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

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?

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.

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.”

Sounding off-the cringe-worthy

Photo taken three days before brain surgery

Recently it was brought to my attention by a concerned, well-meaning friend that I may have taken a prolonged trip to negative-town. Noting that I haven’t been myself lately, she was growing increasingly concerned that I would sink into a depression that I would have a hard time coming back from. It was my pride that responded to her initially, reminding her in no uncertain terms of all I have gotten Up off the Mat from already in just three short years.

For new readers, the hurdles I have fought my way back from include: brain surgery, the passing of my long-time best friend, the untimely passing of my only sibling and most recently; caring for my mother as she endures terminal illness on hospice. I made an agreement with myself long ago that I was going to come back from these adversities in a way that I would like myself for. More than that, my ultimate goal was to face fear in a way that would help others get Up Off the Matt as well.

Part of that has been just plain getting up again after I “fell.” When I had brain surgery, I fought my way back with a tenacity that made my caretakers frustrated and at times, nervous. (No one wants to see someone in recovery from brain surgery hiking the rocky driveway everyday, but I was determined to get stronger.) When my best friend passed away from an overdose, I finally began tackling my goal of starting college to become a substance abuse counselor. I put that goal on fast-forward by participating in public speaking engagements on the topic of addiction. When my beloved brother passed, I started a new semester at college two weeks later and earned Dean’s List. I began my current semester with my mother on hospice. For me, it is all about progress in spite of everything that threatens to hinder it.

With each challenge life threw at me, both the reader and the writer in me were inspired. First, I would set to Google and see what I could learn about each topic. Knowing all I can about what I am facing helps ease my mind. It gives me a sense of control when I feel like I have an idea of what to expect in the days to come. What I found with each topic was that there was plenty of information out there in medical-speak. There are copious amounts of medical articles written by doctor’s and psychiatrists that will educate you on grief, terminal illness and even on craniotomies. (Don’t google that one, you can’t unsee that.)

For me, what was lacking was personal accounts of what it felt like for someone who was actually going through a major illness or loss. What could I expect from that point of view? Was what I was feeling normal? Would I be okay again? Finally, I wanted those who were maybe just starting their trip down “negative-town-lane” to see that I made it. I got Up off the Matt. Every. Single. Time.

That’s not to say that I didn’t get knocked out more times than I can count at this point. There were times I even laid there for a while, flailing and kicking; resisting the fall. Heck, there were even times I had to be rolled out on a stretcher. Guess what I did when I woke up from that much needed nap? I got up and I walked out of that place. Chin down, hands up, ready for the next round.

That’s really what Up off the Mat is all about. I know I’m not the only one who has been knocked down by life repeatedly. My mission is to be a witness to those stories, I know they are out there. Speak on them. Tell your stories loudly, no matter how they may make people cringe or hurt for you. Then you show them. You show them that you may fall down a time or two but you will never, ever, tap out.

Reaching vs. Retreating

She messaged me to check in. I responded right away, telling her I had been sick with the flu. This was my way of apologizing for my lack of communication recently. At this point I still thought it was my lack of presence that was the problem. Admittedly, I had been absent from many of my regularly scheduled activities for several weeks. More than that, I hadn’t seen much of my friends or family, either.

I told myself and those who asked that my state of near-isolation could be boiled down to feeling under the weather. That response seemed to get me by until she didn’t respond how I had expected her to. For whatever reason, I had anticipated the generic “feel better soon” message back. Surely at that point, I could continue my isolation in peace. She had other ideas as she saw through my short responses.

My phone rang with another text. “Have you reached out to your fellow Pranic Healers for healing?”

I knew already she had known the answer to this question before asking. The short answer was no but I knew that wasn’t going to suffice. Instead I opted for a weak attempt at humor with, “I hadn’t thought of that…” I hadn’t thought of that. She proceeded to connect me with a fellow Pranic Healer who was glad to offer me relief.

It should be noted that I myself am a level four Pranic Healer. I could write numerous blogs about the rapid healing I have experienced through Pranic Healing and Twin Hearts Meditation but that is not what this is about. I knew that the Healer that this friend put me in touch with would likely connect me with much relief from healings I have experienced over the course of five years. The question was, why hadn’t I asked? I am glad to offer healing to others who are suffering and have done so on many occasions. It was not until my friend asked me why I had not reached out for healing for myself that I realized that I could count on one hand the times I had asked for help.

I went into the healing session with this question at the top of my mind. When my friend had asked me why I hadn’t reached out, the question had hit me in the pit of my stomach. I didn’t feel I had wronged her or the practice of Pranic Healing that I had grown to love so much; I felt I had been shorting myself. The healer she linked me with provided healing, then reached out to see how I was feeling. I thanked her for the session and explained that regrettably, I had not experienced much relief with my symptoms. Sleep still eluded me, my sinuses were still a mess but mostly, I still didn’t want to face the world.

It was then that the Healer hit me with it. She asked the question I did not know I had been waiting to hear. “What exactly is going on?” Such a direct question. Later I found myself trying to remember the last time someone had been so specific when asking about my well-being. I gave in a little, telling her that I had been sickly, had begun a new semester at college and that my mother was on hospice. She side-stepped the invisible wall I had just put up and probed further.

What followed was an unleashing of a cascade of emotions I had been carrying intractably on my own for months. Suddenly, for an oddly blissful moment in time, I was able to say the unsayable about the realities I am and have been, shouldering. The conversation started with me saying, “these are the things I cannot say,” and ended with me saying just those things. How liberating it was to tell her what it feels like to start a new semester without my only sibling, while caring for my mother who has been on hospice since December. I was overwhelmed by how much lighter these things felt with someone to bare witness to them. Acknowledging these truths had once felt like an indulgence, a betrayal to the strength I have become known for. In this moment, speaking them out loud liberated me.

The weight we carry in our lives threatens to become a part of us that we carry for longer and in more solitude than is necessary. No matter how heavy or awkward the load we bare is, life and the responsibilities that come with it continue to nag at us like a pack of toddlers that missed both snack and nap time. If you can picture that scene, you can begin to picture what those who are grieving, in the process of losing a loved one, or recovering from trauma endure as they face each day. Do not get caught up in the illusion that they must not need help if they appear to be managing all that they have on their plate. Lot’s of us have a great game face.

I was unable to locate my game face the day my friend reached out to me. Because of this, I had retreated to an isolated state, trying to decide which weight in my life was most important to pick up next. Fortunately for me, both my friend and the healer were willing to reach more than halfway to help me figure out how to rise again, carrying a bit less weight this time. Some days we are the healer. On such days, we should reach out to both the weak and to the strong. Other days, we require healing. On those days, may we be strong enough to reach out for healing.

**To learn more about Pranic Healing go to: http://www.pranichealing4me.com