Poetic License

Sometimes I go back to places I’ve been with my daughter. Those places might be real, physical places or just places in my mind or heart, virtual but just as real. We’re just weeks away from what would have been her 40th birthday. Forty!

She has been gone from us for nearly 15 years now. It feels like more. Lately, I am seeking out those places we walked through together because she’s been gone for a lifetime, and people don’t understand that. They don’t say her name. They didn’t know her or don’t remember her well.

Or in the case of one of my brothers, “didn’t really know her” so he sent some cheap-assed flowers and skipped the funeral. His damned cheap flowers got smashed to the bricks along with any sense of connection I had with him.

I’ve been missing my girl so much as the holidays bear down on me again. Recently I returned to a particular place I went with Stephanie, a virtual world of an L.A. funeral home and the complicated Fisher family who ran it, in the series Six Feet Under. It was a show we watched together and a show we cried over together, particularly the last episode, which I played twice during this rewatch.

She had a real thing for Nate, the oldest son, the reluctant funeral director who was an idealist, a free spirit, a person who cared about the earth and other people—in a deeply flawed way. She related to him. She related also to Claire, the artist and younger sister of Nate. As for David, the stalwart middle child who toed the line in everything except accepting his own sexuality, we loved him but didn’t feel as close to him, though I understood him better as I began to understand myself better.

I’ll never know why we got into that show so much, but it is well written and gritty, a little something for everyone. More than that, it’s a fascinating character study of people struggling with grief and mental illness. I guess that is the Venn diagram of the intersection between Stephanie and me. We shared a fascination with the end of life and the afterlife. We shared depression. We shared a fascination with the human mind. She never would have seen this as spirituality, but it was and is. As human beings, we have two things in common. We are born into this existence, and at the end, we die out of this existence, leaving behind only an empty husk that is consumed again by the earth.

My daughter was absolutely the most beautiful girl. She was stylish, though she never had the money for designer clothes. Many things she got from Goodwill or a thrift shop, because that was her preference. She loved vintage clothing. Before I moved out of my house in Maryland last year, I had to get rid of most of her orphaned belongings. I knew I wouldn’t have room for them in my small home in North Carolina.

When I was going through her treasures, I found a faux fur zebra print overcoat that was so Stephanie. Burying my face in it, I tried to inhale any trace left of her scent. It was gone. Some bins had been corrupted and things had mildewed. As I went through each piece that was not ruined, I began to sob in the way I hadn’t since that second year after she died. Standing in the middle of the cement basement, surrounded by boxes of her things and mine, I cried until my ribcage ached and my breath was hard to catch. My face, my shirt, were soggy with tears and snot. I finally had to force myself back upstairs and into a hot shower, attempting to wash away my pain and grief.

The next day I went back down and moved all of the things I had to part with to one side of the basement, leaving a dozen boxes or bins on the other side, which would go with me to NC. I made a phone call to have it all hauled away. When the man came it take it, I couldn’t watch. I went out onto the deck and stared off into the distance. I was hollow.

When you lose a child, the pain and grief are indescribable. Even mothers and fathers grieve differently. Neither can understand the other’s pain exactly, but the two of them are the only ones who have lost the child, in common, they created together. If I’d had my kidney removed with no anesthesia, that pain would not have reached the part of my brain or my heart that felt the loss of my daughter. There would have been no primal howl that could match what came from me when I first saw her body lying in the casket.

There is no fixing anything anymore. All of the problems are over, but likewise, the solutions are no longer possible. You can’t try anymore. It’s just over.

One of the things I said that first night after we got the news was, “We don’t have to worry where she is anymore. She’s okay and at peace.”

Bullshit.

I still don’t know where she is. I don’t understand. I can try, but I can’t know. I can only hope that she was greeted wherever she went with the warmth and love I felt during my near-death experience two years before she died.

She stood over me in the ICU room where I lay getting pints of blood infused. When I opened my eyes, she burst into tears.

What happened, Mom? You are so gray!

But she was still so beautiful when I saw her. So not gray. She was clean and quiet and still caught in the bloom of youth. Had you seen her under other circumstances, you would have thought she was Snow White, caught in a witch’s spell.

If only a kiss would have roused her. I kissed her hands, which, unembalmed, were still soft but cool. I kissed her forehead as I had done when she was a child. I kissed her cheek. I stroked her hair. She smelled like she had just come from the bath. I never wanted to leave, and I have no concept of how much time we stayed with her. I knew that when we left her, she would be taken to the crematorium. The next time we saw her, she would be an urnful of ash.

So whenever I go to the physical or spiritual places we shared, when I walk in downtown Frederick or in Baker Park, when I watch Grey’s Anatomy or Six Feet Under or even Schoolhouse Rock, I’m right back there with her. She is next to me on the couch, laughing along with me. Crying along with me. Walking beside me. Reaching out to grab my hand. Her skin was so soft that her Daddy used to say she had slept in lotion. She had the same blonde hair I’d had as a toddler and that her father still had. Dying it different colors as she got older, she finally settled on black, so stark against her porcelain skin. Such a contrast to her rosy cheeks and red lips. Her blue eyes saw everything.

She forgot nothing.

I remember, too. I will never forget.

Peace, Jude