This past weekend was a weekend filled with tremendous, heart-busting joy. It was also one of the most personally disappointing weekends of my entire life. My head is spinning a little from the existential contradiction that this represents.

I took the brood to Disney World, and one of the objectives of the trip was, of course, to have a good time, and having a good time at Disney World is not a particularly difficult thing to do, what with the spinning teacups and fireworks and pirates and flying carpets and pixie dust and all, and so to say that we – and more importantly, our coterie of pixie-loving badgers – had fun is to understate things dramatically. But having fun was not the only objective of the trip, nor even the primary objective of the trip. The primary objective of the trip (which saw us drive from Toronto to Florida in a vehicle provided by GM Canada) was me tackling the Disney Princess Half-Marathon, aka the Tiarathon, as the first race in my year-long quest to run 100 miles for Tanner. I’ve been training since last year to do this run and all the other runs – runs that will cover a total distance, I hope, of 100 miles – to follow. I had my tiara and tutu packed and ready.

I never got the chance to wear them. (more…)

I don’t quite know what to say about Joannie Rochette. I’ve been stunned by her bravery, humbled by her strength, amazed by her determination in the face such terrible sadness. When my father died, it was days before I could even walk in a straight line, weeks before I could hold myself reliably upright. After losing her mother, Joannie Rochette strapped on her skates and competed for an Olympic medal. Incredible. Courageous.

It’s courageous because it represents an overcoming of a terrible grief, a grief that comes at you like a baton to the knees and the gut and the mind and the heart. It’s not a defeat of such grief – there is no defeat of such grief – but it is – it represents – a willingness and an ability to power through that grief and to keep moving, keep persevering, keep living, in spite of that grief. And more than that, perhaps: to take that grief and let it move through you in a way that carries you forward, to feel its battering force and take that force and bend it to your will and make it dance, to dance with it, to take the lead and turn the struggle into something beautiful.

I would like to do that. But I still feel, more often than not, that the grief is moving me, leading me, directing our steps. We’re dancing, I know, and it’s not always terrible (that is one grief’s secrets: that it is sometimes welcomed, that it is sometimes embraced, because the grieving soul does, sometimes, just want to give in, to fall back into the deep curve of those arms and yield to the bending and the tipping and to just let its fingers graze the floor as it sways and drops) but it is not controlled, I am not controlling it, I am just being led, and I wish, sometimes, that I were not.

Jeannie Rochette will have her moments, I know; moments in which she will no longer feel in control, when she will not be able to stand, let alone skate, because this kind of pain – no matter what anyone says – is terrible, terrible, beyond measure. But she will always have this moment of triumph, this overcoming, this demonstration of the force of life and love in the face of death. For that she should be proud. To that we should all aspire.

I do.

So I wrote this post over at BlogHer. It’s kind of heavy, but also, I think, kind of extraordinary (that is, the subject of the post is extraordinary, not my writing) and I’d love to know what you think. Not least because it comes up in a week during which some people are saying hateful things on the same subject, and talking about actions and ideas that counter hate is, really, the best defense against such hate, so. I think that it’s worth reading, and well worth discussing, and even if you disagree with the whole enterprise, well, at least we could all join hands and agree that compassion is good, no matter what? I’d like that.

Alexander McQueen died this week. He committed suicide, and he did so, in part, it seems, because of his bereavement over the death of his mother earlier this month.

This is going to sound awful, terrible, extreme, insane… but… I think that I know – maybe, a little bit – how he felt. (more…)

Jasper goes to playschool a couple of days a week. He loves it – loves it – and he knows exactly what days he’s scheduled to go. He toddles down the stairs on those mornings and heads straight for his coat and boots, which he tries to tug on over his pajamas.

SKOO! (School!) he yells. RUSSELL! ELLA! (friends) GO! GO! GO!

Yesterday was a school day. He’d been up throughout the previous night with a cough, and he’d felt a little warm at times the day before, but there are always bugs going around this time of year, and he seemed okay in the morning, and in any case, there he was, clutching his coat and boots and yelling skoo!

I hesitated, for a minute, maybe two. He didn’t feel warm, but he did have a cough, and he had been so, so sick before Christmas… but no, he wanted to go. And I wanted him to go. I had work to do. So I took him to school.

Some hours later, my phone rang, and the voice on the other end was a little panicked. Could I come right away? Jasper wasn’t well, he was hot, really hot, sweating through his clothes, his temperature 105 and climbing, and obviously in pain, and coughing, badly. I dropped what I was doing and ran straight there, not bothering to put on socks or scarf or hat or gloves, not stopping to lock the door, not stopping for anything. I just ran. And as I ran – the very short distance from where I was to where he was – I berated myself a hundred times with every step. I should have kept him home. I shouldn’t have taken him to school. I shouldn’t have let what was convenient and easy trump what was right. (more…)

My husband had a vasectomy last year. There was a lot of discussion around it – another baby would not have been unwelcome, and so I wasn’t eager to close off the possibility – but we both knew that it would be madness for me to risk repeating the more or less pretty awfully terrible anxieties and stresses and mental and physical health concerns that I endured in my pregnancy and delivery and post-partum experience with Jasper. “You can’t go through that again,” my husband said, repeatedly, last spring. “We can’t go through that again.

He was right, of course. The pregnancy with Jasper wreaked havoc on my mind and body, as did his birth, as did the post-partum aftermath of that pregnancy and birth. In many ways, I’m still recovering. But still, I have moments in which the loss of the possibility of another pregnancy, another birth, another baby weighs so heavily upon me that it’s difficult to breath, in which the closing off of that future feels a little bit like heartbreak. (more…)

I’m trying to figure out how to write my ghost story. It’s my solace, it’s what I cling to, it’s the closest thing that I have to proof – proof! as if there could be such a thing – that the love and the light that was my father did not just snuff out, did not just disappear absolutely, when he died. So I want to write it. I promised myself that I would, when I got the courage. And you all have given me the courage, with your stories and your reflections and your all-around awesome.

But I’m tired, and writing the story is hard – each tap of my fingers on the keyboard is a tap on my heart and although I tap gently, still, the tapping wears and the words exhaust me  – and I just want to think about snowflakes and ice castles and ice dancers and all things light and sparkly and melty. And then have cocoa. Spiked with espresso.

Today, I might do just that.

I think that I’m stuck in the denial stage of grief. It’s not that I deny the fact that my father is dead – his ashes sit in a box on my mantle, surrounded, at the moment, by a few Christmas ornaments and my kids’ picture with Santa and Emilia’s bardo-drawing – it’s that I can’t wrap my head around the fact – is it a fact? – that his death is the end, that his life is over, that I’ll never see or speak with him again. The absoluteness of it all, the finality: I’m having trouble accepting this. I can’t accept this. My heart aches from its stubborn refusal to accept this.

(more…)

I wanted this year to start with laughter and smiles and cookies and fizzy soda. I didn’t want confetti and champagne and fireworks and streamers – I just wanted smiling. I just wanted this year to start happy.

I’m still trying to find the happy. Yes, my heart lifts when I hug my children and my lips curve when they giggle but the last week of last year and the first week of this year have been covered in a thick blanket of fever and snot and heartache and it’s been hard to find the laughter. And although Nyquil takes the edge off the fever and snot, there aren’t sufficient meds for heartache, Ativan and Xanax notwithstanding. Last week was much, much harder than I thought it would be – doing the final clean-up of my dad’s place in the week between Christmas and New Year’s was, in hindsight, less than ideal timing. Coping with the heart-punches of the holidays was difficult enough without throwing myself into the line of fire of the gut-kicks and soul-wedgies that came with seeing the last of his things carted away, his home wiped clean of his presence.

(more…)

The question was: what story are you telling yourself right now? (And, can you give yourself permission to change the ending?)

The answer was: this year, this decade, is ending in sadness. This year, this decade, is ending and my heart is wrapped in grief.

But: I can give myself permission to change the ending. I just need to figure out how.

A start: reflecting on the things that have made me happy this year. To wit: traveling across the country with my children and with dear friends; having a few lovely, brilliant days with my father before he died; my husband, who is my joy and my rock; my children, my children, my children, my children; overcoming fear; overcoming greater fear; facing fear and calling it to account and demanding that it reveal itself as something more, something better, something beautiful.

This is the ending that I want for my year, an ending that celebrates all the joy that circumnavigated the grief, and ending that finds the bravery in the fear and the beauty in the darkness and the wonder and greatness and living and loving that was in everything.

And I want this ending to be a beginning, an opening-up, an opening-towards new fear and new beauty and new wonder and new confusion and new dark and new light – because all of these need each other, each of these requires the others – and all of this as it folds back into the old and becomes greater-than and more.

And it can be. It will.

Happy New Year.