Month: April 2016

blogging a – z challenge – “f”

/ Kade's mom / 9 Comments

F

I explained the blogging A-Z Challenge, what a blog is in general, and my blog to my five-and-a-half-year-old in the simplest terms possible today. I asked him what my letter “f” word should be. He said, “fish.” So here goes.

Kade was a fisherman. His dad lived in a mountain town and there literally was a babbling brook in their back yard. When I’ve been up there I’ve seen lawn chairs set up creek-side. He was probably in his glory to be able to walk a few paces and go fishing all the weekends he spent up there.

My favorite fishing story of Kade is when he was ten or eleven and my step-dad (and I believe my brother) took him ice fishing in Michigan.

Have you ever seen a pike? They’re ug-ly. Long scary snout-looking head filled with sharp teeth. No wonder Kade wanted to catch one.

Here is how I remember it (I’m sure Marv and Andy have a better recollection because they were actually there):

Kade talked and talked about how he was going to catch a pike. Marv prepared him that you don’t always get any fish, much less the type you want to catch. But the glorious moment arrived, and Kade caught and reeled in…a pike! He hollered, “I caught a pike! I caught a pike!”

Later he casually sauntered around the other fishing holes to strike up conversation. He tried to look and sound nonchalant.

“Having any luck? I caught a pike.”

“I know. I heard.”

He helped Marv clean it (probably totally enamored with that process), Grandma fried it up, and we all had a little piece of Kade’s pike with breakfast.

blogging a – z challenge – “e”

/ Kade's mom / 8 Comments

E

To save time deliberating what word to use for the daily letter, I’m trying to go with one of the first words, if not the first, that comes to mind. Today I thought, Enough! Yes, with the exclamation point.

Enough!

Sometimes I’m just sick of grieving. After a song on the radio that hits me particularly hard, or a different trigger, sometimes I just get sick and tired of the whole thing.

Enough.

Who’s in charge here? Hasn’t there been enough? I haven’t seen Kade in 3.5 years. Who thinks it’s OK for a mom to go that long without seeing her child? I’m tired of memorializing. Remembering. Honoring. Grief groups. Grief reading. Grief counseling. Coping. Healing. Sadness. Tears. Enough.

I’ve felt this way a handful of times. It’s like anger…not spirited energizing anger, but exasperated defeated anger. Have you ever felt just sick and tired of something? That has gone on entirely too long? That you know won’t stop any time soon? The frustrated feeling of Enough! elicits as many tears as its precipitating wave of anguish. It’s doubly exhausting.

But tears, even the exasperated, defeated, angry, salty kind, give way to relief. One can’t stay in the pit of Enough!, or for that matter a griefburst (hence the word “burst” in it) for long. That feeling, like all of ‘em do, gives way to another after a bit.

My engineer husband must be rubbing off on me. Here’s my attempt to describe this mathematically, though it’s cyclical and I don’t know how to type in a circle:

Griefburst > Enough! > Exhaustion > Solitude > Rest > Look, my 5-year-old did something hilarious > Laughter = A bit of blessed homeostasis > Adele’s “When We Were Young” comes on the radio

blogging a – z challenge – “d”

/ Kade's mom / 13 Comments

D

Dream

I chose “dream” because I had a dream about Kade that I woke up from this morning. It wasn’t a wonderful dream where I felt as if his spirit was visiting me, that family and friends of his have described having (I don’t know if I’ve ever experienced that). It wasn’t a great dream where I felt as if was getting to lay eyes on him. It was kind of a bad dream where it involved his death and me lamenting it. So, I suppose, a reflection of real life.

In the dream Kade had to go away. Like to juvenile detention, or to jail, or something. He had to go away someplace, and for some reason, he died where he could not come back, instead of simply going to jail where he could come back. And I was lamenting my part in it.

“Why didn’t he choose jail?!–he could have come back! Why did he choose dying?! That was so stupid! Why didn’t we think this through?! Why didn’t I think to talk him out of the death option before it was too late?!” These are not necessarily the words I was saying, but the feelings I was having. Yeah, pretty awful.

But as I’ve mentioned before…anything that brings me closer to Kade is somehow strangely comforting. I dreamed about him = I haven’t forgotten him. More frightening than mourning his death, or even my part in it in a dream, is forgetting him.

I’ve had a handful of Kade dreams since he died. I keep a dream journal next to my bed so I can write them down because they are so fleeting. Some have been sad but some have been really comforting.

I’ll briefly describe my favorite:

I didn’t have my dream journal because I was traveling, so I voice-recorded it on my phone. The night before, I had been especially missing Kade before going to bed. It was a definite low. When I woke the next morning, I recalled the dream. I was having a conversation with my healthy-looking smiling boy. (So healthy, in fact, he looked a little fuller in the face, and had a beauty mark on his face that he didn’t have in life–strange). Kade looked so content. And it came to me after a little while that my vantage point talking with him in the dream was the exact spot I was sitting where I was missing him so acutely the night before.

blogging a – z challenge – “c”

/ Kade's mom / 8 Comments

C

I had a few different ideas for today’s letter C:

  • Change (our lives are about to change with me in graduate school),
  • Cat (Kade’s love of our cat, Nermal, and other cats that were in his life),
  • Crazy (I don’t think losing a child makes one particularly sane),
  • Cough (our family was hit by horrible coughs in February and now Asher is coughing again! Say it ain’t so!)

I’ve decided to go with Change.

I’ve been thinking lately about how my life is about to change. I’ve been a stay-at-home mom to my baby, toddler, preschooler, and half-day kindergartner. Although I nanny part-time and bring Asher with me, it leaves a lot of chunks of time to be, and to do things, together.

After this summer I’ll have a first grader. Our carefree days at home together are numbered. I’m a little sad about this. He’s about to be in school a full day, and I’m about to embark on going back to school and the studying, reading, and papers that that entails. We don’t even have this summer as our last hurrah, exactly. Though my classes will be at night, my program starts this summer so I’ll be signing Asher up for camps and activities so that I can have some daytime study time.

It’s like it was gone before I knew it.

He’s still in morning kindergarten for two months. We have most of our afternoons to play, and now that the weather is getting nicer, park and museum outings will be easier to accomplish. And this summer I will have a lot of time with him between the camps and activities I find. It’s not as drastic as if I was suddenly going to work full time and Asher to daycare all day.

I loved my time at home with Asher. Of course as a single mom raising Kade that wasn’t an option for me then. We’ve explored nearly every playground in Highlands Ranch—and there are a lot. In the last five years we’ve been to countless story times at the library, kid’s activities in our community, and museum outings in the metro area. For years we got together with the mommies and buddies from our playgroup EVERY WEEK, sometimes several times in a week. That has ebbed with our now-kindergartners in different schools on different schedules. I’m hoping our play-dates pick back up this summer…so we moms can catch up, and so we can commiserate together on the changes we face.

blogging a – z challenge – “b”

/ Kade's mom / 9 Comments

B

If my “A” word yesterday was Asher, then my “B” word today is Brian!

Brian is my ever-so-patient husband. My husband of eight and a half years, who signed up to be a step-dad. He wanted to date a woman with a kid, because he wanted to be a father that much.

Who does that?

And five years after marriage…what he didn’t sign up for was to become a bereaved step-dad. To be married to a bereaved mom. Can you say, How fast can I run and how far will my legs carry me? He sure didn’t sign up to have his spunky wife turn traumatically bereaved, forever changed. None of us signed up for this shit.

I love Brian for going along with my cockamamie ideas.

After receiving a 10-page letter from a dear friend after Kade died: I need to go see my old friend, a second mommy to Kade when he was little, who I’ve known since we met in Lamaze class as young mommies. ‘Kade and Chloe’ were each other’s first best friends. Oh yeah, she lives in Hawaii–that’s alright, right?

I want to have a pizza birthday party for Kade’s birthday…and invite all of his friends.

For the anniversary of his death I want to go whitewater rafting on ‘his river’…and invite all of his friends.

Let’s have family pictures taken…holding a blown-up picture of Kade, of course.

I want to order memorial wristbands…bandannas…t-shirts…

I want to go to this healing retreat. And this retreat for traumatic bereavement. And this national conference for the loss of a child.

I’m joining a writer’s group because I’m writing a book about Kade.

I not only need the memorial space for Kade’s stone…but those adjacent so that the flat rock I sit on when I visit him will always be mine to sit on.

I want to go to graduate school for counseling. I need to have a career that may bring good from what has happened, rather than a job.

I could go on and on. As a technical and engineer-type-person he may not be the most touchy-feely in the emotions department—I realized early on I would need vast networks of various outside teams for that—he does what he can. If I’m willing to tell him exactly when and for what duration I need a hug, by darn, he delivers. Drawing a diagram helps…

He tries, and he has a wide breadth of patience. Those are two characteristics that are priceless in this new normal that neither of us…that nobody ever…signed up for.

blogging a – z challenge – “a”

/ Kade's mom / 8 Comments

A2Z-BADGE [2016]

I learned about the Blogging From A to Z Challenge from A.J., a girl in my writer’s group. Today, April first, the project of blogging each day in the month of April (except Sundays), for each letter of the alphabet, begins!

The letter A. Well, the first “A” word that comes to mind is the name of my youngest son, Asher. He is five years old and at kindergarten this morning. Today’s post will be about my little Asher…and will touch on how his big brother’s death has…or hasn’t…affected him.

Asher was only 22 months old when Kade died. When I wrote about the day that Kade died, I noted that Toddler Asher was…quiet…during all of the chaotic goings-on. I won’t write about that day at length here, but he was calm, as if he knew something grave and life-changing was happening. He didn’t make a fuss, as if the Older Wiser Asher within was telling Toddler Asher that this was bigger than a tantrum. This was bigger than fear. This was bigger than chaos and hyperventilating and oxygen masks and strangers taking care of him at the pool because mama couldn’t right then.

I am a big proponent of being open about grief. Of letting the bygone days of shame and secrecy associated with loss, be way bygone. The societal tides are changing, and I’ve had great mentors to learn from. I agree with the thinking that “being strong” for the children is a bunch of bunk, and if my kid sees me cry because I miss my other kid who died, it’s not going to harm him. He’s going to witness true human emotions (not all of them all of the time of course), and furthermore learn that tears give way to laughter, laughter gives way to frustration, frustration gives way to sadness, and on and on and on. Emotions ebb and flow and what favor am I paying Asher if I paste on a cheery smile 24 hours a day? Let’s just say my toddler/preschooler and I have spent some afternoons on the couch with Cheetos, tissues, and TV. And conversely, we’ve spent some afternoons at the museum learning about dinosaurs. Life, and mood, is rich and varied.

I’ve learned that as Asher grows and changes developmentally, his dealing with his brother’s death…a large impactful loss in his immediate family…will affect him differently. Today, my very verbal five-and-a-half-year-old is hot and cold on the topic of “Big brother Kade.” Some days he mentions his big brother with affection. Other times he simply wants to leave him out of what we are doing. A succinct “No” was the answer to my question, “Shall we include Kade when we make up nicknames for our family for Dr. Seuss week at school?” OK, then.

But a couple weeks later when I started drawing on the sand on our Mexico vacation, Asher said, “Let’s write Kade’s name.” Then he nestled the smooth rock and brain coral he had collected inside the heart.