15 Jun 2010
… which i’m too tired to figure out how to embed tonight. It’s not supposed to be searchable on YouTube, so I think you have to go to it straight from this link. Anyway, here is a little bit of Ash with Antony and The Johnsons.
02 Jun 2010
today should have been their 18th birthday.
i mean to say more, but find that i can’t.
24 Mar 2010
i am so mad at you today – like that time you went down to the river with your friends when you were ten and you didn’t come home until after dark, and i had imagined all the horrible things that could happen to you lost in the woods alongside the river at night – and i had cried myself into such a hysteria that when you finally showed up, whistling and laughing, i wouldn’t speak to you for an hour – mad like that, except this time i know that the horrible things HAVE happened and you are not coming home – which makes me even madder.
29 Dec 2009
I know, for instance, that I would have said exactly what I DID first say to her when they finally let me go behind the curtain in the emergency room, which was “oh babygirl, what have you done?”. And maybe she would have told me, with her chin quivering in that way it always did just before she started to cry, that she didn’t mean to, that she was just trying to find that tightrope she’d walked so many times before, that thin line between just enough and too much, that perfect balance of comfortably numb. Or maybe she would have said that she meant to go all this way, that she’d given in and given up, that she couldn’t fight it any longer and was ready now to leave us behind forever.
I overheard (over-read on the internet) one of her support-group friends, telling someone else that they were all pretty sure she meant to die that night. And if I think about this too much, I get angry. After all, they were with Ashlie that evening and I wasn’t. They know details that I never will. And if they’re all so convinced, I want to demand to know what they know that I don’t, what things they didn’t think to/dare to/bother to tell me, or why, for the love of god, they didn’t try to stop her? After all, one of them gave her (or gave her access at the very least) to the drugs that killed her, and there were plenty of them around when she got sick late in the evening, when she would have been obviously intoxicated, if not unusually so. But this train of thought is merely a distracting dead end of anger (there are so many) and I have been learning to walk myself back from them with this reminder; that there is enough blame to go around, enough guilt to keep us all busy and shamed for decades.
So I go back to imagining the kind of conversation we might have had in the hospital, if she was leaving us, but still conscious, if we both knew that within 48 hours her brain would swell, shutting down her organs one by one until the neurologist came in that last time and performed her series of tests and declared her brain dead. She always prided herself on being smart. Smarter than everyone else. Smart enough to get out of learning things she didn’t want to learn. Smart enough to learn anything she was interested in learning. Smart enough to manipulate most everyone around her. Smart enough to know exactly how to hurt people best when she lashed out, or to get what she wanted with a mix of logic and honey. Smarter than the therapists and doctors and the drugs themselves. The arrogance of such things, was easily her undoing. She was her own undoing. And none of us stopped her for the same horrible but simple reason that none of us knew how.
This is, of course, one of the hardest things to swallow, that I DIDN’T know how to save her. And I know its easy sometimes, to look at these things from the outside and assume that you would have or could have; that you possess some magic answer, the obvious cure-all that we overlooked/ignored/missed. We could have that conversation, you and I, but trust me when I tell you that it would only lead us down another one of those angry dead-ends and I’d much rather let you sleep sound in the belief that your magic answer and obvious cure-all will save or protect your child/spouse/friend/loved-one should such horrors ever befall them, than try to convince you that they might not. I envy that kind of sleep, knowing I’ll never have it again.
What I DO know, without the luxury of that final wrenching conversation, what I have to make my peace with , is that on the night of February 18th, Ashlie didn’t want to feel sad or angry or lonely or broken. And whether it was temporary or permanent, she was looking for an escape, for the absence of pain. It is not such an extraordinary thing to want. And in these last ten months, when so often pain and grief define me, I think I understand even more what she wanted, what she was striving for. I only wish I could have given it to her, that I could have taken her pain away. That’s what I would have told her if I could have told her anything that morning in the hospital when they finally let me into the room and I saw her there but not there, breathing still but already gone.
Pain is a side effect of life and the measure we receive or are spared is as random as the accident of birth. What we DO with the pain, how we face or avoid or hold on in spite of it is ultimately what matters. You don’t have to believe that, but I do. And I choose every day to hold on.
09 Sep 2009
This one is from early 2008, and it was one of the first photos saved on Ash’s cell phone. The eyebrows and the sweater are the coded datestamps. Without them, I’d just see G.T. somewhere between fourteen or fifteen.The eyebrows mark this as having been taken not long after the Christmas Eve we spent the drive out to Mr. j’s grandparents house trying to figure out what G.T. had done to his brows. He swore it was nothing, that he hadn’t trimmed or shaved or otherwise altered them, but no one was buying it. And I remember that the more we prodded, the more frustrated he got, until we had to drop it. Not one of us in that car on that ride that night, suspected anything. I figured it was like that time when out of sheer boredom, I shaved my arms had to spend the next two weeks, being teased by my family about my cactus arms while the prickly little hairs grew back.
The sweater though, marks the photo as some time in February, because it was one of the first pieces of clothing that I bought for Ashlie. I’d gone shopping for her twice by myself, and this was the first time that she’d agreed to accompany me. She wouldn’t touch any of the clothes or racks, but stood nearby with a practiced bored expression while I held things up, giving me secret signals (a curled, disdainful lip for “no”, an arch of one butchered eyebrow for “maybe” and an almost fearful, wide-eyed glancing furtively around for what I finally figured out was “yes!”. The sweater, if I remember correctly, was just a maybe, but I bought it anyway because it was the same color as her grey/green eyes.
What I mean to say is that it struck me again over this joy-filled weekend, how packed with pieces of our lives and memories these little freeze-frames can be, and how lucky we are all to capture every little scrap of those memories that we can.
04 Jul 2009
This morning, Mouse and I woke at 6:15 so we could load up his things and get to the Greyhound station in time to catch the bus rolling out to Santa Cruz at 7:00 a.m. I don’t think he even realized that he’d chosen to travel on a holiday, that he was making his grand stand for independence on Independence Day, but by design or accident, he went off this morning, on his first adventure into the adult world, his first attempt at making his own way.
Except for his last three months of high school, when we came back to the valley and he stayed behind to graduate, I have lived with this boy for the last twenty years…longer than anyone else in my life except my own mother. And it pained me, especially in light of Ash’s death, to let him go in such a casual way.
We listened to a new CD on the ride, one I burned a few nights ago, which I flippantly titled “11 tracks for Alice and Jesus”. We’ve always shared music, my Mouse and I, and this morning it was Tom Waits, Johnny Cash, Nick Cave and Joe Cocker, who carried us down to 9th st. and then sang me (with tears streaming) home.
It wasn’t suppose to be like this. He wasn’t supposed to be the last to leave home. I wasn’t supposed to find myself childless at 40, half hoping, utterly unfairly, that his first attempt to fly is less than a grand success. Oh I want him to be happy and I completely understand his desire to be back in the comfort of that one place, which still feels like home.
I just don’t know if I know what I’m supposed to do tomorrow morning without him here. I don’t know who I’m supposed to be when after twenty years, I find myself suddenly not actively being Mom. And I know there’s nothing special or extraordinary about this feeling. I expected to face it someday in the far-enough-away-that-i-don‘t-need-to-think-too-much-about-it-yet future. But the future came three years early, at 6:15 this morning, when my eldest child…now my only child…spread his wings while I closed my eyes, held my breath and let him try to fly.
23 Jun 2009
Twice, in the last month, I have been visited by you in my dreams. In the first, three weeks ago, you were maybe four or five, with that blond bowl haircut and giant grin. From across the room, a crowd between us, you flashed me that grin and mouthed the words “I love you” to which I replied, also soundlessly, “love you, love you, love you too”.
In the second dream, just two nights ago, you were even younger, toddling alongside me with a group of others on a bluff overlooking some sea. Immediately, I swept you up and cuddled you, nuzzled the back of your neck and breathed in your still-just-a-baby smell.
Both times, the dreams were lucid, in that I was fully aware of your absence in the waking world, yet the pain and grief could not break through the joy of your presence. Upon waking, each time, these little gifts…this tiny measure of bliss has stayed with me for the remainder of the day. Is it any wonder then, that I want to sleep so much and travel in times and places where I might just run into you?
02 Jun 2009
When I first sat down to write this, I typed the following: Tomorrow would have been her seventeenth birthday.
I was still sitting here staring at that sentence fifteen minutes later when Micachu came into the room and put his new Pain of Salvation DVD into the PS3 to play their cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Halleluah” for me.The song is, of course, beautiful. The guitar solo alone, so delicate it could make you weep, even if you weren’t prone to weeping, which I am these days. Afterwards, I erase that first sentence and start again.
Tomorrow is her birthday. I do not know what I am supposed to do about that. The date has been creeping up on me for months and I have dreaded more than any other. I have written and erased and rewritten the rest of this post six different times. Nothing seems right. I am beginning to suspect that I shouldn’t have tried to write it at all.You see, it’s midnight now and so…
today is their birthday and it is all that I feared it would be.
She would have been seventeen today. Instead, she will remain forever sixteen, equally brazen and fragile, an impossible tangle of surly and sweet. These last few nights I have woken more than usual, expecting to see her standing beside the bed, trying to wake me by being the quietest thing in the room. It had become a habit in those last months, when she couldn’t sleep. And somehow, it isn’t spooky or sad, as much as it is soothing, waking like that, with blurry vision and the sensation of being watched and needed. Now though, there’s nothing I can do for her except remember every little detail of her, honor every lovely thing in her brief, complicated life and hold on to her memory as tightly as I can.
22 May 2009
Yesterday marked the three month anniversary of Ashlie’s death.
That knowledge rolled around like a big boulder marble in my chest since the sun woke me that first time around 6:30 a.m. The night before, I dreamed of her, all complicated and vivid; I could smell and see and hear her, and yet, even in the dream, I knew that she was gone.
I remember distinctly the sensation of waking abruptly that first time I dreamed one of my children had died. Twelve, maybe thirteen years ago. And I was shouting at someone in the dream, just before I woke, how nothing will ever be OK again. It won’t. No matter how happy or exciting or illuminating a future perfect moment may be, everything will never be OK again for me.
This is the thing, which will forever divide US from EVERYONE ELSE. My sister and blood brother could tell you this, as could Aunt Vickie, and dear old Geraldine. Time is no great friend. The loss does not get easier to live with. Rather, my body, my whole self in fact, has begun the task of rearranging itself, creating new chasms to contain the grief.
I am not the person I was three months ago. I have less energy for niceties, less tolerance for platitudes, and little interest in what used to be the consuming task of worrying about what other people think of me. At the same time, I have become acutely aware of the smallest acts of kindness and evermore appreciative of those quiet souls around us with unexpectedly deep wells of strength.
If you want to know how we are doing, all I can say is that we are still working on finding that “new normal”, that we are still fragile, that we talk about Ash every day…sometimes casually, sometimes jokingly, often sadly, tiptoeing around the edges of that great well of grief that now resides at the center of our little family. But always she is with us and this three months has been both a lifetime and the blink of an eye.
20 May 2009
I spent the first half of the day with an old old friend. (Not that he is any older than I am, a handful of months at best, but we have known one another for twenty-some-odd years now.) In theory, we were meeting up for coffee as he came through town. In practice, we filled up on well-iced and caffinated fountain drinks and tooled around Mo-town in his sister’s air conditioned car, stoping at a handful of favorite spots for smoke/pee breaks.It was a good day for such things. Warm, but not hot, at the tail-end of the most recent heatwave.
I talked about Ashlie. A lot. More than I do most days or at length anyway, which I don’t do most days, because I spend most days with people who know all the “at length” stuff. At one point, my friend innocently asked if I wanted to go run an errand at Winco (the grocery store) with him and I winced. That wince devolved into a twenty-minute explanation which included my last visit to Winco with Ash, six days before her death, and then the series of events which followed.
I had told him the basics back in February, but for whatever reason, I found myself recounting the details of that week, not something I had intended or expected to do, not information he asked for or pried out of me, but things I wanted to tell him nonetheless.And my instinct afterwards was to apologize for having rambled, for having answered a simple question in that manner.
See, I kind of don’t know how to be around people anymore without “faking it” and I really didn’t want to fake it today. I really didn’t want to do the small talk thing, avoiding talking about the one thing that takes up / makes up / fills up my entire life and self nowadays. So I didn’t.
What I mean to say is that if you say “Winco?” and I say everything that follows that mental marker in my internal dialogue, please take it as a compliment that I am NOT editing myself at that moment, that I want to be honest and real and bullshit-less with you, that I trust you enough to NOT fake a smile and say “sure”, that I MIGHT even feel ok enough to walk through The Villa with you, chainsmoking and letting the ghosts run wild, no matter how spooky it feels.