With the turn of events in my family’s lives, my blog has taken on a decidedly melancholy tone. I’ve often wondered if the Javacat Café now feels more like the Suicide Café. I thought about apologizing for this….for just a moment and then decided that I would not. I have other decisions to make in my life that are deeply parallel to this one little decision on how I will now define my blog…and that decision is how I will let this tragic event define my life. Despite what I think or how I feel on a daily basis, I still own the choice on how I will let Abigail’s choice define me.

With that being said, I am a different person than I was four months ago. I question every previously held belief that I have ever had….about me as a mother, about God and certainly about life after death. I don’t believe I have been a horrible mother but certainly I could have been a better mother, which is not self-deprecation but rather a realistic evaluation. One thing that I cannot be is the grieving mother who stays in bed and cries all day while her other two children wonder why they no longer matter. Not to lay claim that I do not have those days. Sometimes my will is not stronger than the paralysis, and I realize that this is part of the process and embrace it.

So, to that end, I get up every day, I go to work and I come home and remember (most of time) to feed my kids. I try very hard to make time for a run. The pain I feel inside is constant and at times unrelenting. Running is also painful, but a different kind of pain….it is an elixir in a sense for the other pain that will probably never be quelled, but at least be made bearable. It’s a constant struggle to not let that pain shove me into a dark corner where I am less able to be normal enough to be a mom, a wife and a friend. So I exist…I do more than exist, I choose life.

I am slowly learning to live with the feeling that I have been somewhat lobotomized. I am not unlike a person in the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s, to put it more succinctly, I can’t remember shit. I have huge gaps in my memory and I struggle with the simplest things. I look at people and no longer recognize them…it’s strange. I even forget sometimes that this tragic thing has happened. I expect to go home and find my girl on her computer, and when I pull myself back to reality and try to comprehend the reality of this new life…it’s crushing. It may be years before I can say “there is no turning back”, and yet I am patient with myself. I allow myself to march straight up to her room every single morning and absorb the fact that she is still not back. I am patient with the wound being torn open day-after-day. Sometimes I cry, sometimes I get extremely pissed off and sometimes I just go numb. All of that is okay. It’s something I need to do.

I want you to know that the kids are all doing well…or as we like to say, the best we can. They are much like me in that when they try to comprehend the realness of this new life, they break.

Another thing that I have to acknowledge is that we have not gone through any of this alone. Our families, our friends and our neighbors have held our hands and at the very least provided distraction every step of the way. It surprises me to read about how a family suicide often changes people’s relationships with their friends…scaring them away and making them uncomfortable. This experience has actually brought our circle of acquaintances closer and words could never express how grateful we are to them. So with this blog and with life, it’s one step forward.

Daddy and I went to see your grave tonight after picking up some supplies for the rainbow cake that I promised you I would make for your birthday. It smells wondrous outside and there is a lightening storm, crowning the mountains in the brightest of silhouettes. You would have wanted to sit out on the balcony to watch. You loved the rain and the thunder. It did not go amiss that you were born under these same circumstances, a chilly late spring storm. As we drove home, I thought about the drive home from the hospital, two days after you were born. Daddy was behind the wheel of my big old green Volvo wagon, the car you loved with the “fuzzy warm seats”. We were so nervous on the road…I think your dad drove 15 miles per hour the whole way home. We were so scared and so excited and so full of love. Tonight we were just scared.

I’m sitting here…thinking of what I should write to you and the words are there but the grief seems to be drowning them. Tomorrow at 3:15 am you would have turned 14. I can’t bring myself to say Happy Birthday, because it isn’t a happy day and birthdays seem to imply a progression, but you Abigail are forever 13. Forever. There will be no first date, no drivers license, no high school graduation. Even though it wouldn’t surprise me even one bit to find you in your room, listening to your iPod…the fact that these events will never happen is still not within my realm of comprehension. Confronting them is terrifying and gut wrenching.

I know that in time I need to focus on cherishing every minute of the 13 years we spent together, but right now all I can do is suffer the deepest grief over those things you will never experience. I find myself thinking about how I will never hold or spoil your children and it just kills me. It’s a precarious balance right now. I know that I need to dig deep Abigail and sometimes I don’t have the strength to do that. For the first time in my life…I don’t have the strength. I miss you so profoundly that the desire to smell your hair threatens to make me go crazy.

You know that crazy sign I keep looking for? I can’t help but to think that the rain and thunder are you speaking to me in the only way you can now. I’ve decided that there is no harm in believing in hope…reunion….eternity. I will see you again my pretty girl, whether it’s in my dreams…in your room, in your pictures your presence is always in my heart. Always. That doesn’t go away. I love you and think about you every second of every day. That doesn’t go away either.

I don’t know what the morning will bring, but then again, I never did.

The most difficult part of this whole thing is the pretending. It’s giving those standard answers to the questions on how you are doing…how you are feeling. No one wants to hear someone say, yeah, today I feel like a miserable piece of shit again….but that is what it amounts to…what I feel is:

• A good deal of self-loathing. Don’t tell me what a great parent I am when my daughter just took her own life. I didn’t even see it coming but the signs were there. I chalked it up to a whole lot of age appropriate behavior but never once looked at myself and thought, “you know what, you need to try harder….hug her instead of ignoring her when she seems impossible”
• A sense of disbelief that the world would dare go on and progress from day to day.
• So miserably sad that it manifests itself in actual illness…making me gag at the thought of food and leaving me vulnerable to every miserable germ that decides to come my way.
• So angry. At her. At me. Was I really so blind? How could she?
• Fake. Getting up, taking care of work and family…I would love to crawl into a dark hole and close my eyes
• Confused…that her room is still empty, that her bed is made. She never made her bed. I go lay in it just to mess up the covers.
• Pissed off that time is so cruel as to take the smells that were hers out of her clothes out of her pillow out of her blankets and other things. I really hate time.
• Sick. Sick that her birthday is in just a few days. How could she? How do I?

I issued an edict last summer. If the vertical living rooms blinds are to be opened, they can never be drawn. I dubbed the main floor living room as my “reading room”. Abbey and I spent hours in there both reading and writing. Last summer when I found myself reading or writing in there, I would often hear a small “thunk”, and then run outside just as fast I could. I inevitably would find a jewel colored hummingbird lying amidst the dirt and pine needles, for all intent and purposes, dead. I would gently pick up the humming bird, and begin stroking its limp body. The kids would always gather around me and lament his condition and then ever so slowly, the rise and fall of its breast would become more apparent. I would continue to stroke the bird until it became more animated. When the bird was then able to stand on its own, I would take it to the backyard and set it on the roof of the pool house, always looking for a spot out of direct sunlight. Suddenly, the bird would float off into the air and back into space that is familiar. It was magic.

I soon found myself checking the front window even when I didn’t hear a “thunk”. I had become paranoid that one of those beautiful hummingbirds would hit my window and that I wouldn’t be there to rehabilitate it and send it back into its familiar space. One day to my horror, that fear was realized. I found a beautiful amethyst breasted hummingbird without a head. No amount of stroking or love would ever again help that bird to take flight and make the world just a little more beautiful.

I can’t help but to think of those birds when I think of my Abigail. It seems that since the moment she was born, I directed all my attention to putting her in a cocoon to protect her from the world. I issued edicts for blinds to never be fully opened all throughout her life. The girl was afraid to walk two houses down the street at the age of nine! I never in a million years dreamed that I would have to protect her from herself. All of the visible blinds in the world did not keep my daughter from taking her own life. I now wonder if the magic of those hummingbirds somehow grayed the finality of life and death in her mind. Did she think that I would be there to stroke her beautiful face and bring her back into familiar space? This haunts me. It will always haunt me

Tags: suicide

It will be ten years ago this next Monday that you impatiently pushed your way into this world. It was 7AM on the morning of April 13, 2009 when the cramping in my abdomen announced that you would be arriving that day. I patiently drew myself a bath and insisted to your dad that he could go to work and that I would call him when I was ready.

As I washed and soaked in the hot water, the contractions became more insistent. I decided that I had better shave my legs because everyone would be looking at them as they sat on display in stirrups, rather than my birthing canal, right? Your daddy began to pace that small bathroom, begging me to hurry up. He was much more nervous than I was, after all you are number three and I was a seasoned pro.

I remember feeling that need to push at the last stoplight before we reached the hospital. Your daddy nearly had a stroke. Thankfully, I was able to hold you in long enough to have you delivered by someone more qualified than Daddy. You came into this world fifteen minutes after we had arrived at the hospital. You were a big beautiful round baby, with a head full of black hair, and lungs with the capacity of a tenor.

You cried from 10PM at night until 3AM in the morning for the entire first three months of your existence. I would have never guessed that you were working out your angst as a newborn to make way for the ray of sunshine that would become your personality and disposition in life. I still can’t get over how happy you always are. I can be in the deepest darkest place and your ready smile is always there to light up my heart. That is your gift.

Together, you and I experienced the scariest most unfathomable event of our lives, but I want you to know that there are going to be so many other experiences in your life that will be happy and wonderful and that they are all something to look forward to. I want to be there to hold your hand through the best and the worst of those experiences. All of them have value, even those that are not so pleasant to go through.

You have been a bulwark to me lately, taking care of me when it is my job to take care of you. I love that you caress my face like a mommy and tell me how important I am to you or how “cute” I am. It helps me to look outside of my grief and put my presence back with the living. You are so grown up. My commitment to you is to be present as a mother and to ensure that you remember your childhood as a happy one filled with hot Cheetos, hikes in the foothills, snuggle time and Club Penguin. I love you always, Mommy.

I am writing a lot more than usual…to maintain my sanity. As usual, writing is my life line. I am not blogging everything that I am writing, for obvious reasons, but below is an exerpt….that being said, I also know that each of you worries and cares about me, or else you wouldn’t land on my blog at all, to that end I want you to know that I am doing okay, and in this entry am sharing what I can at this moment in time. Much love, Catina

37 Days
It has been a few days since I have written, probably the longest stretch of time since Abbey passed and I started writing down my thoughts….hoping to anchor to anything that keeps me grounded in life and reality. It’s so difficult to find that anchor. I feel more and more lethargic lately. It never gets any easier. I know now that she is not coming back, that this is not a vivid dream that will make me breathe in a sigh of relief when I wake up in the morning. This is my life now. This pain in my chest that often hijacks my mind, it’s not going away. Another mother advised that I would have to just pack it up in my backpack and learn to carry it with me. That sounds so wise.

At the moment, I am still swimming in my grief and more often than not drowning. I can’t see the shore. I find myself wishing I were dead, when the pain is so excruciating that I cannot see a way through it. I did not realize that I had voiced these feelings aloud…not exactly wishing that I were dead, but vocalizing that I didn’t think I could handle it. Maia heard me. Tonight she was extra affectionate, making sure to tell me that I am and awesome mommy and a cute mommy and that she just loves me so much. She asked me if I would ever leave her and I told her “no” and I meant it.

As awful as I feel inside, as much as a part of me is dead, there is much that is alive and that is needed by all three of my children. As I read through Abbey’s poems and journals, I see that she too is very much alive. As long as I keep her alive through her writing and my memory, she does not go away, any more than does my love.

Yet, I feel so strongly that desire, that need to have my baby near. I reach such bottomless lows, lows that only a mother who has lost her child could ever fathom. The reality of it all is still debilitating to my whole system. I have moments of normality when I am lost in my work. I have moments of peace when I am next to my children. I know for them that I must live, I must make peace with Abbey’s death, because only then can I honor her the way I should. I am a long way from that place, but I can see it as the objective. I wonder if this will help me in the end. Everyone says how strong I am, yet I have never felt so vulnerable, scared and shattered

Nineteen Days. Everyone was gone this morning…it’s always my biggest test. Antonio and Maia had spent the night at my cousins and Chris had gone snowboarding with his friends. Alone time has been my greatest challenge…trying to dig deep within myself to find a reason to peel myself out of bed. I couldn’t find a single reason this morning. At around noon I received visitors who were bringing us dinner for this evening. It was a reason to drag my sorry butt out of bed to be gracious and thankful. I promised them before they left that I would take myself for a run or a hike in the foothills. After they were gone, I dutifully got dressed and walked up to the foothills. There were a gazillion cars at the trailhead and I was grateful that I lived close enough to walk.

I headed up towards Taylor’s Canyon, alone with my thoughts, some of them bordering on madness. I climbed up to the trail, wanting to be on the highest trail and found myself wandering at the bottom of the rock spills. I had gone too far and was slightly lost. I’m the only person in Ogden who can spend all summer in the foothills and still manage to become lost when I am on my own. I found a huge boulder to sit on and catch my breath, and cry and pray for a sign. Yes, a sign. I’ve been entertaining the absurd a lot lately. I honestly convinced myself that Bambi would come up to me while I was sitting on that rock and talk to me and tell me that Abbey is okay and that she loves us and knows that we love her. Bambi never came. I thought, maybe a big serpent will slither out of the cracks and rocks and tell me what a shitty mother I am and have been and lay into me with venom and culpability. The serpent never came.

I wandered around the boulders and hidden crops of wild onions, trying to figure out how to get back to the trail. I never actually saw any onions but I could sure smell them. I thought to myself that maybe it was Abbey sending me a sign, but I couldn’t recall any occasion when her smell had reminded me of wild onions and trust me, I have been a maniacal hound dog these past nineteen days. I walk around her room, picking things up and inhaling them deeply, trying to find her in anything. I even took to smelling her shoes. I never smelled onions in those either.

I wandered until I found a wash that was free of scrub oak and boulders and slid down in my tennis. I thought of the Buttschards and the Osguthorpes briefly and wondered if they had laid the branches in the wash to prevent people like me from trashing a regrowth area. …I felt badly because I was sure they had, and here I was, lost again in my own foothills. Finally I saw a runner pass below me, and I made my way back to the trail. I put one foot in front of the other and made my way towards the canyon. One foot in front of the other is as much as I can concentrate on lately. One minute after another, one foot in front of the other. I started making lists in my head. I started with the things I was grateful for. I tried to make that list long and tried not to pick out too many things for my “life is shit” list.

I saw that a small bug had landed on my arm. I gently nudged him off and wondered if my Buddhist teacher would be proud of me. I put my Buddhist classes on my things I am grateful for list. I thought briefly about how I have always wanted to flex my muscles while a mosquito was feasting on my flesh and see if they would really explode from the overload of blood being sent into their greedy little needle mouths. I decided to put the exploding mosquitoes thoughts into my list of things that are not very Buddhist about me.

I came upon a couple who were picnicking in the trees. They had a radio, a jug of water and a huge art canvas. The young man had a shock of bright red hair and that made me smile. I love red hair and beg my children on a regular basis to marry a red head so I can have red headed grandbabies. I put red hair on my list of things that I am grateful for.

I felt a tickle on my arm and as I went to scratch it, I felt a small bug’s body pour its fragile wet guts onto my arm. Life is so very fragile and sometimes fleeting. I had just cancelled out my good karma. I made it to the canyon, took a cursory glance at the waterfall and headed back towards Taylor’s Canyon.

I passed all of the same people I had passed on the trail before. The red head and his girlfriend were lying down so I didn’t get to see his red hair and that made me cry. I tried to cheer myself back up by convincing myself that there was still a chance of being approached by Bambi, or a talking lizard, or anything that would make putting one foot in front of the other easier.

I saw some kids bouldering on a trail below me and heard music coming from their stoop. I was irritated for a moment that they had their music so loud….violating the gentle chatter of nature. Then, I realized it was the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Maps. Abbey loved that song, so much in fact that I had put it as the ringtone on my cell phone. I wondered if this was finally my approaching Bambi…hearing the lyrics “Wait, they don’t love you like I love you, Wait, they don’t love you like I love You.” I marveled in that. Marveled in it like you wouldn’t believe until I felt the vibration in the pocket of my pants. There was no radio with the kids climbing the boulder, there was no sign, it was in fact my phone…ringing.

My cousins were at my house dropping off my kids. I had wanted to stop at the little pond, but I put one foot in front of the other and made my way off the mountain and walked towards my house…towards those little people that give me a reason every day to drag myself out of bed and make it through the next minute.

There is a finality to “Thank You” notes that I have not yet been able to face. You see, for two weeks, I have harbored some sense of the implausible thinking that I will still wake up and that the death of my beloved Abigail will be some horrible dream. With each morning that I wake up without her, with each visit to the cemetery, that implausibility becomes more implausible and reality starts to take root in unwelcome, untilled soil.

Nevertheless….we have not gone through this alone. There has been Jeanne who mobilized an entire grief effort to make sure that my daughter had a funeral befitting a princess. There has been Shane/Angie and Hillary/Curtis who left gallons of coffee on my doorstep every morning. Coffee, being the comfort substance from my childhood was the only substance that I was able to keep down that first week. They don’t know it, but they sustained me.

There has been Lisa D-S, one of my dearest and best friends since childhood, who has dragged me out of bed every morning, despite my protests and desire to sleep and wake up to better circumstances…and the Norvell’s who filled Lisa’s shoes on those mornings when she didn’t make it down the canyon. There is Wendy who has shared my grief right along side me like the best friend that she is…feeling what I feel…showing up at my doorstep when I refused her company but she knew better.

There are the many neighbors and beloved internet friends (Nadolski’s and many more) who have brought us dinner every night…ensuring that my family was fed when all I wanted to do was hide in Abbey’s room or under my comforter.

There has been our families, who have literally put their own lives on hold to make sure that the rotten business side was taken care of while making sure that we were taken care of and our kids were taken care of and that shoulders to cry on were taken care of.

There has been our coworkers and our employers, even our former employers who made sure that they knew that they were there and that we are loved.

So many to thank…and I will….I will. Reality is setting is…and as painful as that is, we have to move forward with some sense of normalcy for Antonio and Maia. We have to. Thank you Shane for the beautiful tribute that you stayed up all night putting together for Abbey’s funeral. Jeannie…thank you for everything….everything is all inclusive and too numerous to define. Thank you Tia Carolyn for always being my mother whenever I need a mother most. Thank you Jamie and Nicole for being here at the drop of a hat even though you are far away. …..thank you to my husband, my soul mate for being strong for me when I welcomed losing my mind and my will. Thank you to my kids for giving me the strength to retain my will.

Amidst this terrible terrible event, we have found that we are most blessed and loved. Thank you.

How do I wake up every morning knowing that I cannot change yesterday?
How do I go on living this life without drowning in the “What Ifs” that consume my mind?
How?
How do I reconcile the confusion, the fright, the darkness that threatens to swallow me without the slightest care or deference.
How do I look at the other two and assure myself that my failure will not again result in demise.
How?
How?
Why?

I walked into the train station in somewhat of a frenzy. I had missed the 9:04 am train I had intended to board, and David thought that the next train didn’t come in until 11:00. The fault was mine. I was reading email on my laptop and it did not register that the time I was looking at was Utah time. I noticed an older woman with an elegant Anna Wintour style bob reading the newspaper with shopping bags at her feet. The years have done nothing to diminish the woman’s beauty. I dismissed all the talk about Chicago being populated with only rude and unfriendly people and asked her if she knew when the next train into the city would be departing. She replied that the express would be arriving at 9:40 am, or approximately 20 minutes. A man pointed to the Saturday schedule on the wall as if to confirm what the older woman had stated.

The man asked me if I would be going to the Auto show downtown and I replied that I was meeting with friends. He was eager to engage me in conversation but his voice was almost inaudible and he had a tendency to talk to his shoes, further blurring any audible clips that spilled from his lips. He continued to make conversation and I listened and gave the kind of response you give when you are trying to appear both polite and uninterested. After about fifteen minutes the older woman looked up and said that she thought she could hear the train’s arrival. The man and I followed her outside the station and onto the platform. The man continued to talk as I turned my attention to the approaching train. I nodded politely to the man and followed the woman closely as she boarded and asked her if I could sit next to her. The train was half empty, empty enough that all of its occupants could have sat alone, but that’s not my style.

I have no expectations of having deep conversations with strangers but when my soul becomes sick and bruised from the constant platitudes in my life, it will reach out of its own accord and find for me a deep and meaningful conversation. I need this, I suffer without it and eventually everything around me suffers as well. Joanie assured me that it was alright for me to take up the seat next to her. As she adjusted her bags and belongings, I heard something fall to the floor. She looked around wondering if she had lost something, but didn’t see anything in the visible space around her. I tucked my head under our seats and found what looked like a small stone at first but was a much worn oval of acrylic with an angel floating inside.

“It’s my guardian angel!” said Joanie. The smile on her face was warm and kind and she was happy to have her angel once again in her possession. Joanie was headed to the city to meet her daughter, who would pick her up and take her to her home, which was another 45 minutes outside of the city. It was Valentine’s Day and Joanie had gifts for her three grandchildren. She had not seen them in several months and she was so excited to be able to spend the day with them.

Joanie had just recently retired and moved into assisted housing for senior citizens. She would like to see her kids and grandkids more often but doesn’t have the confidence or the eyesight to make the long drive and risk coming back at night. She has also timed today’s trip so that she will arrive back to this very station before it is dark. This gives her a total of three hours to spend with her grandbabies after having spent as much time travelling.

She worries about her daughter who has just given birth to a baby with a chromosomal defect similar to Down’s Syndrome. Her daughter has a good job but the daughter’s husband is trying to make it big as an artist. Joanie obviously finds this frivolous. She is a woman who was forced into practicality when her own husband died at the age of 42 and she was left to raise their children on her own.

We talked about her son who lives in San Diego and how her other daughter would like to go back to school and become a teacher. She says that at 36 (I’ll be 36 this year) she is too old to start a new career. I tell her that being a teacher is hard work and later I will regret not telling her that it is never too late to begin a new career, especially one that holds your heart and your passion. She wishes I could speak to her daughter to tell her how difficult teaching is.

Joanie tells me about how she really needs a knee replacement and how she is finding it harder and harder to get around on her old knee. She worries about how being laid up will prevent her from being able to buy groceries and take care of herself, something she hasn’t had to worry about since she first became a widow. I tell her that she should have one of her children come and stay with her for awhile, but she assures me that they have their own lives and their own worries. I wonder what kind of children any of us are when our own lives and worries trump providing a service to our parents that they themselves provided to us even into adulthood.

I feel slightly melancholy as we pull into Union Station in downtown Chicago. Joanie insists that I walk out of the station with her so that she can point me in the right direction. She hobbles, more noticeably to me now, on her bad knee. Her daughter has not yet arrived and I ask her if she would like for me to wait with her. “No, no go on, I’m going to just have a cigarette until she gets here.” We embrace and part. I wish that I could check in on her and make sure that she has that knee surgery but she is only a first name with a warm embrace in a big city.