Life in Chicago

Thirteen Years

This past Sunday marked 13 years since my mother died. Every year I write her a letter. Last year's can be found here.

January 24, 2010

Dear Mom,

It is January 24 and you have been dead for 13 years.

I woke up this morning and lay in the dark in bed, listening to the rain outside and thinking about you. My daughter lay sleeping beside me. I am a mother now, mom. I have a beautiful baby girl. Her name is Veronica and she has blue eyes and long fingers and the sweetest little smile and I love her so much.

She was born on June 10. It had been a rainy week and I was 4 days past my due date. I’d been waiting and waiting for labor to begin. I was so huge and uncomfortable, so exhausted by all the anticipation. She was finally born that June night in a birthing center here in Chicago. I labored without any pain medications, pushed her out of me without anything but my own strength.

I knew that if I’d been able to survive something like your death and Dad’s that I could surely give birth the way I most wanted to.

Just Because it's Inevitable Doesn't Mean I Have to Carry it Around

I've had death on my mind again lately and I'm sick of thinking about it.

It doesn't help that I went to a conference last week on "Helping Parents Through the Loss of a Child." Ugh. I sat in horror with my hand over my mouth for the entire 5 hours I was there, just thinking about how unbearable it would be if we lost Veronica.

And then a couple of different people recommended this blog to me, and while it's beautifully written and I can't help reading it, it also just shoots me through with icicles of fear and sadness and leaves me lying awake at 3am when I'm nursing V, thinking about what it would be like if she were suddenly gone.

I know Greg thinks I'm crazy for dwelling on these thoughts. "Just don't think about stuff like that," he says, and while it's good advice, it's different for someone who is intimately familiar with loss. I still have friends who have never lost anyone significant in their lives and that's hard for me to wrap my head around. I became familiar with death at an early age and have continued to experience the death of close loved ones throughout my life. It's easy, at this point, for me to imagine what it would like if someone else I loved were gone.

I must have only been 5 or 6 when the first person in my life died. My parents were quite wealthy when I was growing up in Atlanta, and during my early years we had a nanny/housekeeper named Johnny who worked 5 days a week in our home. Johnny was lovely. She was in her 5os, African-American, and came from an old Southern family. She had a soft voice and gentle demeanor. Some of my earliest memories are of sitting on her lap by the window in my room as she read stories to me. 

Johnny had been working for us for several years when she died, and by then I had become very close to her. I didn't learn the real story about her death until I was older. Back then, in the days surrounding her death, my parents took me for a drive in my father's big, black Lincoln Towncar. This is definitively one of my clearest, early memories. I can picture the smooth black leather of the backseat, the shiny pate of my father's bald head, and my mother swiveled around in her seat as we wound through the old, Atlanta neighborhoods.

"Johnny died and she isn't coming back," my mother said. "She went to sleep and didn't wake up," she said. There is no easy way to explain death to a child. They are literally incapable of fully grasping it until they are closer to the age of 10. The more concrete, the better. Telling a child something like, "she died in her sleep," can make a kid afraid of sleep. They might wonder if they themselves could die in their sleep. But again, there's no easy way to help them understand it. Honesty and direct answers to the copious amounts of questions children are bound to ask about the death are the best route. 

The real story definitely would have been more frightening for me to learn. My mother came home one afternoon that week to find the house quiet. She called out to Johnny as she set down her purse, her keys, removed her coat. There was no answer. My mother tip-toed up the stairs, her heart pounding, and pushed open the door to my room. I was in my bed deeply asleep in my afternoon nap. She pulled the door closed and began to peek into the other rooms, looking for Johnny.

In her bedroom the bed was neatly made and the carpet recently vacuumed. She noticed that the lights in the adjoining bathroom were on, and it was as she approached that she saw Johnny sprawled across the tile floor, an arm twisted beneath her, her body eerily still. She'd had a heart attack, the paramedics told my mother, before they wheeled her out of the room. I continued to nap soundly until after the house was quiet again, until after Johnny gone.

Johnny had a few old house dresses that she kept and wore when she worked in our home. After she died I slept with one of them, a faded, blue one, soft at its edges, and my mother let me take it with me to school for a while. I still think about Johnny some days, still remember her place in my life, and her absence.

I've given so much thought to death in my life. What it means. What it is. What I believe about it. What I know about it. Sometimes it seems like the most banal thing in the world. Some days I think I totally get it and it seems preposterous to view it as anything but a simple and inevitable thing. Other days it destroys me.

Whatever the case with it though, I'd like to stop thinking about it so much. As I write this, I'm one week away from finishing a class at Adler School of Psychology and I'm one month away from completing 2 years at my hospice job. The completion of both of these things mean that I'll be eligible to take the Illinois state exam for my professional counseling license. And THIS means that I can move away from hospice and towards a private practice where I can see a broad range of clients.And hopefully that means I can stop thinking about death so much.

I've actually loved my hospice job and I'm grateful for the experience. And I'm also appreciative of the person I've become in the face of so much loss. But I'm ready to move on from it all, ready to let go of the shroud of sadness and seriousness that I wear so often. I don't want to think about Veronica's death, just her life.

Friday Morning Worries

Dear Bug,

If something were ever to happen to me, this is the letter I would most want you to read.

I think a lot about what it would be like for you to grow up without me, your mother. I suppose it has a lot to do with my having lost my own mother and the fact that I constantly fret about my own mortality. Well, actually I go back and forth between incredibly serene moments of understanding about the ebbs and flows of life and death and then extreme anxiety about having to leave this world before I'm ready. And your presence my dear, makes me feel like I'm not ready.

There are so many things I want you to know, so many things I could say. I could write you a letter every day for the rest of my life and probably not say it all. Nonetheless, there are a few choice things I would definitely want you to know if I weren't around.

I think a lot about how, if I were to die now, you wouldn't remember me. You would have no memories of our sweet, little relationship. I think about how that's true for the next three or four years. That in order for you to remember your mother I have to stay alive for several more years. I do know that even if you didn't remember me I know that I would have still had an effect on the person you are. I take comfort in the fact that all the love I've given you, all the care I've provided will always make you that much more of a secure person.

But enough of all that. Here's what I want you to know.

I love you like I've never loved anyone. I love you in a way I didn't realize was possible. I love you in this profoundly transcendent way. This way that, even if I weren't here, you would still be surrounded by my love. It's a love so big that it's never going away. Not when you're 20, not when you're 47, not when you're in your seventies and a grandmother.

I want you to know that I'm always going to proud of you. Even if I were to die today, you can be certain that when you're making your first science fair project or running your first track meet or graduating high school or college or losing a tooth or skinny a knee or taking your first step or going to your first dance or getting engaged or having a baby, that I'm proud of you. Even if it seems like I couldn't possibly be proud of you because I'm not there, I just will be and you have to accept that.

Death is such a strange thing, little bug. It happens to all of us. And it can be so sad and so scary and so unwanted. But the truth of it is that because of death, life is important. Think about it for a moment. It's true. Death gives us meaning. It gives us goals and aspirations and makes us think about just how much we love one another.

I don't know why I think about it all the time. I guess because both of my parents died so early. And because I work in hospice (really need to get a new job next year). But I do. I think about how long I have to live this life. How long I have to love you. To love your father. To be a mother, a wife, a woman, a writer. I think about places I want to see and things that I want to taste and feel. I think about having more babies and I think about you, you, you and your life and all the things I want to see you do and taste and feel.

And all those things make me certain that I just couldn't bear to go yet. And then I think, well, if I did have to go, I'm so very grateful for what I've done and felt and tasted here in my 31 years. You and your father and my mother and father have the height of it all. There's just nothing more important than the people we love.

But I digress. It's a drizzly Friday morning in October. You're 4 and a half months old. You weigh sixteen pounds (my aching back reminds me of this often). You love to suck on your big right toe and you've been squealing and laughing more than ever this past week. You don't have too much hair but you have the prettiest blue eyes and the softest rose-colored lips. You're nursing as I type this and one hand continually brushes against my shoulder, pulling at my sweater and grazing my face. Your eyelashes cast soft shadows on your cheeks and your warm little body is flush against mine.

There is no way I could love you more than I do in this moment. And it's something that will last forever.

I'm certain of it. 

Love,

Mom

The Turtle Fountain

The summer I was 15 my parents and I went on a three-week trip to Italy. One of my father's best friends was an Italian man named Gastone Nardoni who lived in Rome with his wife Allesandra and their two sons. I can't remember how he and my father met but they'd been friends for years and the Nardonis had always been a part of our lives, visiting us and sending their teenage sons to live with us one summer. My mother had met Allesandra for the first time when my parents honeymooned in Europe and the two of them had hit it off famously.

The summer that we went to Italy we stayed in Rome for a week, visiting with the Nardoni's before continuing on, just the three of us to Venice and Florence. We completed the trip with a week in Tuscany, again with the Nardonis and some of their friends, altogether 10 of us rattling around in an old farmhouse on a hillside. We spent the day at a little pool on the property, vineyards rolling out in every direction, and at night we drove the little winding road into town for gelato.

I had turned 15 just before going to Italy and was about to enter into the height of my angst-ridden years. I spent a lot of that trip listening to Soul Asylum on my headphones, refusing to smile for the camera and writing in my journal. My mother was wonderfully tolerant of this phase, always managing to engage me no matter how stubborn or resistant I was being. Now that I'm a mom myself, I can only imagine how hard this period must be on parents. Just the thought of Veronica putting on a pair of headphones and turning her back to me already breaks my heart.

One of the ways in which my mother was good at engaging me was by taking me for long walks. It's something we always did in the summers on Cape Cod, the two of us walking for hours along the shoreline. If I was moody or sullen my mother would just remain quiet as we walked. Inevitably I would open up and begin talking little by little. By the end of the walk I would have poured out my heart to her and we'd be a pair again, walking side by side, our bare feet dusted in foam from the waves.

We took one such walk together around Rome one afternoon. We'd spent the previous few days with the Nardonis and their sons and sons' friends who were all a few years older than me. I'd begun feeling left out and a little insecure and I think my mother could tell I was beginning to disengage. So one afternoon we went for a long walk, just the two of us, through the city.We walked through the old Jewish ghetto, exploring the crumbling buildings and meandering up little, winding alleyways.

Eventually we happened upon a tiny piazza and the sound of trickling water drew our attention to a beautiful little fountain in the center of the square. The fountain consisted of four sculpted men lifting four turtles into the topmost pool of water. We took up seats at a little outdoor cafe and sat in the square for a long time letting the tranquility of the moment seep in. It was a welcome respite from the usual bustle of Rome.

My mother was in remission from colon cancer for the first time that summer. She'd been diagnosed the summer before with stage four colon cancer and the last year had been a roller coaster of surgeries, tests and chemo treatments. Even though our financial resources were beginning to dwindle, my father had scheduled this trip, eager for all of us to get out of the anxiety-laden routine we'd been stuck in for the last year. Sitting there at that little cafe by the turtle fountain that afternoon in Rome I think my mother and I felt peaceful for the first time since she'd become sick.

Later that night we described the piazza and the fountain to the Nardonis. "Ahh," Gastone had exclaimed, "Piazza Mattei and the Fontana delle Tartarughe." He went on to explain how the square was little-known to tourists and a favorite of Romans. He told us that although another sculptor had originally designed the fountain, it was Bernini who had added the turtles.

The rest of the trip was pretty wonderful, but after we returned home it was always that day in Piazza Mattei and Fontana delle Tartarughe that my mother recalled most fondly. She died a few years later, of the same cancer that had so considerately gone into remission that summer in Italy, and a few months after her funeral my father sent me back to Italy. Just as he had taken our small family abroad that summer when I was 15 to escape my mother's illness, I think he sent me across the Atlantic again in hopes of helping me evade the pervading presence her death had become.

My friend Liz was living in Spain at the time and we bought the requisite Eurorail Passes and spent a month cavorting about Europe together, that trip making for a dozen more stories to be told another time. Before we left though, my father handed me a ziploc bag and told me to take the contents to Rome, to the Fontana delle Tartarughe. The bag my father handed me contained a portion of my mother's ashes. This was a ritual I was already becoming familiar with, although the thought of scattering my mother's ashes without my father was a daunting one.

So, once again in Rome, now at the age of 18, Liz and I traveled to Piazza Mattei, accompanied by Gastone and Allesandra, and while the three of them hung back I emptied the bag of ashes into the fountain, that afternoon spent with my mother swirling into muddy pools of cloudy, gray water. It was only then that I truly realized why that hour in the piazza had been so special to her. I'll always miss those walks I took with my mother, miss the hidden squares of the world and ourselves that we would inevitably uncover, given enough time.

 

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I recently wrote about Fontana delle Tartarughe for Trazzler.com and my trip has now been chosen as a semifinalist in a writing contest. The trip that gets the most votes by September 15th wins a paid writing contract. If you'd be so kind as to vote for me, I'd really appreciate it. You can do so by visiting my trip page here and clicking "Add to Wishlist."

Letter

Yesterday, after I posted my two-month letter to V, I got a text from a friend saying that she was thinking about me. I racked my brains for a minute to figure out what was special about the day. And then I remembered. So I wrote another letter.

Dear Veronica,

I already wrote you a letter today, to commemorate your 2-month birthday, but then a friend reminded me that today is also the day that my father died 6 years ago. I had completely forgotten and was shocked to realize I had done so. And then I felt a kind of warmth at knowing that it's because of you that I'm not focusing on such sad events.

You woke up from a nap just a bit ago and were disoriented and startled so I held you in my arms in the rocker in your nursery until your breathing evened and your head fell softly against my chest. We were both quiet then and I could tell you were drifting off to sleep. I thought about that day 6 years ago when my father died and I couldn't help but cry, wiping my tears with one of your burp rags.

I wish so much that he were here to meet you today. He was the sweetest man, so kind and patient and really, truly wise. He would have loved to meet you.

My last days with him were so sweet and so sad. He died at home in his condo in California and I was there, taking care of him. We held hands a lot those last days and were quiet for long hours, sitting there together in the late afternoon gloom of his bedroom.

On the last day that he was truly conscious, he reached out his hand as I sat beside him and he touched my face. I closed my eyes and let him run his fingers over my cheeks and eyelids, my nose and chin. And only now do I understand what it must have felt like for him to do so. As I sit here with you in my arms, running my own fingers across your cheeks, it breaks my heart to imagine how I could ever do that knowing it would be the last time.

When he was finished my father looked at me and said, "Life is worth living," but it is only now, only since you have been in my life, that I truly understand what he must have felt in that moment.

Thank you for giving me that.

Love, Mom

Twelve Years

Dear Mom,

It is January 24, 2009. You have been dead for 12 years. It’s hard to believe that I’ve been writing these letters all this time…12 years worth of letters telling you about the progression of my life since I last saw you.

Beside me lies a photo of you taken on April 29, 1978. You were 8 months pregnant with me. You look so beautiful in this photo; your stance proud and your smile luminescent.

As I write this, I am 5 months pregnant. I lied in bed this morning with Greg, both our hands on my belly, and felt the little kicking from within. I’ve thought of you so much through this process. I’ve wondered so much about your experience of pregnancy and I’ve sat, hunched over photo albums, peering at polaroids my father surely took of you throughout the nine months before you gave birth to me.

A lot has happened in the last year, mom. A lot that I would have loved to have you here for. Oh, I just had to get up for tissues. I’m already crying. Every single year I think I won’t cry when I write this letter…and every year I do.

I got engaged and married last year, mom. Two things I would have loved to have had you here for, more than anything. Although, I’m sure that when I give birth in June that will top them both, in terms of wishing you were here.

I couldn’t be happier to be married, mom. Greg is the most wonderful man I’ve ever met. Besides Dad. He’s so kind and caring and patient and he makes me feel complete in a way that I never expected. It’s just like you wrote to me all those years ago –

Find yourself and you’ll find your other self, you wrote. Give each other space and respect – there can be no tiny, nagging doubt. The Italians have a name for it – colpe di fulme – and it’s likened to being struck by lightening when you both meet, which I adore. Accept nothing else. Have babies which I can take care of. Please choose a man who adores you and would never hurt you.

And it was like that, mom. There was never any doubt, never any question. Falling in love with Greg was the easiest thing I’ve ever done in my life. In April of last year he got down on one knee and put a ring on my finger and asked me to marry him. It was your ring, mom. He took the stone from the beautiful engagement ring that Dad gave you and had it made into something special just for me. Every time I look at it, I’m reminded of you and Dad and the love that I come from.

We were married in July on Cape Cod. In the very church where you were married over 30 years ago. I’ve never felt so beautiful or happy in my life as I did on that day. Uncle David officiated the ceremony, just as he did for you and Dad, and Greg and I exchanged vows that we wrote ourselves. That afternoon we dined on lobsters and champagne in Pam’s backyard by the beach and then we all went swimming in the ocean. It couldn’t have been a more perfect day.

Afterwards we returned to our life in Chicago, our beautiful home on the river with the ducks and softly flowing water and cicadas ringing in the trees. And in September we conceived the baby that I’m carrying. I thought of you so much that month, wondering what it had been like for you and Dad in those first few weeks of learning that you were pregnant with me. It happened so fast for us, but we couldn’t be more excited.

I’m due in June, just a couple of weeks after my 31st birthday. I like thinking that you and I will have carried our babies through the same seasons. I look forward to the warmer months, to spring and then summer and the baby here, making three of us. If I haven’t already felt part of a family again, I know I will, more than ever, then.

But I miss you, mom. So much. I wish you were here with me through these life events. But I also know that you knew I would do all these things, that I would grow into the woman I am, that I would marry and have babies and be beautiful and happy.

I hope to be as good a mother as you were. To give my child the same fierce love and understanding that you never ceased to bestow on me. It’s a love I still feel today, and of that, there is no greater gift that a parent can give. Thank you.

Your only daughter,
Claire

Life Goes On

Election day was bittersweet for me.

Just before I left the house in the afternoon to get on the train to head downtown to meet Greg, I learned that my favorite hospice patient died. He's been a patient of ours for a year and for the last ten months I've visited him every week.

His death came as no surprise. I'd been to see him on Monday morning, after learning of his sharp decline over the weekend. He recognized me for a moment when I got there, calling out his familiar, "Helooo, Clara," before going back to talking to someone in the corner who wasn't there. I sat with him for a while, holding both of his hands while tears streamed down my cheeks. Before I left I gave him a kiss on his forehead and told him that I loved him.

I'm not sad for his death but I will miss him dearly. He was due to turn 96 years old next week and was a Lutheran Reverend for most of those years. He and his wife had been married for 65 years and the house in which he lived had belonged to her parents, built at the turn of the century.

I met The Reverend (as everyone affectionately refers to him) in January and I've gone to see him every week since. All day long he would sit in a reclining chair by the window, listening to classical music on an old radio and looking out the window at the quiet neighborhood beyond. An old grandfather clock chimes behind him and he shuffles through the newspaper. I would sit across from him and let him tell me stories. Sometimes we would just hold hands. He always greeted and bid me farewell with a kiss on the cheek. He always called me Clara. He often told me he loved me.

He was intrigued with my story: the girl with no parents who moved from Los Angeles to follow her heart. Being old fashioned and conservative though, he was worried that I had moved all this way without the promise of marriage. He offered many times to marry me and Greg. I took Greg to meet him in an attempt to assuage any concerns. He agreed that he's very handsome. And on each visit after that The Reverend would check my hand for a ring. In late April, when I finally got to hold out my hand with its sparkly diamond engagement ring, he was thrilled and we celebrated with sparkling apple cider.

He was even more thrilled with our quickly following nuptials and listened in earnest as I told him all the details upon our return from Cape Cod. I blew up photos so that he could peer at them, declaring everything perfect. I always felt that he was looking after me and I never doubted that he loved me. He often reminded me of my father and I never stopped being grateful to have him in my life this year.

Last week, on my regular visit, he was already beginning to decline. I told him then that I was pregnant and he was thrilled. "I've been waiting," he said, with a grin, and I was glad that I told him. Leaving that day, I had a feeling that it might be one of my last visits and when I got the call on Sunday that he had really taken a turn for the worse, I leaned against the counter in the kitchen where I'd been making soup, and I closed my eyes for a moment, so grateful for all this time I've had with him.

But visiting him on Monday was harder than I thought. I will truly miss our time together each week. It's been one of reflection and gentle caring, one of support, and a nourishment I didn't realize was missing in my life. The Reverend has been a beautiful reminder that life continues to unfold until the very end and I will always be grateful for the time we shared together.

Tuesday Morning Thoughts

It snowed for just a moment yesterday.

As I sat at my desk in our little second floor flat, snow drifted softly past the windows to fall on the roof next door. But today it's back to being fall, the leaves a bright auburn color, a chill in the air warning of the cold night ahead.

I've been thinking about death this morning. And how my thoughts on it have evolved in the last year. I read a story in a magazine at the gym yesterday about a girl who became bulimic after her mother died, so ruptured was her world with this loss. And I thought about myself at age 20 in New York City, my world collapsing around me as I tried to make sense of my mother's absence. It never ceases to amaze me how huge these losses can be.

But today I've been thinking of my father and of the nights when he sat on the edge of my bed, rubbing my back as I wept. I think about the things he told me about life, about how swiftly moving and vast it can be, about how wonderful it is to be alive, about how life will present nothing but constant change. The world is what you want it to be, kiddo, he'd say. Life is always worth living.

And I've been thinking this morning about how many times he told me those things. But how it wasn't until I truly learned them myself that they made sense.

I don't feel sad at all anymore that my parents are gone. I miss them sometimes and I'm often so grateful for them that tears well up in my eyes. Sometimes I wish more than anything that I could talk to them, that they were still here to be my parents. But I'm not sad that they're gone. I'm not sad that this is my life, that I am who I am, that my life will continue to unspool as it does.

Death, it finally seems to me, is no different than life. They are each other. And perhaps that's the one thing that will never change.

On Death & Dying

I've been having a hard time at my job. Certain aspects of it have been getting to be too much for me.

I still enjoy the counseling. I enjoy visiting patients and families and I think I do good work with them. It's so meaningful and restorative to me to be able to help someone through such a challenging point in their life. I often reflect on when I, myself, was in a similar situation and how grateful I was for the people around me who stepped in to help see me through it. I sometimes think that is what life is about -- a series of interactions in which when we are strong, we help others and when we are not, they help us.

What I've been struggling with is constantly hearing about illness and disease. Every Thursday I spend two hours in an interdisciplinary team (IDT) meeting. I sit at a long boardroom table, my high heels crossed against the table leg, my case load binder open in front of me, paperwork and pens and sticky notes nudging into everyone's else's piles of the same. On my left is our social worker, on my right is one of our nurses. Across from me sits another nurse, sandwiched between the chaplain and the massage therapist. At the end of the table the two home health aides sit next to each other. At the head of the table our team doctor sits between our clinical director and office secretary.

And for two hours we discuss all of the patients we currently care for. We begin with all of those who died in the last week -- what their death was like, how the family is doing, when the funeral or memorial service will be and any psychosocial risks for the bereaved. After that, we discuss the new patients we have taken on in the last week -- their diagnosis, whether they are at home or in the hospital or in a nursing home, who is caring for them, what kind of help they might need, and what our team can do for them and their family as a whole. Finally, after that, we discuss all of our current patients -- any change in health status or caregiver needs, and who is visiting when.

Words and phrases like stage four colon cancer, mets (metastatic) to the bone, lung cancer, swelling in the brain, morphine, lung mets, albuterol, prostate cancer, bleed out, bed sores, mets to the ovaries, liver cancer, severe hip pain, hospital bed, brain cancer, terminal, alzheimers, dementia, breast cancer, stroke, cardiovascular disease, pancreatic cancer, aortic stenosis,  tumors, renal disease, COPD, failure to thrive, and on and on.

I can't stand these words. They make my belly go cold with fear. As I sit there for those two hours, hearing these words tossed around I literally feel those places in my body as they're said. My liver. My lungs. My heart. My brain.

I think about Greg and I think about my life and I think about how much I don't want to get sick ever. I think about how much I want to do with my time here and how much I want to have kids. And I can't help but think these things and sometimes I can't get these words and phrases out of my head. Literally, sometimes I wake up in the mornings with the word scopolamine in my head. (It's a kind of pain killer.)

And you know, I look around the room at the doctors and nurses and social workers and secretaries and although some of the nonclinical people like me will squirm at a particularly graphic description of someone's medical problem, for the most part, none of them seem to be at all haunted by these words.

I know that so much of my fear has to do with having lost both of my parents to cancer and having watched that disease ravage their bodies over the years, but I can't help wondering how no one else seems to be haunted by all this disease-talk like I am. I'm of the opinion that what we think about grows -- another reason I hate having these thoughts and words and illnesses in my head all the time. But then I think about oncologists who work closely with disease every day -- where do they put these things? How do they wake up in the morning without the word cancer on the forefront of their thoughts?

And I just keep wondering, is there a way for me to do this job without constantly ingesting it all like this??

Slowing Down

I can't believe that the wedding is over. That it all actually happened and is said and done for now.

I don't mean that in a mournful way. I think if we had waited a year, it still would have felt immense and swirling and over faster than we thought. I mean more that I almost can't believe that it happened at all. That I got to get married, that I made it this far into my life, that such an unbelievably good thing was able to happen.

The last couple of years have been filled with a lot of good things. There have been graduations and writing accolades, huge life moves and falling in love, new jobs and beautiful places to live, incredible friends and a proposal from the person I love the most.

But for a long time in my life things were hard. My days were full of knotting tension and anxiety about the well being of people I loved. Then they were filled with loss and painful memories, loneliness and self-hatred. I think most of my adult life, so far, has been spent in a realm of fear and sadness and inner isolation.

When things began to turn around a couple of years ago, in large part to the work I was doing on letting go of those ways of being, it was like entering into a whole new world. Everything felt different, temperatures and textures, sounds and tastes, all evolved to suit this new way of looking at the world: a way that wasn't so much about holding onto the past and all the sad things that happened but that was much more about consciously moving forward into the life I wanted to create for myself.

Easier said than done though. I've said it before and I'll say it again: falling in love with Gregory was one of the scariest things I've ever experienced. I was so afraid to invite something into my life that could have the potential to also become one of the greatest losses I'll ever experience. In the beginning I could only think about how painful it would be to lose this person whom I already knew I would love more than I had ever loved anyone.

I still think about it a lot. I have a constant murmuring in the back of my head that says, please let me have this. Please let me have these days, these moments, this love. Please let me marry this man and start a family with him. Sometimes I find myself calculating how long would be enough. I think of my mother, who died when she was 58, and I think, that might be enough. If we had children in the next few years then they would be young adults by then. If I could only have that long, please, please let me have that.

Truthfully, all this time, throughout my twenties, I don't think I thought that I'd ever get this far. Losing my parents and going through all that I did really did a number on my sense of mortality and the movement of life.

But now.

Now things are changing. Tears are in my eyes as I type this. I got to get married. I got to fall in love, to have this wedding, to go to sleep night after night next to this beautiful man whom I love and who loves me. All things I was so terrified would never happen. But they did. These facts and experiences, these moments and truths, they all stand just as as tall and as real as my parents' deaths. The gain is beginning to equal the loss in the most profound way.

Realizing this forces me to continue reconfiguring all the things I thought about life. And it calms me and allows me to begin to release this urgency I carry around. It's like an equation. If I was able to fall in love and get married then it suddenly seems quite possible that I could be able to have children one day and live a long and happy life. Whereas before, the equation read more like, if I can lose one person I love then I can lose another.

All this to say that for the first time in a long time, I have this feeling that I can slow down, that, if even for just a little while, I can stop obsessing over whether or not things will happen. That I can simply breathe and be in my life. That I can finish this post by simply saying how grateful I am for everything that my life is.