cut the most. Because of that, I want to further my own healing during these October days. In the process, I hope to further the healing of others—not only those who have lost a child or loved one from any cause, but also those who have lost a sibling, mother, father, friend, spouse—anyone they loved.

Loss will touch each of us. That touch can sear our souls. As a healing balm, I present a new October. Each day, rather than become snared in the dread of loss, I intend to spin a circle of celebration. I loved Alexa. I lost her. What did I love that made the loss so keen? What do I do, and what will I do to keep from stumbling—through October and every day, week, month? By sharing my journey through October, I hope to make your journey easier, to offer a hand when you stumble, to keep you from falling. If you fall, I want my hand to be there to help you up and back into life.

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Do you have a “long, sad, month”? Please feel free to share your concerns, struggles, victories in the comments. I welcome private correspondence at mysistersgarden@gmail.com.

Rubble Squats

Rubble Squats

Life Marked By Stones

It’s gone and I’m beyond distressed. Fires, tornadoes, hurricanes, mudslides, tsunamis, floods . . . houses get ruined, destroyed, daily. Rubble squats where once stood a home, a place that wrapped its walled arms around people and kept them safe, secure, and warm. Those walled arms allowed them to slumber, ceiling overhead, the dark kept outside where it belongs.

Homes vanish at nature’s whim, the carelessness of humans, or by choice, to make way for something else. Those something elses can and do take the form of offices, stores, shopping centers, resorts, playgrounds. Those something elses take the form of highways on which we partake in the dance of travel, of movement, of getting where we want to be, where we think we should be, and where we think we must be.

Vivid pictures of that home had slipped across the miles and years of memory and into my expectations. A white house on a corner lot—brick fireplace on the east side. A bay window in the dining room, also facing east. Brick steps leading to the front door were embraced on each side by tall azalea bushes whose color blazed bright every spring. Five-foot-tall elephant ears once dwarfed the children in their shadows. Old-growth heirloom camellias, a hydrangea bush that blushed blue before summer’s heat dried its blossoms. Camphor trees with roots once dug for sassafras tea in the years ignorant of its toxins. Wood floors, polished to a reflective sheen. A swinging door gave passage from the kitchen to the dining room. An arch opened the living room to the dining room. An extra room off the kitchen and dining room had its windows long ago closed in. Its wall became shelves for hundreds of books. Windows throughout the house had separate panes of glass held in by wood painted bright white to mark the sections that let in light. A single bathroom for a family of six. A pile of leaves behind the garage composted and fed the abundance of worms just beneath the soil’s edge. A single-car garage on the side of the house stored a push mower with rotating blades, clippers for the azalea bushes, paint, tools, the things that make up a life—a home.

In the days preceding my journey there, I imagined pulling up and marveling at the yard and how small it would seem through adult eyes as opposed to child memories. I would have been courteous to the current occupants and grateful for any time they allowed me to observe and maybe even step upon and touch the ground on which my child feet once walked.

Possibility figured in my imagination—perhaps once again those wood floors would hold me up as I walked into the door, perhaps my eyes would look through the bay window and see as an adult as well as a child.

Google Maps could not find the location when I requested directions from my Central Florida home to those brick steps three hours north of me. I hadn’t lived there for fifty years. Maybe my memory had failed me on the exact address. The street was there and that was enough for me.

We exited I-95 and wound our way toward the neighborhood and nothing was familiar. The house on the first corner held no recognition for us. Once several blocks long, the street was short—only three blocks.

West of where the house and street should have been were massive piles of rubble—the remains of my childhood home. Stunned into mute grief, we continued to drive in the neighborhood. We found the cemetery we once used as a shortcut on our way to school. I scanned the grounds through the locked gates, and as I turned away for a moment, I saw a young man on the street. I called out to him, we spoke at length, and he confirmed what I already knew. Eighteen months earlier, the DOT razed the west end of the neighborhood for an I-95 exit.

So recent, yet so long ago. Time didn’t matter because gone is gone. I turned again to the cemetery. Entering a locked cemetery absent malicious intent didn’t seem wrong to me. I climbed through an open area in the fence. I explored the area alone, with reverence, respect, and silence. It was and is still a cemetery for Black people. In the years it was our path to school, the burial ground was overgrown and untended. It now has a sturdy fence and the locked gate discourages vandals. Grass grows around the graves. A paved road provides access. Flowers adorn many areas, and new graves are interspersed with old—some dating from the 1800s. New headstones stand near cracked and broken markers, some with dim letters that appear to have been etched by hand into unyielding stone.

Do the old-growth live oaks miss the feet of children playing at their roots?

I took that path to learning and I continue to learn. Part of what I’ve learned since my feet stepped on those grounds and since I was awed by the azalea bushes in the spring is gratitude. I am grateful for the years I spent in that house. I’m grateful that the cemetery is well tended, that the souls there rest undisturbed. I wonder, however, if the feet of children are missed by the ground and the old-growth oaks towering above miss the shenanigans and laughter.

What remains of my life on that street and all my childhood memories is a cemetery. As I processed the initial, stabbing grief of losing the home I knew and loved, I instead stepped lightly around another place of grief and loss and love.