Dear Worry

Small Things

Dear Worry,

This Mother’s day I went out to the country. The Hill Country. I wasn’t thinking about being a mother. Just feeling it a little bit. The weather was perfect. Partly cloudy. Perfect Texas weather. I wore a long navy-blue sundress with cactuses and cowboys and for the first time for an outing in almost a year, sandals.

It’s been a time of milestones. Glorious culminations of life coming from a long, long period of, for lack of a better word, Work.

To go from deep chronic illness to living life has been the second hardest journey of my life. Only shadowed by what I went through with my son—that paralleled my health’s decline. Not that it was the cause—any kind of long term stress is going to have an effect. No, my illness was rooted in many things, and my body as they say, kept the score.

As soon as we arrived at the local music fest, a small backyard bar-b-que, it down-poured— a quick and heavy rain—forcing us under a tent. There we met several people, all talkative and open and generous the way that Texans are. Not long after finishing our plate of home-cooked meats and beans and salads, oh my, the woman next to me and I struck up a conversation about my little dog, Daisy.

I don’t know what turns and twists the conversation took to get us to the moment where we both divulged our deepest wound. We’d both lost a child. I watched it—if that’s possible—this moment unfold. Here it is, some part of me recognized. In five years, I’d never had someone offer up their loss the way that she did. Nor have I ever felt compelled to share mine.

Until I met this particular mother.

A voice came in: Tell her. Tell her now. As if it was for her. As if I was put there in order to do so.

On Mother’s days past, as a practice of survival, I attuned to the cycle of life. The young children and parents, the teens, alongside older folks like me. It helped me to step back from what I think I know, from what I’ve experienced, and see that so much is not known to me. That I am a part of something so large, it hardly has a name. We call it Life, but Life is such a simple word for what Life is.

Because for a time, right after losing my son, I couldn’t be around children at all. I’d find myself studying families and wanting to reach over and say something. Something awful. Sometimes it felt like “fuck you,” as if they’d purposely showed up to force me to remember. Other times I’d desperately want to ask: “Can I hold your baby?” followed by the deep urge to cry.

I recognized the instincts for what they were. Confusion. Anger. Love. So hungry to go somewhere, but unable to move. Wanting to go back. If only I could go back. Then he would be here. We would be like them. He would be a baby, and my daughter a little girl and we would go walking and picking flowers and making cars go szhoo, szhoo, szhoo.

Oh, how I craved relief.

This is real, I thought, in those early days. I’m going to have to be alive without him. More, I’m going to have to be in this world with what our journey was. I’m going to have to relearn how to live. But I was sick. So, so sick, dear Worry. You know. You still help guard me. Still measure and mobilize me.

Death recalibrates everything.

Just like getting sick.

To be with Life, I’ve had to Work. I’ve had to Rest. I’ve had to get in my body. I’ve had to change just about everything. How I think. How I move. How I am with myself and with others. Simple words and simple sentences. Not simple at all. It’s in all of the small, almost unnoticeable things, that have made my Work so big. That have made Life possible again. That have opened my life up. Even in so much loss.

To meet this mom, on Mother’s day weekend, I had to come in an hour from the city—to a place and to people I did not know. That alone is a culmination of years long practices and Work in order to have the capacity—the energy to do so. My husband had to meet someone on a new golf course, to get the invite, weeks before. And we had to change our planned day of arrival from Sunday to Saturday. Then, we had to arrive just when we did. So that the rain would force us under the tent. We had to sit just where we did. Despite there being so many empty seats.

There had to be an openness. Recognition of that openness. A sense that I am safe. I am held. That this moment is mine and it is spacious.

Small moments made large.

River, my son, once told me that his greatest gift was his ability to walk into a room and completely change the atmosphere. His ability to connect with people, or things, or words truly made his presence palpable. Known. Energized. Different.

Thunder rolled.

Rain.

In the distance, there was lightening.

A short time after, the sun came out.

I was sitting out in the open—my new-friend-soon-to-be-old-friend had gone. A little girl who’d been riding a stick-pony all over the grounds, trotted over and asked about our dog. The girl’s blond wispy hair reminded me of my daughter’s.

She said, “I have a dog at home.”

“What’s it’s name?” my husband asked.

“River. River,” she repeated.

Then off she rode.

Love,

Kris