Please click below to read in the Dispatch. Thank you, and Happy Halloween!
Please click below to read in the Times. Thank you, and Happy Halloween!
Newspaper column #104: Helping kids get through the horror of Halloween
Prader Willi
Dispatch column #40: It’s time to champion each other.
Dispatch column #18: Help those navigating rare paths.
A real gig: Dispatch column #11 Camp fire puts Thanksgiving in the Q.C. In perspective
A real gig. Dispatch column #4: Some parents must confront hard questions about school.
In the paper. Dispatch column #10 Yes, we all can change someone’s world.
To know me, is to know the real thing.
Due to a domino effect of used refrigerators trading places, we now have, in our kitchen, a refrigerator that has never had a lock. It sat empty for five days like an alien life form that was a complete mystery. I was unsure how to approach filling it. There aren’t Katie drawers. No insulin or Bydureon rattles around in the “butter” compartment.
275 days into this life of grief, I still buy too many fresh vegetables and yogurt nobody ends up eating. Trips to the grocery store find me standing in front of a shelf not having any idea what to put in my cart. More then once I have walked through the store, pushed my empty cart back into the rack and driven away with nothing in my trunk. One day the butcher found me in such a reverie he said he almost jumped over the case to see if I was alright when I was not responding to his inquiries.
I don’t tell you this looking for pity or sympathy. I tell you so you know the real thing, the real me. I have this firm belief that it is important to share with others the lows as well as the highs. I think it might help somebody else to know what I am experiencing; it might mirror something they are enduring and help them to know how another feels, or it might help somebody who in the future will be in my shoes, or it might simply help you to know me better. To know when my participation in a conversation is non-existent, or distracted at best, that my mind doesn’t always focus or concentrate on what is being said or what is happening around me. Also, I tell you this because you endured all of my griping about the damn locks. You listened and comforted me when I complained about Kathleen‘s stupid syndrome. You knew it was never the inconveniences to me I was bemoaning, but the tragedy of a girl always being hungry which was my cause to wish for a day I could have a refrigerator without locks. I have one now, I wish it was due to a cure instead of a death. Even without locks, at my house, we are still hungry for a cure……
~~“What we hunger for perhaps more than anything else is to be known in our full humanness, and yet that is often just what we also fear more than anything else. It is important to tell at least from time to time the secret of who we truly and fully are . . . because otherwise we run the risk of losing track of who we truly and fully are and little by little come to accept instead the highly edited version which we put forth in hope that the world will find it more acceptable than the real thing. It is important to tell our secrets too because it makes it easier . . . for other people to tell us a secret or two of their own . . . ” buechner
Wish!
For more than half of my life as I blew out my candles, I only had one wish. I wished for Katie to no longer be hungry.This was my constant wish, not just for candle-blowing time. Now she isn’t. My wish came true, not quite how I had imagined it would, but it came true. Tonight, at age 57 I needed a new wish. It came to me quickly. I wish everyone would have the opportunity to fully understand how much they are loved. It is a humbling feeling, one which will have you thanking your lucky stars, Almighty God, or your deity of choice. Every day since Katie died earlier this year, I have experienced love, care, and generosity from family, friends, neighbors, and almost strangers. There are so many people I have not yet thanked, so if you are reading this and have heard nothing from me, please know I am eternally grateful for whatever you did or provided for me. The magnitude of the love is overwhelming and inconceivable. It is also completely palpable. Grief is the hardest thing I have ever done. I was completely unprepared for grief. I have often stated, and still believe I have been in mourning since Katie’s birth. I mourned the child I expected her to be, the child I had planned on having and raising. She wasn’t who I was anticipating. That form of mourning did not prepare me for the slap in the face, punch in the gut mourning in which I am currently engulfed. I vividly remember the lecture and book by Kubler-Ross, but I don’t remember ever once being told how physical the grieving would be. I know I was never told that somebody who loves me would do my laundry or dishes or carry my purse and open my doors because I simply have no strength. Often I feel like a pile of tar in the middle of a Disney World parking lot on a 110 degree day. The Disney World reference is intentional, because I often think the rest of the world is running on Disney happy place steroids…..while I am the tar. People have been able to temporarily love me out of the tar state. Love has been made visible to me. I don’t wish the death of your child or any other calamity which might be the opportunity for you to realize the depth of love others have for you, so instead I wish you would be open to love whenever it knocks on your heart. Watch for love. Recognize love. Accept love. This I know…wishes come true. Allow yourself to be loved. Allow others to love you. It is, after all, my birthday wish.
good enough.
Katie has always been difficult to buy for, for any holiday or gift giving occasion I would wrack my brain trying to come up with a decent idea of a gift for her. I always wanted to find something to make her happy, but my gifts were never food. Instead, my gifts were Uno cards, a new game, a movie, craft supplies, or music; all which she was happy about, but I never felt like I was able to give her what she really wanted. I never thought what I could give her was good enough. Today, I think I chose good enough. Today, I understand I gave good enough.
One thing about me which was bothersome to Katie is the fact that I am a procrastinator. If taxes don’t have to be done until April 15th at midnight, I’ll turn them in at 11:55pm. When I think of something that needs to be done, I figure I’ll do it sometime this week. When Katie thought of something that needed to be done, she wanted to do it immediately. Our sense of time, or rather our sense of the importance of time differed. Perhaps she knew tomorrow wasn’t promised, it should be done today.
So today, three months from the day my daughter died, I filled my car with ribbon, wire, trinkets, a potted plant in a basket and a giant glittery, lavender shepherd’s hook. I drove to her grave site, well, I drove to the vicinity of her grave site. I thought it would be easy to find. I thought it would be the plot with the fresh, new, baby grass growing on it. Nope. They laid sod! I found a metal circle in the ground that read 221 abcd, I knew she was at 221 b. What I didn’t know is where those plots were located in relation to the metal number circle. There was a wooden stake tipped with red paint sticking out of the ground to the far right of the number circle. I looked carefully at the stake to see if there was any other marking on it. Nope. I carefully walked in all directions away from the stake until I found a faint sod line in the ground. I walked the perimeter of the sod line and was astounded how small it looked compared to how eternally huge and gaping it looked when her casket had hovered over it three months prior. I backed up to look at it from a different angle, I heel to toe walked the length and decided that yes, she is probably right there. Now to figure out where the headstone would be located. I suppose it would be located at the head, but if it is to line up with the others in the row, it seemed like I was standing at the foot. I decided I would put her stuff there whether I was right or wrong. I put the bottom of the shepherd’s hook in the sod line and pushed it into the soil by standing on it with my good foot while trying to not damage my injured foot. I reached up to fasten the sparkly fuchsia tulle bow to the center with pipe cleaners. The sun sent sparkles all around my head as it shone through the bow. The bright blue sky made me happy as I saw it peeking through the white rattan of the basket I was hanging. I stuck “stars on sticks” from her students in the plants’ soil, affixed various trinkets, a crown, a cross, and an angel, then I hung up the zip bag of craft supplies. Inside was yarn, scissors, and pipe cleaners with a note to friends of Katie to feel free to use those items to attach anything they might wish to the shepherd’s hook. I walked a few feet away to take a few pictures. It sparkled and shone pink and purple and was noticeable from a great distance. It was up before her birthday. She would be proud. She would be pleased.
For my daughter’s thirtieth birthday I decorated her grave and it was good enough.
For my daughter’s thirtieth birthday she helped me understand that I always gave good enough.
Leap Day, Katie-style
Katie was always fascinated by Little People. She adored “the tiniest dwarf” and the Roloff family on television, but I believe this affinity began when she was in early elementary school. She was little for her age and would hear me explain to people that short stature is a Prader-Willi Syndrome characteristic. She would also hear her father’s family tell about how short their ancestors were; I believe her paternal great grandmother was reported as being 4’8″ or 4’10”, I don’t remember which, but definitely short compared to my family. She was wearing size 3 dresses when she started Kindergarten, so she frequently heard comments about her diminutive size. Sometime after age six, she encountered her first little person. He completely captured her attention. She watched him unabashedly, contemplating how his small stature didn’t seem to accurately reflect his apparent age.
After studying him sufficiently she turned to me and asked, “Do you think he comes from a family where everybody is small? Or do you think he was born on Leap Day?”
Barely choking back laughter, I sputtered, “What? What do you mean?”
With the patience only Katie had, she calmly repeated with more explanation, “He is little. Do you think his whole family is little, like how Dad’s Grandma was little or do you think he was born on Leap Day?”
“I don’t think his whole family was little. What do you mean about him being born on Leap Day?”, I was still perplexed by that part of the question.
“Well,” she began explaining, “if his whole family isn’t little, I figure he must have been born on Leap Day because he is old looking, but he is still so short that he must not have had enough birthdays to grow big.”
I will never live through a Leap Day without thinking of this delightful conversation and without remembering how Katie loved people, but most especially little people.
Devour My Words 