I wonder if I’ve just been riding a shock wave since you died. I’m having trouble remembering anything other than jarring, big events. Like a policeman’s floodlight across my bedroom ceiling and the knocking at the door at 2:00 a.m. “Are you the parents of Mila ...”
Why did I confess I was. I should have said, “No, wrong person. Leave.”
Now the creep of the tide coming in feels threatening. More than ever. No more cards come in the mail. Barely a phone call or a check in. A few people hang in there, but for how long? This doesn’t even seem like the beginning and yet I feel so tired that facing another day seems insurmountable.
I am so tired. So bone heavy tired.
I am here in this place I don’t know or understand and there is no map and the faces are all unfamiliar. I am unfamiliar. What do I grab onto? Where are my tethers? My family? All is off. Our dynamic is gone. It’s all so different now.
It is hard to be and grieve and authentic around your sisters. They do not want to be in that space for themselves and talking to them about it always seems to make them feel like we are judging the “way” they are dealing with things. They get hurt and resentful. We worry that they aren’t dealing with ‘it’, the grief that replaces you, but what can we do? They are not children anymore. We can only love them, but it would be untrue to say they bring us comfort or connection. I am learning that I can love them, but I cannot make them meet me on a level I need to be on, especially when they resist. When it isn’t what they need. What can I say to that? I make space for them but I have to make space for you too and right now, my love for you is held in a cocoon of mourning. I cannot separate them and I do not want to.
What died in us all when you died? I wish you could have known. Did you think you could surgically excise yourself from us and we would continue on - now just four instead of five? You must have. Did you? Probably, you didn’t think much of it at all. Although, you did ask for us to forgive you in your letter. We can forgive you my girl, but even we can’t make right what’s been done. We can’t right this ship that bobs on the sea, taking on water, listing under the blistering sun. We are powerless to change our course but that’s the only thing that would fix this so… what then? Nothing then. Bob about while wave after salty wave pours over us and out of us.
Yesterday Dad and I went for a rip on the quad to just do something other than farm work and t.v. Too much t.v. and movies and we decided to stop doing that. It just started happening over the last two weeks. It’s a good diversion, but not in the end. Like shitty food that leaves you with a tummy ache after. Anyway, we went for a rip and then came home. At the last minute, dad decided to “go a little longer”. We ended up down the gravel road behind the pond, where the old, archaic cemetery is, the one we usually drive by without much notice. But Dad wanted to stop this time. We were walking around that cemetery, saying the names of the people on the headstones aloud, when we heard a cat meowing from the surrounding woods. I started calling “kitty, kitty tsk tsk tsk”. The cat meowed back incessantly and then, finally, walked out of the woods and towards me.
Of course, you know this was Theo and you know he had been missing for quite a few days. Theo. Were you worried about him? Did you speak to the quiet instinct within your Papa, that tether of love that connects us to you? “Stop, Dad, and let your voices be heard in the land of the dead.” Theo is safe at home, but of course you know that, too.
The shock that recedes is replaced with an ache deep into the very marrow of my bones. Each one of them. My ribs, one by one, droop at the weight of it all. My vertebrae condense, piling tightly against one another. It’s too much, too much. What the fuck am I supposed to do in this world now? Who am I supposed to be? A hermit is the best I can come up with. Some hermit creature of the woods begging the birds to leave an image of you in the shit they leave behind as some sort of omen that you are near. How desperate and foolish am I.
Sometimes these little signs and moments and serendipitous events feel so awe inspiring and wondrous and I feel so close to you. Sometimes I realise I’m reaching. But won’t I always and forever - be reaching I mean? Are you reaching too or are you pulling away? Does my pain push you away? Are you allowed to see it and feel it? Can you touch it? Do you want to?
As I write this, on July 16th, it’s only been a little over two months since you have died. It feels like an eternity and it feels like 8 hours. It could be. If someone came in right now and said, “you’ve been in a real mental whirlwind here, but it’s been 8 hours since you learned that your beloved Mila has died and you really must eat something” I would believe them. If someone came in and said, “Tara, it’s been 28 years since Mila died, would you like to do anything for her birthday this year?” I would believe them too.
I am sitting on the floor of my dark closet typing this. One of your sisters is in the next room watching some digital currency video on YouTube and it just makes me want to scream. I hide instead. Someone called on the phone and she called out for me but I pretended I wasn’t here. I just want to stay here, in this dark closet, all day. All my life. I will come out sometime, maybe in those 28 years from now I just mentioned, and I will have hair below my ass, all of it grey, and a sunken white face covered in age spots. I would be 78 then, close enough to have a meal or two and then walk into the woods and lie below the sky, my saggy, wrinkly flesh cradled on the floor of the earth, waiting for the cold or the heat to claim me. That would work, too.
I have no hope today.
Dad and I got in an argument about cow fencing or waterers or something dumb. I couldn’t hear what he was saying. I just kept feeling this rising sense of urgency welling up in my body. He wasn’t being mean, but he kept insisting I give him a solution to a problem that was better than his solution and all I could do was think “I don’t care” and I don’t. I don’t care about anything. Let them all die, I thought. No, not really, but yes, yes really too. But he needed an answer and I asked him to stop and he wouldn’t stop and I had to leave and he wouldn’t leave me alone and well, here I am. The darkened closet where I can live out the rest of my days.
There are doors to paint, a duck house to paint, stuff to do on the farm. I don’t care. I’m doing none of it. Fuck it. Nothing matters. That’s the thing - nothing matters at all. I don’t care. Do you care? I don’t care. I think you might care more than me.
What else is there to do, Mila? Who we were, all that we thought and dreamed, died with you in that frigid, dark water. We died with you. Now what? What do we do? You know what to do or, at least, are figuring out. It physically ended for you. But for us, it’s not physical life that is gone, it’s everything else. We remain here, trying to play this game with our limited hand. It seems impossible and insurmountable. There’s nothing to even overcome to find relief. Overcome? What could we possibly overcome? The loss of you? Never.
Never. Never. Never.
Meece. That’s mostly what I called you. Short for Miso. Meece. Dad went for Milooter Or what was that weird one he came up with recently and tried to pretend he had been calling you it forever? Remind me. I can’t remember. I just remember us teasing him about it but he was convinced all the same.
So casually I would call you. “Do you want some supper Meece?” Meece. Mis without the O. I miss you. I can’t stand this new place without you.
Tara, I also am thinking of you and Mila and feel moved by Diana's post to share that my grandmother also lost a child to drowning. He was 14 and hit in the head by rock thrown at him hard enough to cause him to fall into the Maumee River. His grieving father, who worked as a longshoreman at the Presque Isle coal and iron ore loading docks on Lake Erie, fell to his death less than two months later. My grandmother's grief in losing both her husband and son was profound and crippling, but she had eight more children to raise alone and she did, surviving another thirty years after that double tragedy. She inspires me in my grief as I mark the seventh anniversary of the death of my daughter this week. It's truly a most excruciating pain to lose a child.
Tara I was thinking about Mila and you these past two days. I'm reading 'Under the whispering door' by Tj Klune and with every other chapter thoughts of her where she may be now popped up. I wish I could do what the Buddhists say inhale your pain and exhale happiness but I cannot imagine the pain I can only grieve with you from across the ocean and hope better days will come for your entire family.
My grandmother lost a child to drowning. He was 14, my father watched from the shore. He was 7. She told me the story over and over. The funeral details, the weird feelings she had all day at work and the aftermath. She said she went to the grave every day for a long time. She couldn't remember for how long, crying and knocking the fresh dirt and asking to be dead as well. She said and I quote: 'I didn't think I could live anymore without him but here I am talking to you thirty years later.'
I don't know if it is appropriate to even write this and if it gives you more pain please ignore me, but he is not forgotten. He lives in the stories that were shared and the memories he helped create.