Ten Years

Baby Girl,

Ten years ago yesterday, I asked if you needed help for the last time.

Ten years ago today, we cuddled and joked for the last time. 

Ten years ago tomorrow was the end of your life and the beginning of a nightmare.

I continue to be knocked down by your absence, to figure out how to get up and carry on. I would give anything to hold you again, to help you again, to have tomorrow never have happened. 

3,651 days. It's a lot of days to go without a person that you love. It's long enough to figure out how to get through every day, how to acclimate to a new life that is just a little less. It's never going to be long enough to move on.

In the past ten years I've heard parents talk about how hard it is to continue to support their children who have substance abuse disorders. I've heard young people talk about their parents cutting them off or removing their support. I know that I am not part of those families and I don't see the intimate details of their struggles. I know that it is reasonable to reach a limit. I understand that.

I want to be gracious and understanding to those parents. But all I can think is that I wonder if I could change their minds if I could explain to them what it is like to have lost that choice - too late, revoked, they're dead. There are no take backs and just like I would have wished for you to learn from my mistakes I wish I could transmit to them the lessons that I have learned from your death. The uncontrollable, incapacitating grief and the rest of my life spent trying to overcome it. The way it sneaks up on me, the way it keeps all of my emotions floating just below the surface.  The way I feel permanantly and perpetually broken. I cannot help but think how much I would give to be in a position to continue to help you with your monsters. I didn't know it at the time, but it's what I signed up for when I had you.

I miss you so much. I yearn to share things with you. To go on a walk, to giggle together, to fight. I want to show you this new place that we live in that you will never experience. I want you to see your siblings and for them to know you and everything that was so special about you. I would give everything for anything.

I don't know what triggered the choices you made that stole you from me. I've spent so much time in the last ten years trying to figure it out, analyzing it. Sometimes I thought I understood. Its not a mystery I can solve, but I think that adds to the guilt because I am so sure that I missed things that could have saved you.

I will spend the rest of my life mourning you. Some days it's all that I can do to fight the feelings that this creates. Some days every thought of you brings a smile to my face.

I am so grateful that your spirit chose mine. That I got my introduction to motherhood with your wonderful life. For every decision I made as a naive teenager who believed that all I needed was the love that I had for you from the moment I knew you existed.

I'm sorry for the moments that I failed you. For the things I missed because I was too busy or too blind. For losing my temper when I should have held you and focused on your needs. For not listening to my fears, yesterday, ten years ago.

I'm sorry that you are not here to hug and that I couldn't stop your absence.

With everything I am sorry for, I will never be sorry for you, or for every moment that I was allowed to be your mother. 

I love you, Baby Girl. Always.

Villages and Judgement Free Zones

This year as the anniversary of Elannah Roses death passed and I became entangled in my grief and anger and unending self flagellation, I couldn’t stop thinking about what is actually happening to save future lives and families. I am more and more convinced of the need to discard preconceptions and prejudices, those judgements we hold about how we should all behave in our own homes, whether someone else is a good or successful parent/child/human, and to come together as a village. 

Since the loss of my daughter my village has saved my life, my sanity, given me something to live for and work for on a daily basis. Part of my village is my little nuclear family who inject joy into my life, grieve with me, celebrate with me, prove to me that while I may always believe that I failed my first born, I am not a failure. Before I lost Elannah Rose I didn’t realize how much more than that I had. My village is so much bigger. 

I had a sister who literally fed me when I was so broken that didn’t want to feed myself. A circle of friends who made sure we were never alone, one of whom made sure I could give voice to my grief and helped find a way to make it constructive. 

I felt so alone when Elannah Rose was struggling with her addiction, on an island where we would do anything to save her but I was ashamed or scared to let our family and friends know and just uneducated about where to find help. I closed my village away, on the other side of an invisible barrier held up by destructive and terrible secrets. 

Having lived through such an isolating experience I believe that we have to find a way, as a society, to break down those barriers that make us hold back when we need help as much as we need to find a way to let go of those things that cause is to judge each other. We need to do this so that our children will learn to look for help and so that we can, too. Who would reach out for help if the only thing on the other side is condemnation?

In the first years after Elannah Rose passed, I thought I could build a place that would bring people together  to learn and lean on each other. In my mind we would fight the influx of drugs and other dangerous things by breaking down barriers to expert resources, to law enforcement, and to each other - a safe and judgement free zone. I wanted to take action. To make my grief into a tool. To save lives. 

Today I am just as lost about how to achieve such a lofty goal, but what I have learned is that when you take down your own barriers you are met with far less judgement and criticism than you expect. And maybe that’s the first step. 

I will always have failed my daughter. I will always have that voice in my mind that wonders how I can expect to help others when I failed so horribly and so absolutely. I’m trying not to listen to her, so that I can do my part to build a next generation that feels whole and supported, to show love and withhold judgement, and as my husband would say “to build a world full of ass kicking warrior women.”

To my daughter, Elannah Rose - I love you without end. I hold you in my heart. I miss you with every painful breath, and every joy that we cannot share with you. I hope you are singing. 

Just Breathe, Pearl Jam

Endings Are Hard

There was a television show that we watched religiously as a family from the time that Elannah Rose was relatively little. It was a family event which we scheduled our lives around whichever night of the week it was on before Netflix became a thing. We even named our pets after the charactors in the show.

Sunday night I watched the very last episode of this show. I could not stop crying from the moment the episode started. It is the end of something we shared with someone we cannot share anything with anymore and as silly as it may be, it felt monumental. I haven't been able to shake this new wave of sadness.

Endings are hard. Even stupid ones.

Beginnings can be hard, too. Beginning a new year. Beginning a new adventure. Watching the kids begin new phases of life that, at this point, she will never experience.

There is a behind the scenes melancholy that sticks with us. It lies dormant sometimes, but without fail something triggers it. It’s invariably a little thing which in another life, another situation, we would not look twice at. It is part of our human experience.  That melancholy or full blown mourning lives in the back of my head and in my heart, like a poisonous snake waiting to strike.

It’s what reminds me that whatever else happens in my life, I survived the loss of my child. I can survive the next thing, and the thing after that. Even if a TV show coming to an end can bring me to my knees.

Carry On My Wayword Son - Kansas

Ripples and Tidal Waves (28)

Just a couple of months after my sixteenth birthday I gave birth to my first child. Biologically perfect timing, but mentally and emotionally I was clearly only semi-equipped. And yet... the perfect creature entered my life and I became a mother. The best job I could ever imagine, then and now. 

Over the next few years Elannah Rose grew into a wonderful, loving, and funny little child. Her existence was all the motivation I needed to really nail the whole “adulting” thing, which somehow seemed less intimidating and complex than it does today. I didn’t nail it, but I felt like I was doing ok. Life was perfect in its imperfection. 

Elannah Rose joined me at college, concerts, music festivals, and almost every other new experience. She was my little mini-me. I don’t think I ever questioned whether she would be welcome at whatever I was doing and I was blessed to  make friends with people who welcomed and loved her dearly. 

As she grew up (as we both grew up) life changed, our family grew. Eventually, the source of my original and purest joy became the source of my greatest pain. 

I can’t adequately describe the hole that fills her void. It’s the pit of despair, the monster in the deep, deep, dark. The clown in the gutter. The insidious fog in the air. 

“Still?”  Wish I had the courage to answer that the way I want to, but I guess I still have too many fucks to give. 

Nothing that I have experienced, before or after she left us, has compared to the anguish and the vacuum that losing her created. Elannah Roses birthdays mark the transition from this intense annual mourning into a more normal state of mind, but the hole is always there. The absence of her is tangible. And as I have learned, nothing is really not the trigger. 

So, here I sit. In my little yellow chair, earphones tucked in and volume at maximum, memories rolling over me. Gentle ripples and tidal waves. Figuring out how to get through the day, yet again. 

Why? (Eight Years)

Eyes burning, throat constricted, I want to scream and break things. To stand howling in the wind, at the world… Why?  Why my child? My protector of the small. My girl so full of life that her tiny body could barely contain it.

She is gone. Rotting. Left vibrant only in our memories, in our pictures, in random recordings which capture her voice, her face, her laughter, her getting high. WHY?

What could we have done differently? At any point, before she began experimenting, during her initial drug use, or after when she was hooked and convinced that she was beyond hope. Was there anything more that we could have done? Should have done.

I think about this constantly. So much of life is about striving to be better, to be more successful. There is one place that this really matters beyond all doubt. As parent’s we owe it to our children to learn from past mistakes and use that to be better, don’t we? How could I have been better? What didn’t I do? What did I do? I need so badly to know, and I know I never will.

Is there a time that I yelled when I could have been gentle? Should I have found a way to be more engaged? I wish that I would have known which signs were meaningful. When I should have left her alone and when I should have refused.

Why my sweet girl? I used to think that life only gave you the lessons you could handle… what you were meant to learn. But these things cannot happen in a world with any grand design. Lost children, destroyed by diseases that they were too young, naïve, and irresponsible to avoid. This is not how it is supposed to go. 

And I must remember that this was not my story. It was her story. Her beautiful, epic, tragic story. I would give anything to have her back, but none of this was my choice.  Not even having her, really. Because there was never an option not to. From the moment that little being took hold my future was written. Was hers? Eight years later and I still can't believe it ended like this.

Eight years... just thinking about that is enough to push me back over the edge.

I can talk myself into and out of blame for hours. I can hold this conversation with myself forever. But I can never answer why. I can never get closer to understanding why I do not get to hug her anymore. Why she doesn't get to have all of the chapters she is supposed to in her life. In her story.

I want her back with a desperate rage that I cannot contain. With a grief that will, I think, forever be bigger than me and my broken heart. I do not forgive the person who left her. I do not forgive this world that took her from me. I do not forgive myself. And if there is a grand design, I find myself hating it.

I must admit that ultimately, there is no reason. There is nothing fair, there is nothing I can cling to that allows me to make sense of this loss. There is no answer to my question. There is no why.

Elannah Rose (left) and me

Backsliding

This is the time of year when I feel like I’m backsliding into a broken heart. I spend the year healing, learning to become more comfortable in my current state, figuring out how to be without my firstborn child. In May, as we draw closer and closer to her death day, I feel a hole growing inside of me. I sit on the brink of tears, the smallest thing tipping me over the edge. 

It always takes a few days to adjust to the constant intensity. From July through April I’ve learned to adapt and roll with this persistent grief. May and June are not my friends. They are not the time to make decisions, changes, sometimes even conversation. 

This year I feel guilty as I feel the loss washing over me. Who am I to wallow when so many are grieving, scared, and in a silo while Covid 19 strikes fear in our hearts and the worldwide lockdowns ravage our security, both financial and emotional. 

But grief is a selfish master. I want my daughter back. I want to hear her laugh. I would take everything and anything to have her creating joy and trouble. I give in to this selfishness, I want to stop explaining that I really have three kids. I want her to be 28, not forever 19. More than anything, I want to hug my child.

Unfortunately, the magic that brought this girl to me was a one-time thing. I wish I could sleep through the part of the year that makes it so hard to find a way forward. I wish I could stop backsliding, even though I am horrified at what that would mean. 
I am incomplete without her. 

Mistakes

I still like to imagine that Elannah Rose performed a super spy maneuver, faked her own death, and disappeared so that she could go live her days unfettered by her past mistakes. The fact that there was no reason for her to do so is irrelevant to this day dream.

She'd be a singer in a somewhat successful band with regular gigs and hopefully some good tours. Not so successful that her fame created more problems or drew attention to her true identity, just successful enough to enjoy life and not worry about the future. Probably, and unfortunately, still smoking cigarettes in the alley between sets. Loved by someone who wishes she would stop smoking, cherishes her quirkiness, and is as fun as she is.

This day dream became more elaborate when I realized that if I pretended that there was an issue of mistaken identity it didn't work, because if it was just a mistake she would have come home. Unfortunately, she has to be in hiding.

I like to play this game, although as I write this I think that it probably makes me sound crazy. It makes me happy to think that her life would have turned out happy, in some alternate universe where she was still here with us. Someday maybe I'll write the story of her alternate universe life, and in it I'll cherish every moment.

Maybe in an alternate universe she doesn't have to be in hiding. She'd be irritated that Noah is already taller than her. Proud of her sister for her amazing athleticism, and I like to think they'd be the best of friends by now. She would love Cassie, she always wanted a big dog. She'd be arriving this week for Thanksgiving and I'd be trying to figure out how we're going to fit everyone in the house but so pleased to have the family together again.

Her mistakes took this away from me. I'm still pissed at her for that, but mostly, I just miss her and the life she could have had. And, of course, how do you hold someones mistakes against them? It's just unfair that my biggest "mistake" resulted in her life and her biggest mistake took it away.

Maybe I'm just in a mood. Maybe it's the holiday season, which is notoriously difficult for so many. I feel haunted tonight, by everything that could have happened differently. By peppermint mocha's, and pudgy little feet, and un-punishable little girls who think a time-out is funny, tightly curled hair, and tinkly laughter, and beautiful voices that seem too big for the person they came out of. By life altering choices. By the success of her friends, and still, by the blurry memory of the person who chose to leave her to die alone.

I wish I could take an eraser to that piece of history. Since I can't, I'll just close my eyes for a bit and play pretend.