My Changing Orbit

This week I’ll begin to send our holiday cards, a rite of the season I enjoy and always have. My list has morphed and changed over the years as people have come in gone in my life, something I don’t like but I understand.

Growing up, I lived in a very transient corporate town where families tended to stay about five years and then the dads were transferred and the families moved on. Sometimes you kept in touch with people, sometimes you didn’t. And sometimes Facebook brought them back into your life (one of the positive things that social media has done).

But as someone who wrote about my sister’s suicide and traveled the world speaking about it, grief, and suicide prevention, I also have had quite a few people come and go from life. They needed to hear my words but sometimes they are ready to move on and unfriend me because they don’t need the reminder or my words or whatever it is I provided them. I have learned to accept that, that I am not always supposed to be part of the long journey of someone’s life.

This year, however, I am very aware of the many losses by death that are shrinking my Christmas card list. These people were usually older (none died from Covid) and if I didn’t have contact with their children, I often didn’t know about their deaths except through the obituaries (if they had one). Just a few days ago I found out someone I knew had died in August when her invitation to my Chelle Summer Holiday Preview was returned for lack of forwarding address. I somehow missed her obituary in August and, while she was 85 and we had a great conversation the spring, I am still sad that she has died.

I remind myself that she is happy– she is with her parents and her husband again. I know that when her husband died, she was sad but she told me she reminded herself that Corky was with God and that made her happy. I know that Sally is with God and she is happy.

Because the list is shrinking and I feel like a chunk of my life, particularly here in Albuquerque is gone (mostly relationships that hover around the time of my first marriage), I’m also grateful for the new friends I have made over the last year or so. The list is shrinking in one place but growing in another.

I also am reminded that there are stories for me to tell– that there was so much I learned and that these people taught me. My hope is that I can take that forward with me as my orbit morphs and changes and I try to go with it.

Easter Perspective

I had taken some time on Saturday morning to photograph the dogs– Hattie and Lilly– for Easter. Neither one was happy with me (although after they ran off when I told them we were finished, Lilly hurriedly pushing the bunny ears off her head, they were easily swayed back into happiness with treats) and later I told Greg about how obvious it would be when I posted the photo on social media Sunday morning.

"No one is ever happy on Easter," he said. When gave him a funny look, he added, "Everyone is uptight about something."

Then I remembered the Easter Sundays of my childhood: we were always late for mass. I have no idea why and I never asked my mom when she was alive because she always got upset and accused me of thinking she wasn't a good enough mother. But the church filled up early and it meant we were left standing in the entry way listening to mass. For an hour. 

In that hour I had little understanding of what Easter meant. Yes, I'd taken religion classes growing up, but honestly it didn't mean a lot to me.

Then about six years ago, the same time I had returned to going to mass weekly, I found myself leaving Easter mass wanting to sing, feeling the happiness of coming out of darkness into the light. And each year since then, Easter has come to mean more to me.

I'm sure that I could argue that I'm older now and I "get" it more than I used to but I believe it's just a sense of having traveled multiple journeys of finding myself in darkness and having to seek out light. Each year Lent reminds me that there is hope, that we can get to the light, to the sunshine, that we don't need to be scared.

And a beautiful, cloudless sky– like we had in Albuquerque yesterday– doesn't hurt. 

Honoring Quietly

About fifteen years ago, I remember sitting in the local support group for the suicide bereaved, this several years after my book for sibling suicide had been published, and we were talking about ways to honor a loved one who had died. A man who had lost his mother to suicide said– as he shook his head– "I have no idea what to do."

I responded, "That's okay. You don't have to know right away." 

Many more losses later I am well versed in this. For me, figuring out how I will honor them is how I move forward, but I also realize that we don't have an answer to how to do that right away. 

However, what I choose to do today is much different than when I lost my younger sister nearly twenty-four years ago. While it wasn't instant, I knew I had some need to help other sibling survivors of suicide, mostly because the world was different (the internet was very limited and there was no social media); we couldn't connect to each other like we do today with a simple Google search. That turned into a book which launched a speaking career and traveling around the world, educating and helping people both with suicide grief and suicide prevention.

For my dad's death eleven years ago, I was still deep into suicide work and inching my way toward a doctorate. I didn't have the time– or energy– to figure out what else I might do. But after my mom's death in 2014, my perspective had already begun to shift and I saw where it tied me back (as I have written recently) to the person I wanted to be growing up.

But also in this time, I have watched people launch foundations in loved ones' names, hoping to raise funds to help people or causes, or where they do walks and run, with the goal of doing the same. 

Recently I saw something someone was doing in a loved one's name and a thought struck me– I don't have the need to be so public about saying, "I'm doing this because of my mom." And then  at a party last weekend a friend and I were discussing this, how my journey in that way has become more private: I don't need to share it all with the world.

And yet what I still share is what I create– my writing, my sewing, my painting. I know that pursuing a creative life is honoring the three family members I traveled with in the station wagon (long after my older brother and sister stopped taking family trips with us). I also know that getting my education (particularly before I married– per her instructions) was a way to honor my maternal grandmother who couldn't go to college because she had to help her brothers financially get college degrees. It was never something I talked about, more something I did. 

Today the journey is about doing without having to say why I'm doing it every minute of the day. Sure, there are aspects I share, especially when I particularly know how they inspired something, but mostly it's about taking time each day to pursue what makes me happy is what honors them and makes my life an authentic one.

The Love from our Parents

In the past few months, I've had a number of people I know lose their parents. There's been an ebb and flow, particularly in the last year, although none of my friends are the same age so it's not like we've reached "an age" where we our parents might die. It's just happening.

In the eleven years since my dad died and then the three years since my mom died, I've had some time to process and think about what their deaths mean to me and how I go forward, especially at an age when most people I know still have both their parents, or at least one. 

About fifteen months before my mom died, she told me something that has helped me, something that I believe all our parents want for us, particularly when they reach the afterlife where I believe there is no pain, no sadness, no hurt or anger over what has happened in life. In the afterlife, they want us to be happy, they want us to have the lives we're supposed to, and they want us to know we're still with them.

Mom told me that she knew I was different than the rest of the family and that I needed to go forward and be who I'm supposed to be. What Mom wanted for all her kids was happiness, to see them have the happiness she never had truly had in her life coping with polio, a not very great marriage, and all the sadness and insecurity that went with both of those. 

I didn't think much about what she said to me until after she died. In my sadness knowing that she, my dad, and my younger sister are all gone (the three people in my family I spent the most time with because my older brother and sister had moved out of the house by the time I entered junior high), I have clung to those words.

And I've also come to realize something else: she freed me from the past with her message. The memories are mine to keep but I don't have to hold onto the sadness of anything that was said, unsaid, happened, or didn't happen. I can forward without letting any of the past hold me back, instead using from my past what motivates and inspires me (much of what you see in my designs). 

It's painful to move forward in loss, especially that of our parents, because we fear we lose the past, of what defines us in some ways. But it's our choice to keep what works and helps us go forward. The rest we can leave behind. After all, that's what our parents wanted most for us: to know that we are happy and who we want to be.