In the Current

For a woman with many words, I’m at a loss today.

There has been power in silence this morning.

Yesterday, I was not silent. I was a raging, seething, angry monster. And also a blubbering mess of love and sadness and agonizing fear and guilt.

All of the things. I was literally all of the things.

Except quiet.

This morning the sun rose like it does every day. Actually, better than it does most days. Today was epic. The clouds pebbled the sky in globular pockets that took the sunlight and painted it pink, rolling over the lake, dancing against their image on the water. Really spectacular stuff. The kind of sky that gets your heartstrings all stretched out and achy. The kind of sky you don’t miss. Don’t take for granted.

I didn’t need the scenic drama to make me present, today, but it sure was aligned with the achiness in my heart.

I still can’t believe it. I can’t wrap my head around it, never mind my heart.

How does anyone process the death of a child? That kind of unimaginable, unreasonable, unfair kind of loss.

I live in very different worlds. I’ve always been that way – one foot in one door, one out and in another. I like living a big, broad, expansive life experience, and I have a hard time pigeonholing myself into categories and groups. Non-committal. It has its perks, but I’m not always immersed in each of those broad experiences in the same way I could be if I dove in, took my foot out of the door and chose a side.

I never dove right into cancer life. I couldn’t. I played a game – the game of denial, maybe – where I refused to go down the rabbit hole of consuming fear and grief and loss. Life is full of opportunities, right? Why shouldn’t cancer be one of them? Everything is attitude, after all. Perspective. I had myself fooled that I could skate out of that inferno relatively intact – singed hair, maybe. “Contrast” to use for material for life. For writing. For helping others.

I didn’t let myself get pulled under with the current. And it served me. It served us. And I hold to all of those adages that became my mantras in blog after blog. Be grateful for every minute. Have faith. Stay present and positive. What else is there but our interpretation of things?

Sometimes, however, things fall apart. They just do. Life is just so fucking unfair sometimes. And there isn’t any other way to put it.

In one world, I live like the others. I play and socialize and worry about bills and my weight and my bad habits. I strive to be healthier, to be kinder to my husband, to be more patient with my kids, while fussing with grocery lists and dog pee and client calls. “Life”. And it’s messy and sweet and scary.

But then there’s the “other world”. The cancer world. The place where people I love, people I relate to in ways I wish I didn’t, are suffering, still. Suffering unimaginable fear and loss and sacrifice. It’s a world above the other, where you look down in agony, knowing that it’s “right there” – that place of fussy little idiosyncrasies that make “life” what it’s supposed to be. Laundry. Bills. Fights over who forgot to put the toilet paper on the roll. Just out of reach.

I have felt so many times that I am betraying that world up there on the other side of the hospital glass. That place I lived in for so long watching “life” play out for the lucky ones – the ones that had never had to face this kind of terror and disempowerment and resentment and loss. Watching the people that had never had to give up their lives, knowing they would always be somewhat outside of it all, getting up every morning having to do mental gymnastics just to face the day and all of its limited possibilities.

Yesterday my worlds collided. My foot has been far out of the cancer-world door for awhile. Violet has been (miraculously) well, against all odds. Against all expectations. And it has been a goal, as it has been for me from the beginning, to ride that wave and hang on to any little thread that would keep us attached to the world of the well. And I have pulled on that thread for dear life, knowing what would happen if I let it go. I know myself. I’m a positive person by intent. By deliberate, obsessive practice. I know what I get like when I fall apart, and that just was never an option.

But this time I got blindsided – the peril of partisan positivity.

Our little Rylie took her last breath yesterday. Against all odds, I thought. Contrary to the plan.

So now I have been wrenched back into the fray, trying to figure out how to navigate living in two realms so far removed from one another, dangling in the abyss between. My heart is so broken, so utterly raw for her family, so at a loss. She wasn’t my daughter. But I loved her. We loved her. So much.

And her mother.

There’s no way to console someone in this type of pain. Nothing you can say. For me, there is deep sadness and loss. There is fear. There is that confusion that comes when your world gets turned upside down and you question what end is what? What does this mean? How does this fit into the way I thought things were supposed to go?

And so I dig down deep into the ol’ toolkit of wisdom that I have been collecting. I go quiet. I let things feel how they feel and don’t try to make sense of it. The meaning will come. It always does. The universe operates on basic laws and principles of organization, and in my experience, that organization is always toward the good. There’s no way of knowing it all – how it all works, how it’s all serving us. But I know that in the end, it does. It always works. It always fits together.

In the quiet, there’s a place for meaning to arise that goes beyond words. Beyond the noise of our minds and the limitations we have in our understanding. There is a knowing in our hearts that is always trying to tell us something if we listen. Trust. Love. Be. That’s all. Hurt hurts. Loss is loss. And it’s all ok. In the end, it’s all ok.

There will be a lot of pain surging in and out of the heart, but it moves likes waves, tide over the sand, slowly writing the truth in the land. Pain etches itself on our hearts, but it leaves a message – in the end, all there is is love. Under it all, that’s what remains, always.

Rylie, we love you. You had a plan none of us can understand, but you made your mark. On our hearts. On the world. And the love remains, sweet girl.