Greetings All,
After Amie died, I said to myself that I wasn’t going to
push myself to write, excepting whenever it was that I felt called to
write. This last 6 weeks has been really
busy (more on that later), and also grindingly hard at times (more on that
later).
So, it’s been 6 weeks since I’ve written, and that’s
alright. Why? ‘cuz I say it is. J
But, ya know what’s cool….there has been a consistent
200-ish page hits each day, as I know that there’s still a ton of people out
there wishing us well, thinking about us, sending prayers towards us, and all
other types of well-wishing. We
appreciate it, really.
What to talk about, what to talk about…. Let’s start with Anya.
Anya is really doing well, at least we think she is. She’s where most of our focus is going right
now. We’ve been going to Ele’s Place for 5 weeks
now, and it’s been amazing for her. She
loves going there, gets to talk about Amie and have fun, and we go to the adult
group.
Anya’s also exploded into reading. I’m sure I’ve mentioned it before, but prior
to January she was a reluctant reader, and now she’s literally reading too
much. What’s that mean? She avoids all her normal housework to read.
She reads under her blankets after bed with a flashlight, and doesn’t want to
do anything else. She reads (on average)
a book a day, or more. She’s torn
through the Magic Tree House series, the Junie B. Jones series, and the Nancy
Drew and the Clue Crew books. She’s on
fire. FIRE. FLAMES. Ok, maybe too much for that one… no one needs to be thinking about burning
books. But if they were on fire, Anya
would still be reading them…just carefully.
Pretty much everything about Anya is going well right
now. She has swimming lessons on Monday
nights (she fell behind when Amie got ill, and we didn’t follow up), Ele’s
Place on Wednesday nights, and Art lessons on Thursdays. She’s active, loving things, and hasn’t
really shown a lot of acting out, other than what we perceive to be normal
stuff for a soon to be 8 year old.
Shelley has taken all her stress and restlessness and
applied it to our home. All the honey-do
projects that most guys might get for vacations? Yeah, she does all of those. Ya know the stories about husbands who
purposely sandbag chores so that they can get out of doing them in the
future? Yeah. I do my absolute best at
things, and they’re still not up to the skill level that Shelley has on things. She’s never unkind about it, she just knows
that she can do the things that she does much better than I, and she wants them
done right. So she does them
herself. She’s been working on
re-painting trims, removing and replacing fixtures and hardware, and
re-painting the bathroom thus far. I’m
sure there’s plenty to be done in the months ahead.
Me? Work, for the
most part. My normal escape towards
video games has been quite absent, as has my escape towards other geekery like
Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons and Dragons.
I’ve largely been forced to live in the real world. Utterly unacceptable.
But to be real, it got me to thinking about the idea of
identity the other day, in the sense of how we see ourselves, and how the world
sees us. Underneath the surface, for me,
is this seething mass of sorrow, discomfort, impatience, and aching loss. I want to tell everyone I meet about Amie,
and tell them how much I miss her. More
than that, I miss all the things that she’s not going to do, the places she’s
not going to go, the experiences she’s not going to have. I miss the hole that she has left, and know
that it’s not going to be filled, just hopefully become smaller as time moves
along.
I think about all the pain that sits beneath the exterior of
people, and how it does with me as well.
I know that I have always judged people at times, and know that I will
in the future. I see kids with their
heads down in my class, and at times take it personally. Some times the lack of interest is from poor
decisions they have made, and sometimes it’s from utter desire to succeed in
school overall. But how often in the
past has their apparent disinterest been from the profound things that have
been hammering into them on a daily basis, and what could I have done to help
them with that? I think about that stuff
a lot these days.
Since I’m on a roll talking about things that make people
uncomfortable, let’s continue! I
recently took 140 8th Graders to Washington DC. Yes, I am insane. But really, I love taking the trip, for what
it does to the kids who “get it”. I’ve
been reading the papers they wrote this afternoon, up until I ditched them to
write this blog post, and I keep getting blown away by the profound reflections
that kids are writing in response to the trip.
So amazing, and so profound to see these young writers starting to
discover the power of service to others, of self-sacrifice to the greater good,
and how empowering it is to have passion to remake the world into a better
place for others.
But…that’s not what I meant to write (it snuck out!). I meant to write about Grief Bombs. That’s my name for what happens when you’re
walking around in a normal conversation and you suddenly find yourself knee
deep in a conversation where you’re smashing back tears like Captain America
with his shield. My most recent event
with this was at the Hard Rock Café in DC, where a couple of teachers who went
with me to DC were talking about vomiting, and how the girls’ bus to DC (yes,
we separated them this year) had several pukers, and how we hadn’t had any the
previous year. The conversation devolved
into talking more about puke, and those who cared, and those who didn’t, and I
realized that I was totally and utterly missing Amie’s days of puke, because
although she was puking on me as I held her, she was alive and with me. Even typing this, wow. Too much, too raw, so overwhelming.
The other thing that was powerful this last few weeks was
settling on what to put in Amie’s urn.
Firstly, for those who didn’t know, we didn’t bury her. We cremated her, and then we’re going to bury
her. We like to do things our own way,
and this made sense to us. (like I have
to justify anything…) Anyway, the urn we
picked was an adult sized urn, and there was a lot of extra room in it. They asked us if there was anything we wanted
to put in it, and of course, we each chose things to make that happen. Shelley knit a heart (I don’t have a pic, but
wish I did), and each of us wrote letters to say goodbye to her.
I’m not sure that there’s been anything harder for me to
write. Ever. I was leaning over the
table writing, and I was wearing my glasses.
I was crying so hard that I had puddles inside of the lenses of my
glasses, and had to keep dumping it out to finish the letter. But. I
guess the things that matter most, the things that most need to be said are the
things that squeeze the guts out of us the most, and make us the most
vulnerable. We fear those things the
most, but those are the things we need to do.
Always. It’s the heart of what it
means to be real, to be human, and to be connected to each other.
Ok. Enough really
deep stuff for now. I could go on forever
with the stuff bouncing around my head right now. I’ll cease here, and publish this
behemoth.
I love comic books and video games.
I asked them both to pose for me.
Charlie and Anya are epic Superheroes.
This is Jennifer.
She's the former student who organized several fundraisers for us, and is overall just plain amazing.
She came up for dinner last week, and hung out afterwards to talk and play with Anya.
This is Anya's version of the Kitty on the yarn ball.
This is Jen's version. Jen has 14 years on Anya. I'm still giving the decision to Anya. ;)
The big explosion of goodness for the evening came when Jen gave Shelley this bracelet.
She had taken Amie's signature from a piece of artwork and had it made into the bracelet. Shelley and I were immediately overwhelmed by how insanely cool this was, and how much we both appreciated it. Jennifer For the Win!
Hope y’all are doing well, and you’re enjoying the heck out of our spring weather. I know I am.
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