Easy Love (Kendra)

Mary Oliver’s work was such an important part of my own grief. I read so many of her books and found that so many of her poems spoke to me. Poems that gave me comfort and ones that left me aching, but grateful to know that I wasn’t the only one. 

Her attentiveness to the natural world brought me back into the world eventually because I wanted to see it and appreciate it again. 

Her poetry also helped me name and understand something important about my relationship with Magnolia.

A few days after Magnolia died we received a sympathy card in the mail. I don’t remember who it was from, but the card had Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese” on the front. It was a poem I was already familiar with, but of course everything was different. I only read a few lines before I had to stop. I was suddenly choked with sobs, unable to breathe and hiccupping with the effort. It was the first time I had cried since the morning we found her body. Wet, snotty and shaking it was a while before I could even talk. 

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

That line.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

My love for magnolia was so primal and easy. It happened without any thought at all. It was consuming and brilliant. It was this: letting the soft animal of my body love what it loves.  

It was a revelation to me after Delphinium, who felt like so much work. I couldn’t seem to get out of my own way in the early part of Delphinium’s life. She was only the second newborn that I had ever held. I didn’t know what to do with her. There was no swell of violins and magical bonding moment where my maternal instincts kicked in. There were sleepless nights and painful breastfeeding and feeling incredibly overwhelmed with the enormity of becoming a parent and the responsibility of it all. 

Thankfully, Sasha was everything Delphinium needed him to be. He was comfortable and confident, sure that he could take care of whatever she needed. While I struggled to figure out breastfeeding he did everything else. He held her between feedings, comforted her when she was fussy, changed all her diapers and dressed her. It got to the point where I realized that I was only holding Delphinium and interacting with her when I was feeding her, which was painful and frustrating. Not the best way to trigger strong maternal feelings of love. I’m sure she was aware of all my anxiety and fear and pain. Just like she was clearly aware of her father’s warmth and relaxation and confidence. 

I grew into loving Delphinium. I spent more time gazing at her and holding her when I wasn’t feeding, just to marvel at her tiny magnificence and create some positive associations. I became more comfortable with handling her, less anxious that I would hurt her or do something wrong. The breastfeeding got better and feeding her became a nice cozy time for the two of us. But it took work and intentional effort to figure out how to bond with her and get past my own anxiety. 

When Magnolia was born I was confident and comfortable. I was ready in an entirely different way to be someone’s mama. I heard violins and the love swelled and overflowed when I gazed at her. The breastfeeding was hard again, but it didn’t matter. It was just a small frustration in the midst of a fast and furious love that was growing without any work. It amazed me, how wholly and completely I was able to love her. I didn’t know I could do that.

I was ready to be a better mama to Magnolia because Delphinium had already done the hard work of raising me up and teaching me how to be there. 

Magnolia reaped the benefits of all the breaking-in Delphinium did with me. My connection with Magnolia was easy and intuitive. Our life together had never been anything but wonderful—she was only 22 months and still a bubbly, happy delightful toddler. She was incredibly satisfying. 

I reveled in our shared easy love. I would hold her little body while I rocked her and sang at bedtime, or listened to her chatter to her sister during the day, or watched her discover something new with a huge grin on her face and my heart would ache with the loveliness of it all. 

 You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

And then she was gone. And it was like a limb had been ripped from my body. 

The shock of that earliest grief was broken by that line. 

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

I cried hot sad and heartbroken tears for what was taken from me. I have read “Wild Geese” many, many times since Magnolia died and I return to that moment every time. The pain of not only losing a beloved child, but also losing the experience of that easy, deep and instinctual love. 

It is January and Magnolia has been more present in these weeks and days leading up to the 27th. 

This week, I am rereading many poems and feeling especially thankful for Mary Oliver and the gift of her words in my grief. 

I mourn for her and for all the things we lose to death.

Painting (Kendra)

In January of 2013, I woke up one morning and realized I hadn't painted with Magnolia yet. It felt like a horrible oversight to me.  I had been so eager for Delphinium to become interested in making marks on paper and eagerly introduced her to lots of mark-making materials, including paint, and sticky things for collage and other art experiences before she was 18 months.  Magnolia was 22 months old and I was sure I had deprived her, so I got the paints out.

I have so few pictures of her in the months before her death, but this painting time was well documented with video and pictures. It felt momentous to me and after feeling guilty for not introducing her to paint earlier I was determined to capture it all! 

We had a really wonderful time that morning.  She painted for around 40 minutes.  She made 3 paintings, clearly enjoying the process of choosing brushes, picking up paint and moving it around the paper, making different marks and pointing out different colors on her paper.  

In this video she is showing her messy hands and her new found delight at saying "cheese" whenever she saw a camera. When I ask her a question she answers "da-ho?" She used this to identify so many things, we think it meant "that one". 

I have watched this next video hundreds of times since she died and love the intentionality of everything she does.  There are so many moments of choice-making, time for her to consider her options and make decisions about her work.  It is such a spontaneous and natural process of exploration.  

She was so pleased with herself afterwards and when Delphinium and Sasha got home that night I held up her paintings to show them and she touched each one and then she pounded her hand--fingers wide open with a flat palm--onto her chest and announced "Noyo!" (Magnolia) for each one.  She smiled and accepted their praise and interest with so much pride.

I didn't know that this would be her first and only experience with paint, but after her death it made it feel even more important. 

I am not a superstitious person, but I am aware of weird coincidences that are meaningless if she had lived, but feel weighted and strange in the wake of her death. The radio is on in the background of this video and the song "Little Talks" by Monsters and Men is playing and this filming coincides with these lyrics:

You're gone, gone, gone away,
I watched you disappear
All that's left is a ghost of you
Now we're torn, torn, torn apart,
there's nothing we can do,
Just let me go, we'll meet again soon
Now wait, wait, wait for me, please hang around
I'll see you when I fall asleep

I have watched this video so many times and the lyrics feel so completely attached to this moment for me. All I have now is the video and the paintings. Just ghosts of the girl who enjoyed painting that morning. 

Her paintings hang in our house as a reminder of her and this moment of creative exploration. 
 
In this week leading up to the crapiversary, I frequently find my mind firmly planted back in that week of January 2013, replaying the days and hours leading up to that awful Sunday morning. I scroll through my camera roll, my email, our paper calendar and remember what was happening. Each year I am so happy to see these pictures and watch these videos.

I am so grateful that Magnolia had this experience and knew this small joy in her final week of life. 

(In January of 2014, I posted a blog entry about the countdown of images and videos that we had leading up to Magnolia's death. I was reminded of it when I was looking at these painting videos again. In case you are interested, you can find it here: https://rememberingmagnolia.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-countdown.html#comment-form)

Fewer Remnants (Kendra)

“When someone you love dies, and you’re not expecting it, you don’t lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time—the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes—when there’s a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she’s gone, forever—there comes another day, and another specifically missing part.”

John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

There is a reason we haven't cleaned out the basement in the past four years. It is like family archeology. Slowly sifting through the layers of our life first as 2 people, then 3, then 4, then 3, then 4 again. It is all there. 

I am now down to the time before Magnolia was born—clothes we kept because we knew we wanted another kid, toys we kept for the same reason—and these collections never made it upstairs because Magnolia died before she could use them. But now Z is ready for them. I have been through the layers of our life since, during and before Magnolia and it is a bittersweet journey. Always glad for the reminders, but also deeply hurt when I find them.

Uncovering toys, blankets, socks, spoons, those bug glasses (in the picture), SS card, audiology report all spark little glimmers that feel special because they don't exist without the discovery. I think part of the reason I haven't taken the plunge into the basement is because it is a finite experience. Once the boxes and bags are gone through and all the stuff is sorted and given away or kept, the opportunity for discovery is over.

There are fewer and fewer remnants of Magnolia's life here. As Z gets older we are putting away all the things that Magnolia used. There is a lot I can't bear to get rid off and I imagine there will be a Magnolia museum collection in the basement for a long time—maybe forever. A problem for her sisters to solve when we are gone.

And, as happens in the world, when your mind is full of something or someone you end up seeing it everywhere.  Magnolia has been so present in my mind this past week and everywhere else.

We watched "Inside Out" the other night and I wept when they fell into the pit of lost memories. My vivid memories of Magnolia are so few, mostly they are the pictures, videos and things we managed to write down. I sat there miserably imagining my own pit of lost memories with little video loops of her playing or laughing or pouting or eating or anything, just blowing away to dust.

Last week, we met a family at D's camp who have 10, 6, 3 year old boys and Sasha did all the talking because I couldn't speak past the lump in my throat looking at our "should be" family right there in front of me.

"Hey Soul Sister" has been playing EVERYWHERE—I counted 5 times that I've heard it in stores or on the radio when I am surfing through channels in the car.

I cut locks of her hair the day she died and then cut off a lot more at the funeral home the day of her viewing—I couldn't bear to let go of her physical body and her hair felt like a good thing to keep. Then I didn't know what to do with it—there was a lot of it. I have found her hair in the weirdest places as I’ve devoted myself to cleaning and purging this week.  An envelop under a basket of socks in my sock drawer, in a baggy on a high shelf in D's closet, in 2 different boxes in the basement. And I wish we fetishized death remnants, like the Victorians, because all week I keep thinking I want someone to weave it into watch fob so I can carry her hair around with me everyday. (I know it is weird—I totally get all the weird death stuff now.)

All these discoveries and reminders have been amazing and heartbreaking.

And it is all coming to an end again. We are getting a new dog this weekend and I am returning to work and D is coming back from camp and our present life will overwhelm me and Magnolia will vanish again.

The rituals that keep her present in our family each day—lighting a candle for her at the dinner table, blowing kisses to her when we see the moon, stopping to smell a patch of sage on the way to school each day and saying “I love you”—will continue, but this deep immersion will end.

Life marches on and we are always further and farther away from our time with her. The basement is looking better, I feel lighter in some ways. Shedding the stuff that has accumulated in the last 20 years of my life feels good. Walking through these last opportunities to discover her in the boxes we put in the basement when our world was falling to pieces, feels awful.

She is all around us in this house and I feel her complete absence from this space. She is always present, tucked under my heart, but no longer a painful ache that makes herself known everyday. She is buried in our family archeology, but now there will be fewer opportunities to unearth the remnants of her. As she becomes more firmly rooted in our family’s past, we find fewer signs of her in our present.

It makes me incredibly grateful for every sign, remnant and ache.

Moona (Sasha and Kendra)

In the 3+ years we've had to live without our wonderful Magnolia, we've
established traditions to keep her alive in our family.  Each night at dinner, we light our Magnolia candle and say "For Magnolia," making sure there's always a place at
our family dinner table for her, and that we're continuing to speak her name.
(For our traditional Sunday waffle brunches, which Magnolia loved, Delphinium began a tradition of lighting the candle and saying, "For Magnolia, who loved waffos.")  After going around the table at dinner to share something we're each grateful for, we leave space for any of us to also share a Magnolia memory or thought; nowadays, these are often about ways that Azalea's infancy and toddlerhood bring up memories of things that Magnolia did or said.

A family tradition that has changed to honor Magnolia's absence is
moonkissing.  Since early in our falling in love, whichever one of us notices
the moon first says, "Pardon me, do you know where the moon is?" after which
the other one finds the moon and we kiss.  Delphinium became a part of this
tradition at age 2, and Magnolia was just beginning to join in the kissing
before she died.  Since Magnolia's death, the two of us and Delphinium have each
kissed each other and then blown a kiss to Magnolia towards the moon. 

We keep photos of Magnolia all around our home, and photo books filled with
that previous family of four are in our living room, where we pick them up
frequently.  While cooking, folding laundry or playing with Delphinium and
Azalea, there are many times when our eyes fall on Magnolia's image and we're
filled with sadness and memory and the sense of her importance in our family.

Lately, Azalea has joined into all of these ways of keeping Magnolia present
in our family.  It began at the dinner table.  Two months ago, we were taken
aback when we lit the candle and said, "For Magnolia," and Azalea said,
"Moona."  As she continued from night to night, it became clear that she was
really joining us in saying her sister's name before beginning family dinner.

Next, she began to name Magnolia in all of the pictures around the house, and
to ask for the photo books so that we could look at and name her sister.
Magnolia joined the constellation of her family as she happily pointed and
named "Mama," "Papa," "Dada" (Delphinium), and "Moona."  Walking through the
house, she was pleased to point up to a picture on a shelf or on the
refrigerator and want to show us "Moona."

Now, "Moona" has become one of her favorite conversation topics.  At times
when we're not expecting it, she just says "Moona" to begin a conversation
with us.  And she has enthusiastically joined in our moonkissing, blowing
kisses to Magnolia not only when she sees the moon but at many other times
when she's walking outside, and making sure that we follow her lead.

The lock screen on Kendra’s phone is a picture of Magnolia.  Azalea often picks up the phone, turns it on and looks at Magnolia, then “answers” the phone and says, “Hi, Moona!”  At other times she insists that a stuffed animal or a toy belongs to Moona: “Moona book” or “Moona bear.”   

While neither of us has ever found much comfort in pondering the metaphysics of death or imagining Magnolia’s soul in heaven, we both wonder about Azalea’s new relationship with her sister and really like to imagine her discovering that she has a toddler playmate in her sister.  We don’t know what she knows or sees or feels or understands about Magnolia, except that her sister seems very present for her. 

And we like to imagine the impossible, that they actually interact, that they play together and that Azalea has a real relationship with her sister. 

Déjà Vu (Kendra)

Even though I have been dreading it since early fall, this particular January kind of snuck up on me. Returning back to New York, after visiting Denver for Christmas, I was distracted by the work I needed to do for school and getting things back on track logistically after time away. I kind of forgot that it was January.

The full force of this January hit me after our first week back home.  For the first time since Magnolia died, I am teaching and in the middle of a school year again. I am also parenting a toddler again—a little round, smiley girl who runs around the house, collecting and distributing things, busily arranging and playing with her toys and demanding help with the things that she can’t reach or manage on her own.

It is all so painfully familiar, like I have been sucked into a time warp and spit out in January 2013. The house feels the same, the sounds and activities are the same, the stress about teaching and grocery shopping and dinners and family logistics are all the same. And this joyful toddler feels startlingly like the same person I lost years ago.

Over the past 3 years, Sasha has spent more time worried and anxious about the possibility of another sudden death in our family, especially since Azalea was born. He is the one who tears up at bedtimes and leaps from the bed when the baby monitor that registers lack of movement in the crib alarms in the middle of the night (always false alarms, so far). 

I, on the other hand, have always felt some strange comfort in the randomness of Magnolia’s death, pretty sure that worrying about random death is not something I should spend energy on since there is no way to prevent it from happening. It is a very important defensive blanket that I have worn since Magnolia’s death. 

That blanket is fraying rapidly this month.  Rational thought has been fading and is replaced by anxiety and an insistent fear.  It is the other side of the random death coin—it can, and does, happen at any time, so why not now? We weren’t protected before, why should we be now?

The overwhelming sense of déjà vu is wearing and exhausting. Azalea is 20 months old right now, only 2 months younger than Magnolia at the time of her death.  Azalea likes to wear our shoes, she spends huge chunks of time happily climbing up and down the stairs, she loves taking baths with her sister, she is loud and demanding with the words she knows, she likes to brush her hair (or at least try), she loves reading and often our pre-nap reading time stretches to half an hour.  Just like Magnolia.

3 years ago we were doing all the same things. Exactly the same, but with a different happy toddler.  And then she died and we had no idea it was coming. We were happily living our life together and loving our family and then, out of nowhere, we were broken and she was gone.

Knowing that Azalea will probably survive this month is different than really believing it.  In the past week I have noticed myself becoming weirdly superstitious. While dressing Azalea for daycare, I pulled out a few shirts and leggings that I remember Magnolia wearing that January. She is wearing them in a couple of pictures I have from that month and so I stuffed them in my closet to get them far away from Azalea. I did the same with a few toys. Magnolia loved to read "Down By the Bay" and we have a video of her reading it the night she died, so it has also been locked up. Azalea has really loved painting lately, but Magnolia painted for the first time the week she died and so the paints are not coming out until I can shed this feeling of impending doom.

At other moments, my anxiety is so great that I become frozen with fear. I spent almost an hour holding Azalea while she slept in my arms at the beginning of a nap one day. She fell asleep while I was singing to her and then I couldn’t stop or put her in her crib. I just kept thinking, “What if this is it? What if this is my goodbye?” I finally put her down when I started sobbing and then I retreated to my bed where I cried for the rest of her nap clutching the video monitor and watching her sleep, hoping that she would wake up.

If there was any doubt that our family experienced a trauma when Magnolia died, this particular round of PTSD should clear up any question. This month has been disorienting and challenging. I am taking next week off of school because I’m not entirely sure I’ll be able to function there, and I am sure it isn’t good to subject my students to my irritability and lack of patience right now.

So I am preparing myself for this next week and also hopeful that the 27^th turns out to be the magical date when all my dread and anxiety dissipates.  I am hopeful, not at all sure, but hopeful that she will wake up on the morning of the 27^th and my rational self will reappear and my blanket of solace will become thick and strong once again.

Ashes in a Jam Jar (Kendra)

A small Hero jam jar with an apricot lid sits on the shelf above our kitchen sink.  The bottom third of the jar is filled with the light grey, chippy ashes of Magnolia’s body.  There is a mangled white twist tie in the jar attached to a round metal tag engraved with “Woodlawn Cemetery Bronx, NY 37842”. Some of the chips are big enough that you can see the porous structure of trabecular bone.  

 We have lived with these ashes above the sink for 2 years and 8 months. 

I glance at them often and sometimes take them down from the shelf, turning the jar over and around to see all the little bits and chips and dust that is all that is left of the round, soft, vibrant body of our little girl. 

They are such radically different things: the living body and these cold jagged ashes. 

2 years and 9 months ago, I’m not sure what I would have thought about someone with their dead child’s ashes in a see-through jar on a shelf above the kitchen sink.  I am pretty sure I would have thought it was strange. 

In my life now it is entirely normal.  There is nothing shocking about it anymore.  Those white and grey shards are simply set dressing for this new world where our heartache has become ordinary.

For many months we had more than one set of ashes sitting around the house. We euthanized our dog, Calliope, a week and a half before Magnolia died. The day after Magnolia’s death, the vet’s office called to tell us that Calliope’s ashes were ready to be picked up and that they were sorry for our loss.  In one of many surreal moments, I explained that our daughter had died and asked if they could hold the ashes for a while.

Days after we saw Magnolia’s body for the last time, my cousin went to the funeral home and returned with a small white plastic box filled with Magnolia’s ashes.  A few weeks later, Sasha and I drove to Yonkers and brought home a metal tin box decorated with flowers holding Calliope’s ashes. 

The boxes were the same size and sat on the mantel in our living room for a few months.  So many days I would wander restlessly around our house, stopping to look at a picture of Magnolia on our fridge and then the two boxes on the mantel.  Saying to myself over and over again, “How is it possible that you are gone?” 

I would sometimes stare at the two boxes—one somber white plastic, the other a riot of pink flowers—and think that the two boxes of ashes would be the perfect beginning for a really sad country song.

The reality of the dusty particles in that small white box was impossible to comprehend.  It didn’t make any sense that Magnolia’s lithe body with strong muscles covered in soft smooth skin was now contained in a plastic bag closed with a twist tie holding a metal tag with a number stamped on it in a plain white plastic box.  How could the lively, bigness of her fit into such a tiny space?

That spring, family gathered with us on a cold day in April to bury Magnolia’s placenta and ashes under a magnolia tree we were planting in our backyard.  As we were each taking handfuls of our daughter to scatter in the bottom of the tree pit, my mother stopped us suddenly and with real alarm said, “You need to keep some! What if you move?” 

So someone went to the kitchen and returned with a jam jar where we poured some of the ashes and put the tag from the bag.  The jar came back inside with us and I put it on the shelf while I washed my hands, watching the water rinse the Magnolia dust down the drain.

The jar still sits in that spot. 

They haven’t moved since and I’m not sure they ever will.  They are a really solid (maybe morbid) reminder that Magnolia existed. 

Her pictures on the fridge sometimes seem unreal.  It feels like such a long time ago that she was here.  Surrounded by the busy fullness of our life now, it sometimes feels like a strange dream world that we lived in for awhile in the before. 

But the bone remnants are proof that she was a living thing in our arms and in our life in so many wonderful ways. That jam jar of ashes sits there, a graphic and silent sentinel, protecting the physical realness of our little girl. Reminding us of her lived presence in our family. 

Because these ashes are real, our life together was real.

She was real.

22 Months After (Sasha)

We’ve been dreading this day for such a long time, the day when Magnolia has been dead for as long as she was alive.  It’s such a devastating marker for us, knowing that for the rest of our lives, she will have been dead for longer than she lived.

On the day that Magnolia died we took a walk by the Bronx River, sad and shocked and unsure of what to do with ourselves.  In our disbelief, we kept talking about how strange it was that we were going to have to live the rest of our lives without Magnolia, that we would get farther and farther away from her life, that a day would come when she had been dead for longer than she was alive.  Since that time, we’ve been so aware of this day.  Along with the anniversary of her death, the birthdays that she’s not here for, and the holiday celebrations we limp through in our incompleteness, it is a key point on the map of our grief.

We know that Magnolia will always be with us in many ways, and that we’re doing all we can to keep her memory alive, but none of that helps right now.  Because every day takes us farther away from her being alive and with us, and today is a miserable threshold to cross, another wrenching loss in an unending series of them.

There is so much we remember from the 22 months that she was with us.  Specific moments, such as when she gleefully bounced around on a rubber horse at a birthday party for one of Delphinium’s friends, or when she decided to run laps in our back room one morning, saying “Go!” to herself as she began hurtling across the floor each time.  And then so many moments that happened each day: Stopping on each step as she went upstairs to wave and shout, “Hi!”  Dragging a chair over to the dining room light switch and turning it on, off, on, off.  Climbing into her high chair athletically, making it up to the seat and then managing to turn around, bracing herself with her arms straight on the seat, and lowering her body down like a gymnast on a pommel horse to get herself situated.  Cozying up in our lap at bedtime to hear a favorite book, then scurrying back to the bookshelf to get another and another, the warm feeling of her as we read together.  Popping up in her crib with a grin when we came to get her in the morning.  Lighting up whenever Delphinium smiled at her and led her in a game.

But as we get farther away from her life, our memories are increasingly reduced to a collection of photos and videos that we’ve looked at over and over.  As Delphinium and Azalea create new memories with us each day, Magnolia is frozen in time.  Her peers have all had another 22 months of life, and are now approaching their 4^th birthdays.  Remembering Delphinium at that age, she was so mature and capable, so involved in her daily nursery school life, her creative work and her friendships.  It’s hard for us to imagine Magnolia at this age, what she would be interested in, what she would care about and how she would want to spend her time.  We will never know.

It’s been wonderful to have Azalea for the past 7 months.  She’s a joy, full of smiles and curiosity, so engaged with us and the world around her.  We’re so fortunate to have her, so lucky for all three of our amazing daughters.  Azalea’s babyhood has also been a welcome opportunity to think about Magnolia as a baby and all the delightful things about her infancy.  In many ways, holding Azalea and playing with her and singing her to sleep have brought up such tender memories of Magnolia at these ages.

As grateful as we are for Azalea, it’s also so hard to have her filling up our time and energy in the way that babies do.  She is so absolutely present and dynamic, and makes Magnolia feel even more absent.  As much as we will always preserve space for Magnolia in our family, the hard truth is that Azalea is the younger daughter who is growing up in our family, the second-second child who has needs that we have to respond to, who demands our time and attention.  And she will keep doing that (or at least we desperately hope that she will, though nothing feels certain anymore), while Magnolia remains frozen in time, needing nothing from us.  We parent Magnolia as best we can, lighting her candle and sharing memories of her at the table each night and blowing kisses to her when we see the moon.  Working to make her a part of our life, so Delphinium continues to remember her and so that Azalea will begin to know the sister she can never meet.

We don’t ever worry about forgetting Magnolia.  But we feel so disheartened by the fact that her warmth and vibrancy, her voice and the feel of her in our arms, grow farther and farther from us each day.  And as we face this day and the rest of our lives without her, we feel her lived life grow smaller as her time as a memory grows longer.