Just like that, September is here, and the turn of the calendar page brought with it a chill in the air. Cool, crisp mornings are coming, as is the exhale I’ve been longing for all summer.
June, July, and August felt like sitting in an oven with duct tape over my nose and mouth. I’ve been holding my breath for what feels like forever, and I’m exhausted. Part of me is afraid of the fact that, with every passing day, I’m further and further away from the last time I saw my daughter. At the same time, I feel triumphant for having made it one more day past a hand reaching out to mine and a voice saying, “I’m so sorry, I can’t find a heartbeat.”
With every second that passes, I’m also one second closer to seeing her again. The mother bear instinct in me tells me to fight like hell until I see my child again. That is enough to keep me going, to keep flailing my limbs in the water and gasping for air.
When Eleanora died, I decided to start doing more of the things that make me happy. (Side note: Part of the Grief Package I’ve been gifted is an incredible amount of brain fog and forgetfulness. Half the time, I feel that what I’m writing, I’ve already written before. So if I have, please bear with me.) One of those things is getting a manicure and a pedicure every three weeks. It’s an act of self-care that brings me a lot of joy, and it helps me mark the passage of time when every day feels like an eternity.
There is a coffee shop right next door to my best friend’s mom’s salon, and when I pulled up last night for my appointment, I noticed something in the coffee shop window that caught my eye.
It was a small rug or mat of some sort, I believe, with botanical leaves around the edges (not eucalyptus, but close enough to remind me of my daughter). The words on the mat: “The sun is setting on summer.”
I felt my heart clench and the tears well up behind my eyes the same way they do every time I feel my daughter speaking to me.
A gentle reminder: “Time is moving, Mama. You’ll never have to see this summer again, but we will see each other again.”
Thank. God.
A few weeks ago, I was having a conversation that mostly involved a lot of tears on my end. The other person was encouraging me, reminding me that I will get through this, that I will feel happiness again. Then, she said something that I so desperately needed to hear:
“You WILL have a family that sits around the dinner table together. You will.”
I don’t believe I’d ever told her that this was one of the things I’ve mourned most after losing my daughter, but somehow she knew.
Throughout my entire childhood, adolescence, and young-adulthood, my parents, my sister, and I all sat at the dining room table together for dinner. This was a non-negotiable, every-night occurrence. The table was set (fork on the left, knife—with cutting edge turned toward the plate—and spoon on the right). The tv was turned off, the phones were put away, and all that was left was us. It used to make me so angry that we couldn’t have tv dinners like my friends’ families did or that I couldn’t text my best friend back until after dinner. Teenagers have Important Things To Do, and I felt like my parents just didn’t get it.
They always said that someday, my sister and I would thank them for these hard and fast rules about dinnertime. I didn’t believe them until, at some point, I realized how sacred that time really was. Around that table, every one of my grandparents sat and watched as my sister and I blew out birthday candles, year after year. Around that table, my Dad told us about how his dining chair sits in almost the exact same place that my great-grandfather’s did when he lived there. Around that table, we’ve shared laughter and stories. They’ve hugged me as I’ve cried into a plate of Mexican food, “she’s supposed to be here.”
When my daughter was growing in my belly, I saw flashes of all these same things that I wanted for her—birthdays with grandparents and candles in the soft golden glow of our dining room; a proud showcasing of a drawing completed at school; chocolate smeared on faces before utensils are learned; games of “here comes the airplane” and little feet dangling from a high-chair. Prayers. Tiny hands held inside big ones to keep them safe.
The day she died, we lost all of it. The film reel of everyday daydreams I’d been so carefully crafting in my mind simply stopped, and every moment was shredded. Every single tiny moment that many people likely take for granted, I now ache for desperately.
I will, however, never take for granted that comment: “You WILL have a family that sits around the dinner table together.”
I hope and pray to God that we will.
We will always have one empty chair, and no one else will ever fill it. But I hope that, in the other chairs, someday there will be two parents, smiling and exhaling together because they’ve survived, children with chocolate-smeared faces who are so proud to have a big sister in Heaven, and a big sister in Heaven who keeps the soft glow in that dining room from ever fading out.
