The gauntlet

My friends have this time of year where almost all of the anniversaries and family birthdays fall. They call this time of year "the gauntlet."

April is my gauntlet. That time of year where I have to grit my teeth, give myself more grace, and plan my crying time. That time of year where I stop making plans and just let the days happen. I keep hoping it will get easier. I feel guilty when it does. Even knowing that it's coming is taking its toll.

A week from today my mom would have been 62. She was born on April 3rd, on Palm Sunday. Add 58 years to that, and she was two weeks away from dying. April holds both her birthday and her death day. It sucks.

My life is so different now, four years later. I'm on my way to being a nurse, and embroiled in the tests and papers and clinical days that entails. I'm glad to be surrounded by classmates who make it their job to be caring - it makes it easier to fall apart, and easier to ask for help.

I'm married now, and my husband is wonderful. Even when I burst into tears for no obvious reason he's quick to hold me and comfort me. We've figured out how to care for one another well, even when things are heavy.

My dad has remarried - a lovely, loving woman. But she's not my mom, so it's just weird. Reminiscing over old photos of my parents together has a different tenor to it. I'm glad for him, and I really love his wife, but its hard.

And I just feel like she's missing. She's missing - as in she's missing out on all these beautiful things in my life that I wish I could share with her. She's missing - as in I think she's missing me, or at least I hope she is. She's missing - as in she's not here, and I feel like she should be. She's missing, and I can't find her, and I won't ever be able to. She just... missing.

Deep breaths, Katye. Deep breaths. The gauntlet has begun.

Gleason

Football. ALS. A video diary to a son. Life, death, faith, fear, anger, sadness, distance, humor.

I was not expecting all that when I went to see Gleason. 

It's raw. Maybe the most raw film I've seen. The most real, true, heartwrenching documentation of a family going through hell and loving each other. The best example of the pain and love that goes into being a caretaker. 

It's not really about football. And it's not really about ALS. It's about a couple, and their son, and their family and friends, living life and looking to the future in the midst of a terminal illness. Its honesty is breathtaking. Its reality is painful. It all sounds so cliche in words, but it's just the opposite. It's the most vulnerable thing I've ever watched, and maybe the most beautiful.

Watch it. Bring tissues. Enter in to the intimate moments. Be a part of this unfinished story. 

Does it ever?

Does it ever get easier?

Too many nights this month I've been up late crying, bawling, yelling in a whisper. Too many nights I've ached with missing you, knowing that you're still not here, and you're not coming back, and I don't have my mommy.

I thought, this far out, it would be easier. And it probably is - the daytime at least. But nights, when I slow down, when everything else stops there's still this ache.

I want it to stop, because it hurts so much. Monthly 17ths, and year anniversaries. Anticipatory grief of coming milestones. Memories of our last family vacation before everything changed. But I don't want it to stop, because I don't ever want to forget. I don't ever want to stop missing you.

I'm lucky, I think - you led me to a profession filled with people who care, and people who have been touched by grief. In my classes I'm not alone - so many of classmates know grief, and were led to nursing by their grief. I can share my story, and it's understood. I can cry and 34 caring people will be at my side in an instant.

I'm lucky, too, because I know that sometimes nursing isn't saving a life - sometimes nursing is about a good death. Living and dying with dignity and grace - that's what I want my work to be about.

But it's still hard. It still hurts like hell. It's still brings back painful memories to learn about brain cancer, feeding tubes, the physiological signs of death. How can I be hurting so much while caring for others in pain?

I don't know how to do this.

I miss you so much.

Does it ever get easier?

Pain of new life

Mom, I have my orientation for nursing school tomorrow morning. The first real day of this new career, and you're not here. 

It's all because of you, you know. Your time in the hospital, in rehab, in the ER, in hospice. All those nurses who cared for you. Seeing them, seeing you - that's why I'm doing this. That's what led me here. 

I wouldn't be here without you, without your illness, without your stroke. But now you're not here to see it. That seems cruel. You are such a part of me, such a part of this. It hurts to carry that, to see this new hope and new life for myself out of all of my pain, my grief, my loss. 

But that's how it's supposed to be, I guess. The light in the darkness, the life out of death. The resurrection made real, made tangible. Somehow the scripture never captured the pain of it all, even in the glow of new life. 

I miss you, Mom. I've missed you more these past few months than I remembered I could. So many good things, so many new starts. Why can't you be here, with me in them? Why do you have to be so far away?

Gecko

Mom, I saw a gecko today.

My husband and I are on our honeymoon in Kauai, and today we saw a gecko, just hanging out by a trash can. It was bright green, and almost too colorful to be real.

I have this distinct memory of my mom, after she came back from a trip to Hawaii to visit her best friend who lived there, when I was about 11 or so. She told me that she saw so many geckos, all over the place. 

Mom, Vinod watched Bunheads with me today, and he really liked it! Especially the dance we watched, in episode 2 - the one to honor Hubbell, set to "Picture in a Frame" by Tom Waits. 

When Vinod and I were first talking about Bunheads he asked me how many times I had watched it through. I didn't remember until later that when this show was first out I watched each episode once myself, and then watched it again with my mom, streaming episode after episode from ABC Family's website using this ridiculously long HDMI cable attached to my dad's TV. 

I loved watching Bunheads with you, Mom. How did I forget about that when I was telling Vinod about it? It was beautiful to share this show about amazing women, filled with beautiful dancing like you liked. 

I miss you, Mom. Even here in paradise, even here on my honeymoon. Things still remind me of you, and missing you still keeps me up at night sometimes. I think I'm glad that the memories still come, but they come so unexpectedly now that I don't always know what to do with them. 

It's beautiful here, Mom. I think you would really like it. I wish I could bring back pictures and macadamia nuts for you. You'd even like the roosters that roam around the island. 

I love you. I miss you. I wish we could share this with you. 

Four years & Stephen Colbert

I've liked Stephen Colbert for a long time. Ask my dad - the number of times I asked to watch the Colbert Report instead of reruns of The Daily Show is too high to count (sorry, Jon Stewart, and sorry, Dad). Colbert has always made me giggle, and smile, and laugh/snort/chortle. And when he started saying things like this on the air I knew he was the comedian for me:

Funny, loves Jesus, and has a wicked eyebrow raise. What more can you ask for?

I'm eagerly anticipating the start of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in September, and today I read the cover story about him in GQ. And more than laughs it was filled with heartfelt reflections on grief, and suffering, and joy. 

When Colbert was 10 his dad and two of his brothers were killed in a plane crash. He's the youngest of 11 kids, and everyone else was out of the house, so it was just him and his mom after the crash. (His mom sounds seriously amazing. And if you want to see one of the most beautiful moments of television, watch this tribute to her when she passed away in 2013.)

In the story, he says:

“It was a very healthy reciprocal acceptance of suffering,” he said. “Which does not mean being defeated by suffering. Acceptance is not defeat. Acceptance is just awareness.” He smiled in anticipation of the callback: “ ‘You gotta learn to love the bomb,’ ” he said. “Boy, did I have a bomb when I was 10. That was quite an explosion. And I learned to love it. So that's why. Maybe, I don't know. That might be why you don't see me as someone angry and working out my demons onstage. It's that I love the thing that I most wish had not happened.”

I love the thing that I most wish had not happened. 

Today marks four years from my Mom's stroke. I've been weepy and teetering on the edge of the waves of grief for the last week - somehow my body and my subconscious recognizes the date before my mind catches up. I keep thinking to myself, like I'm still three, "I want my mommy."

Reading this, today, was a grace. I'm not there yet - I don't love it, yet. (But it took Colbert 25 years, so I have some time.) But even though I want my mommy more than anything right now I also wouldn't change it for the world. My mom's stroke and cancer and death have made me who I am, have led to my vocation, have brought me to my soon-to-be husband. I wish with all my heart that it had not happened, but at the same time I'm so grateful that it did.

Mom, I miss you, and I love you, and I wish you were still here, but I wouldn't change the time we had together, or the life you led me into.

Happy

I am unbelievably happy.

Seriously. It's almost hard to believe. Especially when I look back on the last four years. Am I the same me who took care of her dying mother, who screamed and cursed at God and the universe, who lived in fear and pain and made a habit of grieving?

Sometimes, nowadays, it's hard to remember that life. That life before things started to get better. That life before the good things outweighed the bad. My life before my then boyfriend, now fiancé.

Because it's so different now. The good far, far outweighs the bad, things are falling into place, good things are happening, and I have so many things to look forward to.

I do know I am the same me. And I know this not just because I can re-read what happened in this blog. I know it because on days like today it completely surprises me that I'm happy.

Let me give you an example: two weekends ago I was in Portland visiting a friend, and I found a wedding dress. I found it at a bridal thrift store called Adorned in Grace, whose mission is to support victims of sex trafficking. It was the first dress I tried on, in the first store I went into. It was perfect.

I had to fly the dress home with me to Oakland, but the plane didn't have any places I could hang it, so I had to stuff it on top of other bags in one of the overhead compartments. I ended up sitting at the complete opposite end of the plane from my dress.

Now, instead of assuming that everything was going to be okay, and trusting the other passengers to be kind to it, and trusting that good things were happening, and were still going to happen, I did the opposite. I sat in my seat and freaked out, afraid that the dress was going to be ruined, and that the passengers were going to stomp all over it, or that it would get stolen off the plane, and I'd have to find another dress, and everything would fall apart. In short, I expected bad things to happen.

I do that a lot - expect bad things to happen. I learned it when my mom was sick, and maybe before. I learned to expect the bad things because maybe then they'd be a little less painful. I learned to expect the bad things because that was all that kept happening, for so long.

Slowly, slowly, and with a lot of help from my fiancé and from God, I'm learning to expect good things instead of bad. I tell myself, over and over again: "expect good things."

That's why, when I realize I'm happy, when I see how things are working out for good, when I feel things falling into place without being tugged or shoved there by me, I'm overwhelmed. I cry tears of joy and of awe and of surprise, and I thank the Lord that good things are happening.

It's still weird. It's just weird to be happy! I still don't know exactly what to do with it, and it still feels a little unreal. But the long and the short of it is that I am happy - really, truly, deeply happy. And I know that makes my mom happy too.