Alone In Her Absence After She Passed

This time last season, I was reading a book of essays called “The Bright Hour” by a mother dying of cancer, shortly after her own mother died of cancer, while my daughter’s best friend was dying from cancer.

Nina Riggs- who’s a great-great-great-granddaughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson but who didn’t want to be known as only that - wrote a book that found me on scattered warm days in a world that felt frozen and cold.

Here, now… This was the first “warm day” of the season (and by warm I mean 64-degrees) and I got a fiery push to get to the same beach where I met Nina and said goodbye to Gem, and see if I could somehow find either of them there again.

The last time I was standing on that soggy sand I was hobbling from a recent leg surgery and feeling like a baby deer whose mom was killed prematurely in the movie.

“You look good today Mom,” my youngest said, now, as she helped me get near the water, still not steady enough to do it alone (or at least get back up if I go down)… and I thought about being there alone- alone with the book, and alone in my mind, and alone in her absence after she passed - feeling it was the only time I had space to know what alone even was. I’m never alone. I’ve always homeschooled OR worked with my girls going along with. I rarely drive a car alone, or have a thought alone, or stroll through a store alone.

I’m not doing any of those things right now anyways with how bad pain is and has been… But I couldn’t get to the beach where I first found myself alone fast enough, hoping to not be alone anymore.

“Thanks kiddo,” I said, as I attempted to accomplish work from the sand under the clouds, while she went to sit in the shade near the trees and work on writing a book. (A Nina in the making, taking walks in the woods unironically).

Later, I tried to save the thought about ‘The Bright Hour’ and death and capturing not-warm “warm days” in a signed essay of sorts and our phones died. It felt like a metaphor. And we laughed, fully.

I hoped I’d find them there, somewhere, somehow… Only 6 months gone by and so many sutures between… But instead of being so gloriously alone as wanted, I couldn’t stop glancing to the trees.

How do I get to be the mother lucky enough to have my child sitting beside me, when so many others have not?

“I want to be alone”, I think all the time in the loneliness of my mind…

Yet my eyes search for love in the shade.

It’s the start of a new week which means I’ll always start once by saying: THANK YOU to those kind enough to pay for my work at Catching Breaths.

(Okay, technically it’s Tuesday. Oops)

I do not look at this as a newsletter or a social media front, but rather, an unfolding memoir of essays to leave a breadcrumbs of legacy for my daughters and friends one day (including you!).

Thank you for reclaiming words for many of us, and supporting my hope for a “website” that I wish existed in the world to show that “success” can be defined even amid sickness, and that we can be chronically jacked up and still aim to make ‘meaning’.

I am fighting hard within myself to teach myself that work matters (as long as you also give a lot most of the time, because I’m never going to be able to change that viewpoint), and that we can be generous with our time AND (occasionally) also show ourselves as women that we are not expendable.

I know that $5 a month matters and should not be taken lightly: I will hustle every weekday with gratitude and honesty in my heart… and YOU are giving me the impalpable gift of feeling I have agency and accomplishment despite the fact I am mostly trapped at home right now. (Words can’t explain what that kind of sovranty and abrecation means)

And if you’re like me and do not have $5 to spare month to month, sharing someone’s words really DOES help.

If I can fight to stop underestimating my own worth, I can fight to show YOU the power in simply saying, “Hey, I really dig this broad’s moody paragraph” sometimes and sending a link or recommending a piece if you feel I’ve earned it.

To those who give, I thank you from the bottom of my verbose, bionic little heart.

Now, let’s live another week together, shall we?