Christmas Present

Another Christmas Season has passed and we sit on the eve of a New Year.  What 2011 will bring us is still a mystery, but life has taught me that there is sure to be some beauty and there is sure to be some pain.  I'm ok with that.  Beauty and light can become mundane and taken for granted if not punctuated with darkness to contrast with it.  Imagine the people who live near the Grand Canyon...do you suppose they get up every morning and think "WOW that's amazing"!  Or perhaps do they occasionally think, "what a pain to have to drive all the way around this hole in the ground to get to the other side!"

For those living with grief and pain, there is the occasional beautiful moment that lifts us up and gives us hope and floods us with love.  With God's blessing, those times come frequently.   Sometimes it doesn't take much, because it is the contrast that makes the difference, right?  Everything is relative.  Remember High School chemistry?  Right, me neither.  But if you don't believe me, do this experiment.  Put your finger in a glass of icy water for a few minutes...cold right?  Now put the same finger in a glass of tap water...ahh, feels nice and warm.  But you know it is cool, don't you?  You just poured it from the sink.  It's all relative.  If your finger had started out at room temperature, you would have to heat the water to feel the warmth.

This was a rough holiday season for me, but yet filled with thousands of warm moments, so overall, it was a happy time.  I was surrounded by the love of friends and family.  I was reminded that it isn't the gifts, the money, the place, or the pageantry.  It is simply the people.  God lives in the people (and perhaps the puppies and kittens). 

But even surrounded with the love of Christmas Present, I longed also for Christmas Past.  Every Christmas Past was not perfect....some were lonely, some were poor, some were spent in foreign lands far from family, some were challenging....but for 21 precious years, all had Michaela.  As the holiday season started this year, I was overwhelmed with feelings of loss and loneliness, missing my baby girl.  But along the way, family arrived, friends stopped in, the phone rang, messages of joy and life were everywhere, and I received hope.  A few days before Christmas, a calm sense of waiting and knowing and peacefulness came over me.  And I knew Michaela was with us this year again.  I knew she would show herself, but I just didn't know when or how.

Finally, late Christmas night, the holiday over....the Christmas party cleaned up and everything put away.  Most of the guests gone home, a few of us sat down to play a board game.  Such a random little thing.  We seldom play board games here and we haven't played a single one since Michaela died.  It was something she liked to do the most and she would talk everyone else into it.  So I looked in the closet for a game and only one looked like any fun (Wise and Otherwise, the funnest game nobody has ever heard of).  The object of the game is basically to make up endings to 'wise, old sayings' from other cultures and try to get people to vote for yours as the real saying.  But in our house, the object has always seemed to be to get the most laughs possible regardless of winning or losing. 

I opened the box to play and there it was...Christmas Past was my Christmas Present.  The last time we had played this game was at Christmastime in 2007.  And in the box was all of the little slips of paper from that game.  A simple thing.  Doubters rejoice....of course these things will happen.  Nothing proven here.  But on Christmas night, after waiting patiently for 3 days for something to happen, I had my answer in the form of these little, funny, light-hearted slips of paper.  Nothing heavy, nothing to make me sad...just a small stack of tiny papers written  in her hand and with her crazy sense of humor to give me a few minutes of Christmas Past. 




Mich



Erin



Dave

Where is the Wizard now?

This is the picture that is Michaela's Facebook profile picture and will be forever.  It was taken just a few nights before her accident.  I remember the night very well.  She came out of her room wearing black and white flats.  I didn't like it much; thought it looked a bit dumpy (like I am some fashion guru). We re-worked the outfit adding the shoes and a red necklace of mine to a black and white dress...it was fun. 

Late that night she sent me a text message that she had been drinking and was spending the night at a friends.  She said they had a lot of fun.  Later on, after, her friends told me that they had gotten to the house and Michaela laid down and fell asleep; then she sat up and said she needed to text me and let me know where she was.  Her friends told her to go back to sleep, that it was late and I was already asleep anyway.  But she was insistent.  She said if I woke up and she wasn't there, I would be worried and she didn't want that.

I think about that a lot, and when I get little signs, I know they are from her.  I know that she doesn't want me to worry. 

Anyway, the picture.  Every single time I visit her page, I look at that picture and think....why can't she just click those heels together and say 'there's no place like home' a few times?  Come back to me from over the rainbow.  Just for a little while?  Please?

Mi-shay-la

She hated this dress because she
said she had shoulders like a
linebacker.

My daughter.  Her name is Michaela.  That is pronounced Mi-shay-la.  She loved her name but never forgave me for it either.  The idea at the time we named her was for it to be shortened, someday, to simply Chae.  She was named for her father, Michael.  But the pronounciation came from the region of Germany that she was born in, that tends to soften the ch sound rather than harden it to a K sound as in the High German made famous to Americans by JFK in the Ich Bin Ein Berliner speech (I hope that reference is correct).  But as children are never as cooperative as we hope when they are born, she detested Chae and Chala as much of her family called her against her wishes, but ended up with Mich or Mishy. 

I also have an amazing son, David, and two great stepchildren, Brandon and Heather.  They are alive to speak for themselves (and defend themselves against anything I may say), so you will never see a blog devoted to talking abou them.  But my daughter, my firstborn, my baby girl, is not alive to represent herself, so I have the freedom to talk about her all I wish.  Unlike most people seem to think, it isn't talking about her that hurts.  It is the fear of people forgetting that she was and who she was.

It took some practice.

Michaela was a force of personality from the time she was born.  She spoke her first word at Christmas when she was 9 months old.  It was 'pretty'.  We have no idea whether it was about the Christmas tree or the ugly dog decoration she was particularly fascinated with.  She maintained her fascination with ugly tree decorations, so maybe that was it.  She was also walking by then.  The first three or four months of her life, she did nothing but cry and puke.  I know now she cried out of pure frustration against not being able to do for herself.  Once she was able to hold her own bottle (3 months) and then her own spoon (5 months) and push herself around in her walker (5 months), the crying stopped.  She would wake up every morning with a smile and we would find her standing in her crib happy as could be. (lest you think I'm bragging, she wasn't potty trained until she was 3).



Her love of music started young.

 I am not going to go through 21 years month by month.  Although I do it in my mind all the time.  This is just a list of things even people who knew her might not know about Michaela.  Or perhaps it is some things I don't want forgotten.

Her dimples.  She hated them.  She called them craters in her face.  She got them from me :).  Maybe the only physical feature she did.

Her hairy arms.  She also hated them.  She actually asked for laser hair removal for Christmas one year, even though I kept telling her it would go away with time (she may also have gotten this from me).

She loved unconditionally.  Like nobody I have ever met before or since.  Once she loved you, she loved you.  You may disappoint her and by damnit she would tell you about it, but she loved you anyway.  Nobody was ever an 'x' friend of Michaela's, although of course, people came and went as we moved around.  She believed in first, second and 22nd chances.



Dressed as her hero
for spirit week.

 She had a compass for right and wrong that had nothing to do with religion and everything to do with right and wrong. 

She loved to talk about the issues of the world.  She went to college hoping to find like minds (or unlike minds, but someone to talk to either way), but was very disappointed in her fellow students (she felt all they wanted to do was party and find others to do the work), so she became an RA...not to police her fellow students, but to help them.  She was always more mature than her age group and that didn't change until her last year at college when a compromise seemed to be reached...other students caught up with her as she learned to relax just a little bit.

Her first week as RA, she had to turn someone in for smoking pot in the dormitory.  The person she turned in, knowing it was Michaela who turned her in, asked her to accompany her to the police station to help her.  That was the power of Michaela.  It was always that way.


Speaks for itself.

 She loved Disney movies.  I think her favorite was Finding Nemo but there were many she liked.  She loved Ellen DeGeneres as Dori and could do a great imitation of her.  She could do great imitations in general.  Funny accents were a specialty.

She was a perfectionist.  For better and worse.  She was also a packrat.  For worse.  She kept every single card and every single note anyone ever wrote her.

She journalled all of the time, but mostly when she was feeling an emotional extreme, either up or down.  For that reason it is hard for me to read her journals.  Too much down and pain, but punctuated by such highs.



Entertaining Nathan.

 She was an artist, but most of her art was inspired by sadness.  Much of it is very dark.  She also wrote poetry.  Her soul cried for what it could not understand.  She always said when she was happy she couldn't make art.

Every single time she came home from school (college) we would sit up all night talking the first night.  That is how I knew what she wanted to happen when she died.

She loved Thanksgiving the most, but was like a child (always) for a Christmas at home.  She had endless enthusiasm for the little rituals of the holidays.

She hated math.  It just eluded her.  The simplest algebraic equations baffled her.  I don't know if that is a product of her education (she missed the fundamentals because of a wierd experiment they were doing in England when she was in elementary school) or just a matter of how her mind worked.   I couldn't help her because she just got too emotional, so a friend had to tutor her....God bless his patience. 



Loving on Bear.

 She loved her brother more than anyone in the world.  And she seemed to know he was going to live longer than her (but that is another blog).

She won an amatuer "strip" contest once and was so proud of her "guts" to even participate, that she couldn't not tell me about it.  (She was sober both when she did it and when she told me about it.)

She thought I loved her brother more than her.

She loved her stepbrother and stepsister immensely, although they frustrated her.  She wanted them to do well, but they weren't doing it fast enough to suit her purposes.  I guess it is hard to be the oldest.

Once, as a toddler, I let her eat raisins all day long to keep her calm during a softball tournament.  Her babysitter was NOT happy the next day and saved all the diapers to show me.

She wouldn't speak to me on her 16th birthday, even though she got a car.  It was a stick shift.  She didn't know how to drive a stick shift.  She was quite mad.  That was her first of 3 cars.  She never owned anything but a stick shift.  She didn't want to.  She was proud of her ability to drive one and took it upon herself to teach anyone who would participate how to drive one.  (her stepbrother has one now too...hmm, wonder how that happened). 

Once a (young) policeman stopped her and asked if her car was stolen.  She wasn't doing anything wrong.  I don't know why her ran her plates (hot young blond, perhaps?).  Her plate was personalized "M1SHY".  He ran MISHY. 



Must of been a good story.

 She started a family tradition of going to movies on Christmas night...once the presents are open and dinner has been napped off, why not?  One year we saw .....the Barber of Seville?....murder and mayhem.  I was not happy.  But still a good family memory.  I will never see another movie on Christmas...probably.

She did really poorly the first time she took the GRE.  It was heart breaking when she called me in tears, literally howling about her stupidity.  How can a Cum Laude student do bad on the GRE?  Take all the math in the first year (during HS, dual enrollment), then never do math again.  After she had already been accepted into a great program, bad GRE and all, she was scheduled to retake it.  She asked if she should, I hesitated, but told her yes.  What a good decision.  Without the pressure she raised her score 200 points.

Helping me with a project.

Peace, Love, Save the Whales

She couldn't tell time on a regular clock.  Ever.  No matter who tried to teach her.

Fall Out Boy.  Enough Said.

COEXIST...she made the bumpersticker into a huge back window drawing and left it there for a year.  She believed it wholeheartedly.

My biggest disappointment in the Obama administration is that she really believed they could make a change.

She would make lists of what needed to be done...but in her perfectionism, she would include the daily musts (like 'brush my teeth'), so her lists would be ridiculously long.


She loved this picture.

 Once we went to a minor league baseball game and the catcher threw her a ball with his phone number on it.

This could be an endless blog, of course.  But I will end it here.  It is a quiet Sunday afternoon.  Dinner has been eaten.  The Steelers are playing.  I have a good book to read and time to think about my daughter's life.  Peace Out.

Treasures

My last short post I announced that Michaela's FB page had been restored.  Hurray, good news!  But...as I expected this was probably a programming error.  It is a mixed result at this time.   The notes and the videos are still there.  The conversations and status updates are gone.  Anticipating that would happen, I spent that entire day cutting and pasting her notes, our friendship and then her own page with all of her status updates.  What a treasure to have.  A literal day by day accounting of her mood, her thoughts, her conversations with people. 
I started copying her pages and got back to December of 2009.  I couldn't do any more, I had to take a break from it.  I wanted to continue sooner, but I was also a bit afraid to.  After the initial rush of excitement and the frantic copying, there was a huge let down and an enormous emotional toll.  Imagine if you possibly can, after 18 months of nothing, to be bombarded with memory after memory after memory. Overwhelming.  Wonderful, but draining.  And, in the end, as a very new, but already dear friend of mine said, 'in the end, you still don't have her.' 

I even tried not to read as I was copying, if you can believe that.  I wasn't there to dwell in the memories, but only to copy them, to keep them, to have them for someday, to know they were still there if I wanted to read them.  But I couldn't stop the words from jumping off the screen either.  'Hey mom!  I love you!'  'Mom, you're profile picture is so oddly elegant.  I am so excited to be like you.'  'I love my life.' 'I love my brother.'  From Italy:  'The phone rings. Who do you want it to be? ::My phone doesn't ring. I don't have one here. But if it did I would WANT it to be my mommy.' And the mundane:  'Mumzy, would you make me a hair appointment with Song?'  Each line bringing a specific moment into crystal clear focus.



By Michaela (remember my blog about Circles?)

 Anyway, I am lucky.  I am blessed.  I have a lot of treasures that a lot of people don't get to have.  Michaela wrote journals for her entire life.  They are private and they are personal and I will never know exactly what was in her head at the time that she wrote some things.  I have only glanced through them.  It is too hard to dwell there either, partly because she mostly wrote when she was sad or down or had something on her mind to work out.  She drew and made art leaving me everything from doodles to masterpieces.  She wrote poetry.  She loved to be in front of a camera and would ham it up for a video.  Hours and hours of video from when she was a little girl.  Snippets of video documenting her life at college.  Songs!  Videos of herself sing love ballads and rap songs. 

She wrote notes to me.  I didn't keep them all.  I wish I had kept more. She often wrote when she had something she wanted to discuss with me, but was having a hard time starting the conversation, things she struggled with.  She would write the note, hand it to me, and sit down to wait for me to read it so we could talk about it.  They weren't a way to avoid a conversation, they were a way to start one. These I don't have any longer. 

But I kept some.  I keep them in my nightstand. She wrote me long notes on Mother's day for the past few years.  Each one documenting her love for me and the way that I raised her.  Each one talking about specific lessons she learned from me.  Each one listing specific things she loved about me.  Each one talking about her hopes for herself in the future.  These I kept.  I thank God for that.  They bring me a great deal of comfort and peace.  I do read these notes fairly regularly.  They remind me that she loved me and she knew I loved her.  They remind me that she was happy and that no matter how unusual our life was, she loved her family unconditionally.

Only one note I kept was not from Mother's day.  It was written on Dec 31, 2008, after what turned out to be our last Christmas together.  It was 2 pages long.  It is the best gift of all. 

"I don't think you understand how much I LOVE visiting home.  ... I feel so warm and comfortable and just peaceful here ... It's home and home is where everyone wants to be, all the time.  ... I really love the time I get to spend with you and Bill.  I love you both so much.  I'm so lucky.  Really. I. Am. So. Lucky.  ... I'm really sad to be leaving .... The point is I love you very much and it is both sad and scary to leave your 'wing' and my current idea and familiar basis of 'home'.  ... And this Christmas was a memorable one.  It was amazing.  Everyone got along; everyone was happy to be here and wanted to be in the company of everyone else. ... and, your sheep blanky is very comfortable. (I'm curled up in it as we speak! Ha Ha!) But no worries; I'm not sweating. .....   The point is:  I really love you.  You are home.  ..... PS.  My grades from fall:  A, A-,A-,A-,B ... your awesomest daughter."

Signed, as always, with a little heart and then her name.  What an amazing gift.  A treasure like no other.

A Christmas Present from Facebook

Wow, what a day!  I am exhausted.  I am emotionally drained. 

Facebook gave me Michaela's words back!  Every last one of them!

Her entire page has been restored.

I don't know if this is an accident caused by the latest update to the profile formats or deliberate, so just in case, I am copying and pasting as fast as I can. 

Seeing her words, just her every day status', her notes that blogged her way through three years of growing up at college.  I can't even begin to say what it means to have this gift.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

I don't have time to write a blog now, but I wanted to share this wonderful news.

Katy

A summer (miracle?) story

It is very cold outside today (for Florida).  I have to say that first, because it is a law in Florida that if the temperature is below 40 degrees, you must first make comment on the weather before saying anything else. 

As Christmas approaches, my mind wanders towards miracles, so I thought I would share a true story, even though it is a summer story (actually I thought I had published this story before, but I guess not...the mind is a a terrible thing).  I'll leave you to decide for yourself if it qualifies as a miracle story, but please respect my wish that you keep any non-believing thoughts to yourself.  It is my miracle, please let me have it my way :). 

A picture I borrowed to
represent myself

First the back story, because without the back story, there is no miracle, just carelessness.  To understand the story, you must know that my nickname among my closest friends is Happy (never mind why, it isn't important).  Second, you must know that since being bestowed this nickname, I often use a 1970's style yellow Happy Face to represent myself.  Third, it is a fact that on the day that this story happened, my FB profile picture was a picture of a woman hiding behind a Mylar happy face balloon (representing the happy face that we, the grieving, hide behind for the rest of the world). 

Mich in her famous
tie dye with a friend
she ran into at a concert

Next you must know a little bit about my daughter, Michaela.  Michaela was a bright color fanatic.  She decorated everything around her in the brightest colors she could find.  She was the Queen of Tie Dye. She loved balloons and for a very long time had a deflated, crazy colored Mylar fish balloon hung on her wall.  A few short weeks before her accident, we went to see the movie Up!.  It was the last movie we saw together.  She absolutely loved it of course, it was 100% her...bright and colorful and all about the importance of relationships over things.  And lastly, she was scrupulous about making sure that I had no reason to worry about her, particularly that summer...if she was going to be late or stay with a friend, she made sure I knew where she was (even though she was an adult). 



A few of her favorite things

 Now the story.  On a late June Sunday afternoon, a year after her accident, we held a 'Remembrance' at the beach where we had put her remains.  This beach is at the far north end of a lifeguard protected beach (one of the few in the area).  It was a perfectly beautiful day and my friends came out for the day from all over Florida.  We sprawled out under awnings and beach umbrellas sharing drinks, and stories, and pictures.  We took some of her favorite things with us.  It was a nice day.  A good day to remember. 



Flowers put on the beach on
Long Island in Rembrance (daffodils
were her favorite flower)

 Mid-afternoon, at the very edge of the horizon, floating slowly north, we could see something glinting in the sun.  It was much too far away to see what it was, but we all watched its slow progress up the coast.  Moving steadily North, not moving out to sea or closer to the beach.  It floated past the last lifeguard stand (about 100 yards south of us).  As it passed his stand, he decided to 'rescue' it (apparently none of the other lifeguards had thought to do this).  It took him a very long time to swim out to what we could now clearly see.  It floated past us with the lifeguard in hot pursuit.  Finally he caught it, and swam in with it (about 100 yards north of us).  Then he carried it back down the beach to his lifeguard stand and tied it there, where it amazingly had enough air left to keep it floating lazily behind the chair for the rest of the afternoon.

As I'm sure you have figured out by now, it was a bunch of Mylar balloons.  But not just any old balloons, it was a bouquet of yellow happy face balloons (4 of them) with a few smaller red and blue balloons thrown in for color.  I have only this one picture.  I don't know why there weren't more.  I think we were all too stunned (and crying) to think to take any.



The lifeguard in action



Pain and Kindness

I have about 10 different blogs started in drafts and lists.  I have even more in my head that I know I will write about when the time is right;  the more personal stories about my grief journey and my views on miracles and signs.  But lately I sit down in front of the computer and all I want to write is:  'It hurts, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts' over and over again like a child being punished at the blackboard.  So instead of writing about my feelings and the pain of living and losing, I throw up a deceptively cheerful Facebook status, play another round of Word With Friends, and try to stay on a track that keeps me from spilling my own personal anguish all over everyone else around me.

Why?  Because I am not the only one with personal anguish.  The world is full of people are doing their best to cope with their own problems.  Not that we can't rely on each other for help.  We can and we should.  But we can't just wander around blindly assuming that our own pain is the only pain or the biggest pain or the most important pain in the world.  We can't (or shouldn't) strike out in anger at other people when our own pain becomes intolerable. 

I was very down a few months ago and believe it or not, this concept had not occurred to me.  I was so far down that I couldn't see much of anyone else's problems (I couldn't see much of anything besides my pain).  It didn't help matters that until Michaela died so unexpectedly, I was living a blissful life.  I thought I had problems.  I complained.  Things weren't perfect, but I had no concept of the kind of raw, soul scratching pain the universe can hand to someone.  I was hurting and I was taking it out on the whole world.

During that time, I was talking to a friend and some of the problems that other people were having came up, I don't remember how.  What I remember her saying is 'there is so much pain in the world, it is a wonder that anything good ever happens' or something along those lines. 

Whatever her exact words were, they stopped me in my tracks.  I spent the rest of the day thinking about people I know personally and the challenges they face--cancer, abuse, broken hearts, loneliness, family alienation, financial hardship, teen suicide, cutting, fear, life-style haters, discrimination.  That day I decided to quit spilling my own anguish on others.  I share my pain and ask for help when I need it, but I don't flip off the driver in the next car for making an error just because I'm having a bad day.  I try not to grump at the co-worker who asks me the same question for the 3rd time.  I try not to snap at the person blocking the entire lane at the Walmart while they try to pick between 7 kinds of green beans.  And I try not to write blogs that just say 'it hurts, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts'. 

That day was several months ago.  I haven't been entirely successful in my endeavor to be more understanding of other people's pain, but I thought I had been doing a pretty good job of not spreading even more pain out there.  At least up until this week.  This week my grief came at me with a vengence and I found myself being snappy and snitty with everyone, even my wonderful husband, who, unfortunately had to weather the worst of it.  It is like being on a diet I suppose, one bad day doesn't ruin the whole thing....so up I will climb again, onto that wagon of hope, and try a little harder to keep my cup of anguish from splashing onto other people.

I know that I was right in my last post.  This year's holidays are going to be a very difficult challenge for me.  Thanksgiving passed without incident as my armor was wrapped tight around me and I had a plan of action for getting through, but as soon as the holiday weekend ended, the plan ended and the armor dropped and the pain struck blindingly.  So I learn.  I need a plan, a track to follow, a place to aim for, to keep my pain from sidetracking me.  I will stay focused on the good things in life, but I will not beat myself up for crying when my heart is breaking and I will not strike out at the people who are trying to help me.

I am blessed this year to have everyone coming home for the holidays.  There will be a lot of love and laughter and there will be a lot of action to keep me insulated from my own pain for a little while.  There will be a plan and we will all get through it together, perhaps we will do even better than just get through.  We will make new memories, happy memories.  And I will remember through the holidays and even afterwards, especially afterwards, that everyone is carrying their own pain inside.

Please be kind to each other.