I have gone running for the past 4 days in a row. I feel I should put that in quotes: "running". In reality, these outings consist of 3 minute intervals of jogging interspersed with walking. But whatever, I'll take what I can get. It's pretty amazing what exercise does for the mind. I have felt different, and better over the past few days. I would even venture to say that for moments I have felt... good. Seems weird to say that. It's been 6 weeks and 3 days since I lost Nina-Lou. Too early to be healed. Too early to be better. I know there are more bad days to come; it's often at the peak of feeling like I've reached a new threshold of healing when I suddenly get thrown back down into the muck. But hey. Like I said: I'll take what I can get.
I still carry the thought of her with me all the time. She's always, always, always on my mind. Nearly everything I do, I wonder what it would be like to do with her. Or I think, "I would not be doing this if Nina were here," and those kinds of thoughts really make me feel terrible. These are things that I should enjoy, like getting wine drunk or sleeping in late. Before I lost her, when I was still pregnant, I would think to myself that it was important for Turner and I to enjoy this last final part of our lives as a twosome. And here we are, still a twosome, and I deeply resent having the time and space for those things that only the childless can enjoy. Fuck those things. Gimme the sleepless nights, scabby nips and cradle cap.
I don't have to be back in school until April, and I'm grateful to have this time to grieve. I'm grateful that if I want to spend the afternoon reading blogs by people who have lost children, I can. I can go "running" every day. I can take my dog to the beach and look out at the ocean and think about how tiny I am. I can watch the sunset and take a mental picture of it for Nina-Lou. I can cry whenever I want, pretty much. I feel so strongly that it's important for me to surrender to the grief and let it take me where it needs to go. I know that there is a certain amount of suffering in this that just needs to happen.
I don't know how people go back to work right after this kind of loss. Turner went back to work a week after she died. He said he wanted the distraction, and it seems to have been good for him; I sometimes envy his ability to work despite his grief, but I just have to remember that we are different. I was and am too consumed to be distracted. I look back on those first several days after she died, and I remember that I wasn't able to even turn on the TV or the radio. I managed to read a little bit at a time; that was just consuming enough for me to let my mind go from the torment of dead baby dead baby dead baby. But after awhile I'd have to put the book aside and let the sadness of it fill me up, and cry and cry and cry. I was still so shocked by what had happened, for weeks. The reality of it would sometimes hit me all at once, and it was just crushing; I was hardly able to breath under the weight of it. Shock was a friend to me. It kept me from crumbling. Although I think I would have liked to crumble; it would have been a relief to just collapse into a heap.
But not now; these days, it feels good to stand up. I don't know if I'm just getting more accustomed to her not being here, or if I'm just more used to the sadness, but it all feels a little more manageable. I grudgingly attribute it to the exercise. I find it both reassuring and annoying that our minds are influenced so deeply by the chemicals in our bodies. I would rather think, "my kid died and that is the greatest tragedy that can possibly happen, so therefore I am the saddest person in the world." But then I do something as simple as running for 30 minutes, and the darkness lifts, and I can think about what I'm going to make for dinner and whether or not I might be able to fit into my skinny jeans soon ("skinny" jeans, let's be real). It makes my emotions seem a little less valid to know how much they are influenced by hormones, and that pisses me off.
Hormones. Those dicks.
Then, there are all the other little things that are helping me heal. There is therapy. And friends. And my sweet husband. And our dog, who is the best, sweetest, funniest dog who has ever lived. And this blog. I have not been able to put a finger onto what it is about writing here that is so therapeutic for me, but I feel compelled to do it in a way that I have never felt compelled to write in a journal. There is something about the public nature of a blog that sets it apart from journaling (something I have never been very successful at as an adult, although as a teenager I scrawled all kinds of narcissistic drivel into many a spiral bound notebook); there is something about sharing the experience with others. I think that losing my daughter just broke me completely open, and there was no holding in the absolute anguish of it. I was so wasted in the wake of her death, and I did not have the strength to be stoic, or have people think I was ok when I knew I wasn't. I am changed. I am not the person I was before. People should know.
And, quite frankly, I wanted people to fucking suffer along with me. I got real sick, real early, of hearing people say that they COULD NOT IMAGINE what I was going through. Well, here. Let me describe it in great detail for you, so that you can fucking imagine it. I want people to understand that this magnitude of tragedy is not just a nightmare, it is real, and it happens, and it is a horror show. Be incredibly grateful for what you have, because it FUCKING SUCKS to lose it. And it also sucks to have to leave that tragedy behind you and find some semblance of normalcy again. To sleep and wake and eat and have sex and walk the dog and jog and do all of the things necessary to live a normal life, and use your bare hands to claw away the shit in order to find the joy buried in all of it, all the time knowing that you are broken but that you are slowly stitching yourself back together, and to somehow have faith that life will feel worth living again someday. It's horrible, and maybe it's selfish of me to want others to see and feel how shitty it is, but I don't care.
I just loved my daughter so much, I don't know how I could possibly hold it back. I remember when I first fell in love with Turner, I really understood what people meant when they said that they loved someone so much that they wanted to shout it from the rooftops. I wanted to shout it out and tell the world how much I loved him. I was bubbling over with it. With Nina... I just never knew that much love was in me. And it's overwhelming and bubbling over, but it's all mixed up with the pain of not having her here. And I'm broken and shattered and my love and my pain and my anger and all of it has just been strewn everywhere. I want to shout from the rooftops that I LOVED her and I MISS her, and LOOK HOW FUCKING SHATTERED I AM since she died. She is supposed to be here and she's not, and my understanding of the irrefutable truth of her death leaves me with an emptiness inside of me that I will never be able to fill. I hope that the emptiness shrinks down a bit; I hope that I can stitch up the edges around it as I stitch myself back together, but I hope it never goes away. That emptiness is all I have left of her.
There is a balance to all of this. And I am slowly, slowly figuring it out. I have surrendered to the process, and am letting it take me where I need to go. If nothing else, I have learned that life is short and precious, and a fucking crapshoot. Success and happiness can be hard fought for and even won, but it can all disappear in a flash. No one is blessed. No one is cursed. Some are lucky and some are not. But we all have to keep trudging through the shitstorm in order to find a lucky break. And when we find it, it doesn't hurt to just sit, and let the sun shine on our faces for awhile.
Ain't no sense in squandering that shit.
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