We don’t weed that Garden

He would have been on my ass about missing this writing deadline. I was famous for lagging on write-ups and my big brother? Well, the truth is, he likely would have been sitting here, the morning of, writing his first and final draft. The procrastination gene ran deeply in the both of us. Fortunately, the getting shit done gene did, too.

Another truth bomb on this, the one year anniversary of my brother’s passing, is one that only a writer or a soul disturbed by a traumatic loss could grasp. We know that describing our feelings about a moment in time is best done; in that moment of time.

I write this on a morning that aches of the morning one year ago that we were told our beloved Chris Cousins, had died of a heart attack. The sky is blue, scattered with dreamy-white clouds. Blues-rock music plays in the background. I stop what I’m doing periodically, alternating between admiring the music and the flower gardens I was fussing over when I got the call.

I would imagine that no one ever forgets the phone call that informs them that their only sibling is gone. I certainly didn’t. I remember that call each time I step near the part of my garden I was standing in when I answered my phone. I remembered the call when I avoided the entire garden for the remainder of the season after my brother’s passing. I recalled it again when our first spring after losing Chris came, and it was time to look at that garden space again.

I poured as many seeds into that garden space as I could. I planted trailing vines, marigolds, cosmos; the most hardy flowers I could think of. I was determined, for some unconscious reason, to not be able to see the floor of this garden. I threw on a few more wild flower seeds, then a few more, for good measure. Then I walked away. I haven’t weeded that garden all summer.

Call it procrastination, call it laziness, but the rest of my gardens are fussed over at a near-obsessive level. This garden is different. This garden has seen a river of my tears. I’m convinced the soil can still hear the pleading screams that erupted out of me on this morning one year ago. My arms tremble straight through to my fingers as I recall them. A lump in my throat threatens to bring me to my knees; again.

No, we don’t weed that garden. It does not bring me to my knees to do so, as I fear I won’t be able to rise up as steadily as I did the first time. For now, I’ll admire the blooms it produced. So many blooms in fact, that I can not see the ground, the rocks; I once landed on. One day, I’ll step closer and inspect the damage. All I know right now is that a year is not long enough. We don’t weed that garden.

We miss you, Chris. Here is your soundtrack: https://youtu.be/Q5vBzECT7mc

When your blessings seem to mock you

My brother moved himself and his beloved family back to our home town a year ago today. It was his youngest son’s eighth birthday. I remember he felt a tremendous amount of guilt that Lucas’s day became a day of separation from the home both of his boys had known for years. The rest of us who loved us, his wife and the boys maybe didn’t give that stressor on my brother’s shoulders enough attention; we were just completely overjoyed to have them home. In our eyes, all of our worlds would now be complete. My brother had a way of filling the empty spaces in people’s lives.

The activities that happened during those two weeks seemed rather mundane at the time. He and his family were busy getting settled in and he was tired from the move. Still, he was anxious to catch up with everyone and welcomed visitors. I was anxious to show him how I had grown as a person in the years he had been away.

We chatted over coffee, we worked together on the gardens at his new house. We shopped for perennial flowers together. He picked out flowers in his wife’s favorite shade of purple, I picked out a flower for their anniversary. A beautiful pink lily. Friends that had become family to both of us over the years gathered around his in laws pool and shared food, drinks and laughter. Both of our lives had turned full-circle. The circle was complete.

Two short weeks later, the perfect circle we had all managed to build together was abruptly cut into jagged pieces when my brother passed away suddenly from a heart attack in the early morning hours of August 15th. To say that life hasn’t been the same since would be an understatement that would do no justice to the role my brother played in each life he touched.

I had known that the anniversary of Chris’s passing was coming soon. Beyond the day nearing on the calendar, I could feel the familiar ache in my soul that last August had brought, returning. I had thought that I was as prepared as I could be for that day, until it was brought to my attention that today was my brother’s homecoming.

The moment I was reminded of this, I was overcome not first by the sensation of his absence, but by how I felt the day he was coming home. For a brief moment, I re-experienced the excitement of my brother sending me text messages, updating me on how the move was going. Finally, he alerted me that they were “on the road” home. Soon, they would arrive and we could help them unload the moving truck. Once that task was complete, they would truly be home.

He was excited. I recall my brother showing me around his new yard, telling me all about his plans for this season, and the next. On our walks, we saw butterfly cocoons, named the flowers in his new yard and he showed me where the fire pit would go. Later, we joined them all for a swim. I had missed my big brother. Never did it matter what we were doing together, it was the time spent that counted.

Today, I visited his beautiful wife and his beloved boys for his youngest son’s birthday. Admittedly, I’ve been a bit of a hermit in the past year. I don’t go out much, even on errands. I attend social engagements even less. I’ve grown into a bit of a homebody over the years, but today, as I walked through the old hopes of my brother, his family and my own, I realized their may be more to my tendency to keep to myself.

Not on all days, but today; each blessing of the day seemed to mock me and threaten to drown me in tears. The flowers my brother and I picked out together and planted last August are about to rebloom. There was no beautiful, shiny green cocoon to admire near the milkweed, but I certainly could picture my brother standing there that day, showing it to his son’s. Annual flowers I had gifted him and his wife last year had re-seeded themselves-as if to say that they too, are letting go of last summer hard.

I swam in the pool, something that felt foreign to me without my brother there, tossing our kids over his shoulders. Now they toss each other. It’s not as far, it’s not as high. He really was the strongest man in the world.

It’s not that we don’t laugh, or love or play as a family. If anything, we have all had to “step up” double to fill the many role’s that my brother played in everyone’s life. It’s that when we do “move forward,” it becomes immediately, glaringly obvious that my brother was a true genius at the craft of giving of himself. There is no handbook, no guide available that will help any of us love like Chris Cousins did.

I got home tonight and cried for the first time since the day mom passed. I cried for mom, I cried for my sweet brother, I cried for his beautiful friends and family that go on so bravely without him. I sobbed for how it hurts to go out into the world now-to be reminded at random turns in life how much it can rip at your core to miss someone, to need them. I cried even harder at what a relief it was to finally just let it…hurt for a while.

Tomorrow, I’ll do my best to live and love with a heart as big as his was. For today, I’ll let myself just miss him. God, I was so glad he was home.

Progress: the cure for all adversity?

I can’t remember a day in my life before mom’s passing that I wasn’t fighting with everything I had to bring pride back to my family. The race to reclaim my dignity started with my father when I was quite young. Wanting desperately to win his approval, I went to degrading lengths to hear the words, “I’m proud of you, kid.” It took an eighteen- month drug bender on my part and the recovery following that near-death chapter of my life, to finally hear those words before my father passed when I was twenty-eight years old.

After losing dad, my brother and I pressed forward. Even with broken hearts, we were determined to change the legacy of our family. For a decade, my brother thrived in his career and with his family. In that time, I continued to search for the path that was meant for me. (I’ve never been good with directions.) While I looked for a new goal to surpass that of maintaining sobriety, my brother and mother became my biggest source of validation. I wanted to emulate the best parts of who they were.

Nothing made what my brother had to offer this world more real and present than his sudden passing in August. In an instant, the future I had created in my mind of us raising healthy, happy families together, was erased. More than that, my guiding light for all major decisions in my life was gone. Who would I turn to for answers now?

For eight months following the devastating blow of losing my brother, it was just myself and mom. Not only was mom in end-stage liver failure, but she was rocked to the core from the loss of her son. Taking care of mom and pouring every ounce of my love into her for the time I had left with her became my new mission. My new sense of pride to hold onto, if you will.

There was nothing prideful about those final months with mom. Mom’s final weeks and the torturous pain she endured during her final days will stay with me for the rest of my life. Witnessing my mother choke for each breath, as she slowly drowned in her own fluids was the only thing that made it bearable to let her go home to God. I never would have told her this, but I was more terrified than I had ever been of anything to be left here alone without my family.

When mom took her last breath, finally released from her agony in this world, I sobbed over her until the coroner came to get her. It was not until I left that building, and a new day began, that I realized how profoundly my life had changed.

I haven’t cried a single tear since I walked out of mom’s facility that day. That fact allows for no accuracy on measurement of the depth of my loss. I lose count pretty early-on in the day of how many times I feel the urge to pick up the phone and dial the phone numbers of my late family members. Sometimes I want to tell them about something interesting that happened in my day. Other times, I just want to hear them laugh again. On Memorial Day weekend, I was near-tears, just wanting to have a simple burger with my brother.

When that inner-longing that never seems to let go subsides some, I try to see what the best version of me looks like today. She’s often exhausted, achy all over and a touch jittery. What I have learned about me is that this ache I experience inside can often be relieved by progress. Working towards my degree, gardening and caring for my animals are all examples of ways that I can make myself proud; even when I feel like there is no one watching like there was before.

My progress in the face of so much adversity may look like that of some kind of recovery warrior from the outside looking in. For me, it’s about leaving each situation, and eventually, this world, in a way I can live with myself for in the end. The way I see it, we only really answer to two people in our lives: ourselves and God. Who do you aim to inspire pride in?

You have to understand: we are on a mission from GOATS

I can’t imagine what my choices in the days immediately following my mother’s passing looked like to other people. It’s a wonder what people in my life were thinking of my “grief process,” and I certainly didn’t devote much thought to their opinions. I was doing a heavier amount of processing than I had ever tried to take on before. I was on a mission. I felt the weight of that mission more deeply than I can adequately describe here. That mission becomes even more difficult to convey to other’s when I add that I was on a mission from Goats. Yeah, you read that correctly.

Pictured from Left to Right: Thelma, Martin and Louise

Our decision to dive (well, it wasn’t nearly that graceful) into goat ownership had been solidified in the months leading up to my mother’s decline. As mom’s health worsened, Spring time also finally came; bringing us a real-life lesson in the circle of life. As we put the plans to bring goats to our homestead into action, the leaves on the trees began to sprout and the first flowers of the season bloomed. Migrant birds from the south visited our feeders in flocks of hundreds. I’m sure it would have been a glorious show to sip coffee by and observe, but I wasn’t there to take it all in.

I haven’t been “there” in a very long time. By “there,” I mean that I have not been completely present for anything I have taken part in. When I began pursuing my college degree two years ago, I never would have imagined how deeply the lessons I learned during that time would effect the course of my life moving forward. I think many people that start college envision a graduation day at the end of their journey-a day filled with family, memories and celebration. My mother and brother would be so proud, watching me fulfill a long standing dream.

The sometimes harsh circle of life dashed those visions first by taking my brother in August, then by taking my mother in early-May. I had not had a chance to absorb the loss of my only sibling when mom started to decline rapidly. From August through May, my time was divided not-so-evenly between full-time college, full-time motherhood and having some facet of my mother’s care on my mind; full time. I was barely clinging to any vision of a happy ending at all by April.

Though I didn’t want to admit it, mostly to myself, I had nearly lost myself completely. Every aspect of my life began to show the effects of long-term grief and the fear of the unknown with my mother. My school work suffered as I folded into myself and surrendered to a pain that I knew was pointless to try to battle against any longer. My stress level began to attack my immune system and I was sick with one “winter-illness” or another for three months straight. I still do not know how I managed to keep my head above water for long enough to avoid drowning.

Just then, life did its best to push my head under water. Mom’s final week came and with it, all I had been dreading since she became sick nearly two decades ago. The fact that it seemed that I had so long to prepare for this moment did nothing to ease the blow of watching my mother fight for every last breath for five days straight. The thing with witnessing someone suffer and struggle to breathe is, eventually you start to pray for God to release them from it. After a particularly long and terrifying night with mom, God did take her. I could not remember the last time I had seen my mother look so healthy and at peace. She was beautiful, like an angel.

After a week of watching her fight and just as long of crying more tears than can be counted, I said my final goodbyes to mom. Walking away from the assisted living home for the last time was painful, but I knew right then that I would not be returning for a very long time. I had given mom everything I had in me. With that realization, peace began to come to me, too.

The following day, my fiance and I were up bright and early, laying out plans for the goat shelter. I put my phone on silent, I invited those closest to me to come spend time at the goat farm in progress. I spent the daylight hours of the next several days working outside until my body ached and I finally submitted to the most restful sleep I had experienced in as long as I could remember. The following day, I would wake up rested and we would work until dark again.

My fiance and my son, building a Goat Shelter

After a few days of back-breaking, yet soul-healing work, it was time to bring our new goats home. From time to time, I would recall how excited mom was about her “Grand-goats.” Her face would light up when she saw pictures of them and she would share pictures of her Grand-Goats with all of her friends at the home. Sometimes I would think of my brother, who had a special fondness for goats and how much he would have loved visiting ours.

The days following their arrival reminded me repeatedly what we had all worked so hard for. Though our mission may have seemed off-focus for others, we somehow instinctively knew that these animals were a path to healing. None of us were prepared for the rapid healing they would provide for us.

I had not cried any tears since the day of my mother’s passing. As I processed the loss quietly and in my own unique way, those who were present were kind enough to allow me to just-be. Once we had the goats settled and I watched how they interacted with each of our aching souls, I finally understood myself why we had pushed so hard to get them here when we were “supposed to be grieving.”

My son and Martin the goat. Martin giving hugs after a tough day at school for Evan.

Spending time getting to know these gentle, quirky and emphatic creatures was exactly what each of us needed. Thelma, Louise and Martin have made quick work out of teaching our family some important life lessons about healing. They know when it’s time to be still in the sunshine and catch a quick, revitalizing nap. They know that light-hearted playtime is a staple in every day and that you don’t need a special occasion to celebrate life for. Our goats know that sometimes, a good snuggle is the perfect remedy for what hurts your heart.

Before now, I thought that healing or recovering from grief had to be a dark, grueling tunnel that you just had to walk through to get to the other side. My future now looks much different than the one I had planned years ago. Sometimes I grieve the loss of future memories that will never happen. There won’t be a graduation day with my parents beaming with pride or with my big brother taking pictures.

What there will be are countless moments filled with blooming flowers, silky soft goat ears to stroke and many more goals to set and conquer. That, is a vision from the future that I can handle.

My Mother’s True Heart

“You should have seen her back in the day,” I’d utter weakly as the nurses worked through their medical routine with my mother. Mom was having a bad day and the nurses had call bells screaming for them. Mom’s medical team hardly had the time to get her settled in, let alone reminisce about who she used to be before she got so sick. Each time as the nurses rushed off to their next task, I was left in the dust of those memories; as well as the reality of the now.

Mom on her wedding day (to my father)
So young, so beautiful

Mom was in pain for the last twenty years of her life. In her last year, she suffered so greatly that I feel ill-equipped to try to do her pain justice in writing. The decline was swift and unforgiving. The results of her declining health were revealed to me, I know now, in doses as she felt I could handle them.

To what lengths my mother was willing to go to shield me from the worst of her suffering would not become clear to me until just two Sundays ago. Mom had been “holding her own” medically for several weeks in spite of being in both end stage liver failure and in the final stages of COPD. One day she called me on the phone, begging me to come see her. She said she was not feeling well, that she was having bad nausea. Sensing there was more to it, I went down to see her.

Once we were together to talk, Mom explained to me that she had been feeling quite sick during the overnight and that none of the comfort medications seemed to be helping her. When I asked her what she thought may be going on, she told me that she thought that “this was the end.”

After she allowed me a moment to recover from the reality she had just hit me with, she continued. Mom told me that she was tired, that she did not want to fight anymore and that she was sorry. As if reciting a list she had rehearsed, she then told me that it was okay to be sad. A single tear rolled down her cheek. One tear told me everything I needed to know about how serious she was about what she had said. That one tear was all mom had left. She truly was tired. Mom was a kind of tired that few of us will ever understand.

People who met Mom later in life truly missed out on the ride of a lifetime with my mother. The folks who met mom in her final years saw a woman who had been battling serious illness since her late thirties. She was sick enough to be deemed completely disabled by her early forties. Mom had really been through the ringer with medical professionals and with life in general by the time she was in her late 50’s. She was tired, she was irritable and most of all, Mom was sick of everyone’s shit. Every ones.

The medical teams in Mom’s life never could have known the true horrors mom had suffered at the hands of those who were disguised as helpers and lovers in her life. They definitely didn’t know that what came off as my mother being demanding and critical was actually my mother finding her voice and using it for the first time in much, much too long. They couldn’t have known that while I may have told mom to “be nice” out loud, I was silently cheering my heart out for her newfound emotional strength. Her body became terribly weak in her final year of life. My mother’s heart was as brave and fierce as it ever was. She was ready to show the world what her heart was stitched together with.

Mom passed away five days after she told my son and I that she would soon be leaving us. In those final five days, memories that she, my brother and I had shared together floated in and out of my mind in a dream-like haze. Dance recitals, school proms, holidays. On the fifth day, mom left these memories safe with me and joined my brother and my father, in heaven.

About a week after mom passed away, I opened mom’s journal for the first time. I had gifted mom this journal shortly after my brother’s passing in August. I hoped that writing would help her process and cope with the loss of her son. The journal was titled, “A love letter to my daughter.” The leather books contents consist of pages upon pages of her thoughts of love and concern for each person in her life. My mother wrote about me in nearly every passage.

I was humbled to the core at the notion that someone, anyone, would hold me in that kind of regard in their lives. With all of mom’s health problems, the pain she endured every day, while facing the end of her life; all mom could think about was her love and concern for those who had loved her. Suddenly, I wished desperately that the world, especially those who had seen mom at her worst, could see mom as I did in that moment. I knew right away that it was too late for them. As for me, I’ll keep telling everyone who will listen. Love has been described in countless ways. In songs, in letters, on banners in the sky. If you truly want to know what love in the purest form feels like, a mom-hug is the closest thing.

Flowers don’t grow in blanket forts

Winter in Maine, 2019. I know I’m not supposed to mention the “W-word” this late in the season in these parts. The belief around here is that the W-word is a cuss-word after April the first of April. For us here in The Hills (and I assume, many others) winter came on aggressively and didn’t seem to want to let go once it had us in its grips. I am not a fan of the cold, but this year, I agreed with mother nature’s plan for me. I was ready to allow the harshness of the air around me to match what I felt inside.

I had spent all of last summer in my new gardens. My fiance and I had built seven flower beds by hand. Transforming our yard into a flower-filled heaven designed to attract birds to our newly hung feeders became our new passion. I would start my morning coffee and head outside to check on my gardens before it was even done brewing.

I adored those mornings outside. Very often the first to wake up in the morning, I began to look forward to the two hours before everyone else in the house woke up. Just my birds, my flowers, my dogs and a cup of coffee. Life was perfect.

It was on a morning much like I am describing, August the 15th to be exact, that I was standing in front of my main garden, waiting for my coffee to brew. Before I could decide what kind of day it was going to be, my phone rang. From that phone call, I learned that I had lost my brother from a heart attack. He was 42.

The last time I touched those gardens was a few days after his passing. I made a bouquet of the very best flowers left in my garden and I brought them to my brother when I saw him for the last time. After that, any vibrant colors that were left with the incoming fall season seemed to mock me. Secretly, it was almost a relief to watch the gardens grow weaker, then go under for their winters sleep.

Their leaves wilted, dried up and then began to fall. Foliage from the trees above began to drift from the trees and cover the garden beds, creating a somber glow over the back yard. I made halfhearted attempts at pulling out some of the old plants in preparation for the next gardening season. Soon I gave in and allowed snow to blanket them, too.

I welcomed the first snow and then the second. Soon I deemed it acceptable to make like a perennial plant and participate in my own long-winters sleep. Fortunately, my hibernation doesn’t take place under a four-foot pile of snow. Instead, I put my best effort into participating by making a blanket fort, a bag of gummy bears and comfy pajamas my norm.

I learned that when you’re resting up to become a beautiful flower in the spring time, you’re actually working pretty hard. As it turned out, four months in a blanket fort with gummy bears for company is a fine place for inspiration but it does very little for motivation. By February, I had about as much gumption AS a gummy bear. The green ones that no one likes. Hardly a recipe for a beautiful, strong flower.

I silently started to wonder if I had become a permanent hermit but Spring did finally come. Slowly, I started to come out of my blanket fort for short periods. The first sign of Spring in my yard besides the abundance of birds at the feeder was a patch of sweet Williams peeking out of the snow. I recall becoming quite emotional when I caught sight of the ragged looking plant, even hugging my fiance with joy. Spring had finally arrived. We had made it and man, had it been harder than I could ever express in pounds of gummy bears consumed. (A+ for effort on my part, though)

Then a day or two later, because we live in Maine and because it fit this winter’s Up off the Mat theme of repeated face plants; it snowed. The poor little vibrant, brave Sweet William plant was once again covered with snow. It would have to fight it’s way back from the disappointment and I would be returning to the isolation of my blanket fort.

Once the temperatures went up above the air outside pisses me off, I decided that I was finished with letting mother nature and her six inches of ice push me around. For the next two weeks, I took to the back yard with a metal shovel with the zest of people who get paid for it. I broke the ice away from the patio rocks, feeling farther away from “blanket fort girl,” with each block of ice that broke free. If my neighbors didn’t think I was completely crazy before, they must be well on their way now.

It was during one of these back-yard therapy sessions this morning that I saw it. Four of them actually. Four pathetic, slimy, nearly drowned Sweet Williams that had quadrupled in size since last year. I stood there with my best friend of two weeks, a metal shovel screaming for a break, and admired what it took for these sad little plants to recover the way they did from the brutal Maine winter.

Only then did it occur to me that maybe we should all consider lending ourselves the same pat on the back that we do to nature for coming back from what’s meant to break us. Maybe it’s the challenges of a long Maine winter that knock you down for longer than you think you should be. Maybe you struggle with mental health or a loss that plagues you in your day to day life. Whatever it is that knocks you down, consider giving yourself the same understanding and patience that we are able to give nature as it fights its way back in the spring time. After all, we are both just trying to survive. If we’re lucky, we get to grow from the learning experience.

Surrender to defeat (but rise up swinging)

man defeated by his shadow boxing

https://www.istockphoto.com/photos/defeat?sort=mostpopular&mediatype=photography&phrase=defeat

I hope you are all enjoying part three of The House with the Red Door. Getting to work on part three of this series was a challenge, to say the least. Even the author of Up off the Mat has to pick herself up from a hard knock out delivered by life from time to time.

Admittedly, I could have taken my defeat with a bit more grace. It was the end of August, when I lost my brother, that I was technically knocked out. Not ready to accept the loss or the much-needed recovery time, I pushed forward.

To the outside world, my initial steps forward may have looked to the like a vallant comeback of sorts. I returned to college the week after my only siblings funeral. People suggested that a break may be in order, an idea I quickly dismissed. Much like someone who had suffered a blow-to-the-head in the most literal sense, I was far from at my cognitive best.

The truth is, I barely remember my entire fall semester. Somehow between supressed grief, the daily stresses of life and my mother going onto hospice care in December; I managed to complete twelve credits of my batchelors degree on the Deans List. That miracle was lost on me as the combined coldness of the winter months and my recent loss began to work it’s way into my soul.

The shock of the hard knocks of my life had begun to dissolve and the emotions that crept in to replace them were unwelcome. I was in pain. My head ached as each wound exposed itself in the form of once-fond memories that now taunted me. My heart, which had felt hollow for months, now flooded with what-ifs and could-be’s that would never be.

It was all too much. Instead of surrendering to the grief-response that my soul was begging me for, I told myself to continue to fight. The pep-talk to myself worked for a while. I registered for the Spring semester and finally started writing again. I told myself that being “okay” looked like making progress. As long as I kept motoring forward, neither the numbness or the what-ifs that made me suffer, could knock me down.

December was also the start of three major winter illnesses for me. I first became sick with the flu. Just as I was struggling to my feet from the flu, a respiratory illness took residence in my lungs. For weeks, and then months, I struggled with my health, often bed-ridden.

I could not figure out why I could not get “Up off the Mat.” (It’s been said that I can be a bit hard-headed.) Eventually it occurred to me that I might be a bit on the depressed side. Knowing what our emotional state can do to our physical state, (whether we choose to acknowledge it or not) I began to consider that it was the feelings I had first experienced following shock and numbness that had scared me into rapid progress.

I didn’t want to experience what it felt to recall memories from my immediate family that I would soon be the only one here to tell about. Most of all, I did not want to look ahead to all of the memories yet to be created that my family will not share with me. (Yes, writing that truth was painful.)

At some point a few weeks back, I started to take longer looks at how things in my life were…progressing. An honest self-assessment brought me to the realization that the outward appearance of “okay” had become a full-time job. Furthermore, I wasn’t fooling anyone.

My tenancy to isolate had returned during a cold-winter night when I had my guard down. Soon, I stopped attending classes at the college and started delay-viewing all of them at home. I let my phone-calls go to voicemail, often keeping my ringer off completely. Day-naps became necessity and eating became a chore. Any trip out of the house (known as “people-ing’ around here) was a source of dread.

Man, was I angry at myself. I felt I was losing a battle that I should have been strong enough to conquer. Not even sure who the true enemy that dealing me these damaging blows to the soul was, I silently began to beat myself up for not having the stamina to defend myself. Why couldn’t I just be happy? Why couldn’t I continue to evolve into the true-me that I know I am capable of? Why couldn’t I GET UP?

I decided to nap on those questions. (Hey, I was sick and tired.) Even as I write, I remember clearly a statement my brother made to me as I struggled with the reality of surrendering to my brain surgery (and the long recovery) only three years ago:

“Kid, you have got to stop viewing your brain tumor as something you are DOING to those you love. Stop apologizing for it.”

My brother sure did have a way of pushing me into a place of perspective real-quick-like. As I remembered this Big Brother advice, I made the connection I needed in order to move forward in a more meaningful way.

I admit to being guilty of pride. Many of us are prone to the tendency to want to project a certain image of ourselves to the world. It’s natural to want to be viewed by others as strong, brave, or even unbreakable. In my life, I have been blessed with the tenacity to overcome multiple obstacles and even a few traumas.

Recently, it has come into my awareness that I have developed a sort of craving or addiction to what it feels like to come out on top when life knocks me down. When darkness finds me, I long for what I felt like on my first day back to work four weeks after a craniotomy. Just weeks before, I had been on a hospital gurney with parts of my skull on a tray beside me. Now I was grooming dogs. I felt like super woman that day. What a rush.

Life is not all fluffy puppies with cute haircuts though. It’s not all being honored as a Deans List Student, gardens full of happy flowers or long days by the pool with the best big-brother ever. Those moments are the true blessings but they are not where we do our best evolving as people.

If we do our best growing through struggling, I was in a great place to begin. Maybe my grief wasn’t something I was imposing on those I loved, either. Keeping my brothers wise words in mind, I tried his theory out on my combination of grief and winter-blues.

Not only did I stop apologizing for straying from my previous-self, I started to open up about who I was now. I had honest conversations with my college-family about where I was both physically and mentally. I shared my darkest thoughts with my parter and even a few close friends. I started to write what was on my heart again, sans apology to the world.

I shouldn’t have been surprised, but people were prepared to accept the “messy-me,” too. (I have some seriously awesome souls in my life, for sure.) My college-family rallied around me, giving me slack where I needed it and a good push, too. My family and friends made their presence and support known to me by perfecting the art of giving space and offering comfort. With this, I allowed myself the fall that was needed following an impressive knock out.

I still do not know about the “what-ifs.” What I do know is that the hollow feeling the shock of grief created for me made way for emotions I was meant to feel. Once I allowed myself to be still enough, the pain washed over me in an uncomfortable, yet cleansing way. I did not drown, it did not last forever.

Pain, grief, anxiety and anger are emotions our bodies are meant to experience. We need not run from them, fight them or attempt to hide them. Let them wash over you, acknowledge the lessons that come from them and never apologize for your story on this earth. This is how genuine progress happens.

A Dance with Darkness

The invisible lines between the various parts of my life woke up blurry today. I am far from a master at it but I’ve done this tight-rope dance before. A few days back, after a vallant attempt to combat my tendancy for winter isolation, uncomfortable thoughts and emotions started to creep up on me. I could feel it, as I had counteless times before, first in the pit of my stomach.

Emotions that could be called “vulnerable” ones, such as sadness, anxiety or fear aren’t anyone’s favorite jam. Historically for me, they have been cause for the development of an emergency escape plan. Not only did everything in me scream “run,” when I felt pain, it was most important to get away before anyone saw me in a state of what I viewed as personal weakness. It felt much safer for me to retreat to the solitude of my own darkness, often not treating myself very kindly on said-“retreat.”

In the darkness of my own thoughts and emotions, no one can see me trembling from the inside. My stomach churns, my teeth grind and my head often aches as I take cover from the thoughts that take up space in my brain:

To do lists a mile long that have not been started, adolescent sons, missing brothers, ailing loved-ones, college credits, fear of failure, hope for the future-woah, I still have not begun that to-do list.

It is not long before I have crossed so many lines in my head that I am not sure where to begin with untangling them. When I try to picture the boundaries of these lines in my mind, they represent a ball of yarn that a kitten has had free access to until nap time. By that time, I drop down into “real-life” (the present) for a moment and realize I should probably be doing something productive (full-time college while parenting is no joke) but which priority in my web of worries do I attempt to tackle?

Damn, I feel like I’ve BEEN tackled at this point. My head aches from the teeth-grinding and my stomach doesn’t know if it is hungry or needs to purge. Alas, there is no time to worry about such trivial symptoms, I am STRONG and I have that to-do list bellowing at me to stop being so…vulnerable.

Mama never mentioned days like this

“I like dogs better than people,” he was known for saying. People on the outside of our immediate family would laugh this common statement off. The deep affection my father held for his four-legged friends was legendary. My mother, my brother and I would laugh too: but through clenched teeth while in mixed company. We knew that in private, my father truly did prefer to make friends with even the worst dog over his favorite human.

Growing up, there was never a time we didn’t have at least one dog. Much to my mother’s dismay, it wasn’t uncommon for my father to return home from a road trip or a work site with a puppy or a stray dog. Looking back now, the approval of one of our most memorable rescue mutts, “Muttley” (that lacked hair on his tail-end and smelled awful even after a grooming from a life-long skin condition) meant at least as much to my dad, anyways.

After “the Muttley experience,” we learned not to question the many dogs that followed. Our family mourned when we lost Bandit, my parent’s black lab-cross of seventeen years. We celebrated when Dad returned home from a road trip up North with Dustin the Beagle. Dustin and I bonded over flea-picking sessions while I wondered silently when my father would look at me with the same sparkle in his eye he got when he looked at any of our dogs.

I may have secretly resented my father’s affection towards those dogs but it was during these grooming sessions in my back yard with them growing up that I started to understand. These dogs listened to me intently, with a complete absence of judgement. They understood me without words, they loved me without condition.

I’ve heard people say that everyone gets one special dog in their life that they never forget. For our family, we were lucky enough to have a pair of them. Rosie, who will never be remembered for her smarts and Charlie, the rock-diving black lab bring many fond memories for our family. One memory with this comical duo changed my life in a matter of minutes.

It was the dead of winter and my dad had packed up his two best friends Charlie and Rosie, some tennis balls and a racket for a trip to the ocean. For hours, he slammed those tennis balls our into the crashing waves, our family dogs tirelessly chasing them. I don’t recall being bothered by the cold Maine air that February day. Neither dog seemed concerned either, as they retrieved ball after ball. They paid no mind to the icicles forming on their chests.

Rosie, the younger of the two, was famous for fetching the ball and not returning it. She preferred to drop the sandy, slobber-covered ball on the beach, bark at it relentlessly and roll all over it. This caused me to laugh hysterically at her foolishness. When I looked over at my dad, he was laughing, too. On this day, for the first time, I started to understand how my dad could have the reservations he did about people.

On this day, my dad was as happy and free as I had ever seen him. Sometimes if I close my eyes, I can still picture it. His teeth were showing when he looked over and shared a smile with me. I can feel the vulnerability I saw in his eyes as I realized that after nineteen very long years, both our joy and our pain came from the same place. I did not express this truth to him with any more than a look that day. Thankfully, I was able to tell him before he passed away only a few short years later:

“You don’t need to worry about me or the baby, dad. You really did teach me everything I need to know to go forward.”