Bucket Filling

In Ithaca, New York, Robin Botie wants to fill a bucket for her son on Easter.I wanted to be a mother on Easter again. But my son, in his adult state, does not like sweets. What can you give to someone who has everything? Who buys, faster than light, whatever he needs or wants? I bought him a bucket. And tried to fill it for him.

For my birthday he had taken me to one of our favorite restaurants. After dinner we sat over glasses of Armagnac and I asked him, “What’s next?”
“I don’t know,” he said. And not wanting to bring up the touchy topic of job searches on a peaceful evening, I tweaked my question toward the outer limits:
“Don’t you have a bucket list?”
“I’ve already done everything on my bucket list,” he said. And he named a dozen amazing things he’d experienced in his remarkable young life.
“Well, you can’t be all done. There’s gotta be places you want to see, more things you want to do,” I said, thinking of my own bucket list, which is endless.
“No, I can die at fifty.”
“No. You can’t,” I told him. “Because I wanna live to a hundred and you can’t leave me childless.” Losing a child was not something I wanted to do twice.

Over the next week I tried to make a list for him: see sunrise on a hot-air balloon over the caves of Cappadocia in Turkey; watch the sunset in Santorini, Greece; eat at the Enoteca Pinchiorri in Florence; visit an active volcano; howl naked at the moon with wolves; give a homeless person a hundred dollar bill; attend a birth, … but you can’t make a bucket list for someone else, no matter how much you love him.

The day before Easter, I scrunched my way through a crowded Wegmans gathering travel-sized toiletries and smoked salmon, Clementines, a RedBull energy drink, … special breakfast items. Even a man with no plans and no hunger could appreciate a new toothbrush and a nice Easter breakfast.
Behind the bakery counter, a woman smiled as she drew icing-faces on bunny cookies.
“Do you love your work?” I asked.
“Oh yeah, decorating cookies is the perfect job for me,” she said. “I look forward to it every day.” I added a bunny cookie to my son’s breakfast collection.
At the Agway store, I grabbed a five-inch tall metal bucket off the shelf. The possibilities for a small bucket, even empty, are limitless.

There was one more bucket left on the shelf. I took it for myself.

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Photoshop Therapy

Robin Botie in Ithaca, New York, photoshops a friend flying in clouds over trees..“Can you make a picture of me flying in the clouds?” my friend had asked, looking up from her wheelchair. That was 3 weeks ago. After cancelling and rescheduling several times, we were finally together in her apartment squeezed between the wheelchair, a big armchair and a card-table.
There were questions to consider: Would she fly horizontally or vertically? Did she want wings? What should she wear?
In my collection of cloud photos there were wispy cirrus clouds in a blue sky over trees. There were bright sunlit mackerel skies. But she wanted thunderclouds, lightning, maybe a tornado. “For my dark side,” she said.

It was raining when we shuffled outside to shoot her in a flying pose. She stood against the brick wall just outside the door, flapping her wings.
“You don’t look very happy to be flying,” I said. “Look down at the ground like there’s something special down there.”

Back inside, I inserted the chip from the camera into its slot in the computer. We sat at the card-table and chose a shot from the 21 images of my friend twisting, turning, banking into the wind with arms outstretched. I cut-and-pasted her form from the brick background to the photo of storm clouds.
“I need to be smaller. No bigger. Can you make me higher in the sky? A little more to the right …” she orders.
“You’re too pale,” I say. “I’m adding blush to your cheeks.”
“What about the dark circle under my left eye?”
“I can fix that.”
“Something’s missing: what am I pointing at?” she asks. “Should we put a rat in the picture?”
“I don’t have any photos of rats. What if we add another shot of you?”

“Let’s name this one ‘Ascension,’” she says, two hours and four pictures later. “Besides making me prints, what are you going to do with all these?”
“Well….”

A friend flies over stormclouds in Ithaca, New York.

Glennon Doyle Melton's book, CARRY ON WARRIOR has just been released in paperback.

I’m still fixing. I’m still a part of the Messy, Beautiful Warrior Project — To learn more and join us, CLICK HERE! And to learn about the New York Times Bestselling Memoir, Carry On Warrior: The Power of Embracing Your Messy, Beautiful Life, just released last week in paperback, CLICK HERE!

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Stuck Fixing My Messy Beautiful

Robin Botie of Ithaca, New York, is reflected, praying with cameraIn March 2011, I turned into frozen mud.

I always believed I could design my way into or out of anything. To design is to start with something, a lump of clay, a need, canvas and paint, or a girl who died of leukemia and her grieving mother, and then turn it into something else. For me, to design is to fix and to make beautiful.
But in March 2011, cancer killed my daughter. I could not fix that. I froze. Like mud in winter. Who am I, I wondered? Am I still the mother of a daughter? Who or what am I supposed to fix now?

The day after she died I discovered my daughter was a writer. So I began to write. I wrote our story. And rewrote it and kept writing. Here was something I could fix. I could edit the manuscript endlessly.
But this is messy. In rewriting, I relive the times in and out of hospitals with my daughter. I bring her back to life for twelve chapters and hold my breath as I watch her die. Then, dragging my dashed spirit up off the floor, I fix the next half of the book where I travel alone to Australia with her ashes, come home, and begin a new life. Over and over again, I write and relive every day. For three years.

“When are you going to get a real job with health insurance?” my mother nags.
“It’s time to move on to something else,” says a friend.
“I’m designing my way to healing,” I try to explain. But the truth is I am stuck.

Writing led to blogging. Almost everyone has lost someone or something they love. I ache to fix the pain as another relative is diagnosed with cancer, a friend’s son kills himself, a stranger online reaches out for support.
“There’s life after loss,” I blog on my website, and write the stories of my own struggles in the hope of helping someone else.
Blogging led to photography. I wanted to add pictures to my stories.

My frozen mud began to thaw when I discovered Photoshop with all its fixing tools: a Patch Tool, a Dodge Tool and an Add-Anchor Tool, a Magic Eraser, a Magic Wand, a clone Stamp, …and a Healing Brush. Photoshop lets me redesign my universe. The opportunities for change are endless. The beautiful truth is there are some things I can fix.

“Can you make a photo of me flying in the clouds?” an elderly friend asks from her wheelchair.Glennon Doyle Melton's memoir, CARRY ON WARRIOR, is out in paperback now

This essay and I are part of the Messy, Beautiful Warrior Project — To learn more and join us, CLICK HERE!   And to learn about the New York Times Bestselling Memoir Carry On Warrior: The Power of Embracing Your Messy, Beautiful Life, just released in paperback, CLICK HERE!

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Carry Me Up

Robin Botie's tiramisu bowl before it broke in Ithaca, New York.Before leaving for the luncheon, I snapped a photo of the tiramisu I made. It looked perfect. But in a joyful spirit, I’d doubled the Kahlua. By the time we got around to dessert the whole thing had drowned. My friends ate most of the beautiful mess anyway. Everyone knew I’d made it with love.
A day later I broke the tiramisu bowl. The glass bowl that had contained magnificent salads and trifles slipped from my soapy hands, hit the side of the sink, and cracked.

Tiramisu in Italian means “carry me up.” That is what I did after my daughter died, when I got the mixed messages: give yourself time to heal, get over it, this will be with you forever. I carried Marika and found ways to make her part of my life. And part of my life has been to carry salad or tiramisu to friends’ dish-to-pass suppers.
“Carry me” is what my friends did.
I carried the cracked bowl to its final resting place on the top shelf of my closet.

In homage to my bowl, I hereby humbly set free my recipe:

Carry Me Low-fat Tiramisu

1. Put 16 ounces of Neufchatel cheese (low-fat cream cheese) into mixing bowl. Add 2T sugar, 1T powdered cocoa, 1T vanilla, and 3T Marsala wine (sweet or dry). Mix and let sit.

2. Pour 1¼ cups of Kahlua and 1¼ cups of strong (decaf) espresso into bowl. Halve and dip 12 ladyfingers, one at a time until saturated but not crumbling, into mixture and place in a decorative pattern on bottom of large glass serving bowl. Sprinkle generously with powdered cocoa. Let sit, covered.

3. Put 4T Birds Custard Powder and 4T sugar in medium saucepan, mix, and gradually stir in 3½ cups nonfat milk and ¼ cup Marsala. Mix until smooth, cook on medium heat stirring often until boiling. Boil 1 minute stirring constantly, remove from heat and cool 5-10 minutes.

4. Pour custard mix into Neufchatel mix and beat until smooth. Gently pour mixture over soaked ladyfingers. Halve, soak and arrange 12 more ladyfingers on top. Sprinkle with cocoa. Refrigerate. Cover when cold.

5. Just before serving, shave or grate a good dark chocolate bar over all.

Enjoy with friends. I wish you much sweetness this first week of April.

Who or what do you carry?

 

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What is a Miracle?

Marika Warden as a young on a moonlit beach, photoshopped by Robin Botie of Ithaca, New YorkWhat’s a miracle anyway?
For the past two weeks I’ve been glued to the TV wishing for a miracle for the families of Flight 370. In truth, I’ve been waiting for some miracle or another for most of my life.

This week I came to a realization: the miracle is that we live.
Once born, every last one of us dies. But in between being born and dying we get a gift.
For some it is a sweet comfortable time; some end up on a rocky ride. Our lives are lived in peace, in wars; in mindfulness, in oblivion; in isolation, in the midst of masses. We live in beauty and grace; we live in misery and squalor. If we’re lucky we live through good and bad and everything in between.

Some lives last a century and some are very brief. That we got here at all is the miracle. We’re all leaving town; just some of us have an earlier flight.

I need to celebrate the miracle.
We live. I live. And as I live, I will always remember those who were here with me, especially the ones I loved and was lucky enough to share time with. I am grateful for them, for dazzling days with friends, for the sun and the moon, for the privileges I have known, for the wind that makes me shiver and even for oceans that eat up airplanes and hope. For every lesson in life, both cruel and compassionate, and for every day of my time here, I feel blessed.

So how do I live when my heart’s been broken? How do I live after losing my daughter?
It’s a miracle.

What is a miracle to you?

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The Middle Ground of Grief

Robin Botie of Ithaca, New York, photoshopped faces of missing passengers from malaysian Airlines Flight 370 onto a Malaysian batik design.After I finished my son’s chocolates I started on the microwave popcorn in the pantry. When all six bags of the popcorn were gone I found cookies in the freezer. Riveted in front of the television, I ate recklessly. For the whole week.

“How can you lose an airplane?” I asked the TV screen that glowed maps of islands and oceans with red arrows.

On the third day of the missing Malaysian Airlines Flight 370, CNN News aired a gathering of the passengers’ family members. That’s when it hit me: 239 people were lost. Not just a plane. In the crowd, a man cried out for his son. Even in Chinese, I knew the anguish. It transported me back to the days just before my daughter’s death, when I waited and wished for a miracle.

“Middle ground,” my sister had explained in those first days of March 2011, “is a place somewhere in between knowing that you’re winning the war and when you get those first inklings that you’re gonna lose. It doesn’t mean anyone’s giving up. But it’s a first step toward that end, an end that no one is ready to acknowledge.” The miracle didn’t come. I hovered over the hospital bed to memorize my daughter’s face.

By the sixth day, I was tuning into the TV first thing upon waking and every other hour until bedtime. Between Lost and Found is the sweet time when people hold onto threads of hope that stretch thinner with each passing minute. The eighth day I prayed it was a terrorist hijacking. Maybe the passengers were hostages somewhere in Kazakhstan?

Lost is not knowing one’s whereabouts, unable to find one’s way. Lost means something has vanished. One can be lost forever. But there is a certain finality to being found. Once found, what you thought you lost turns into a welcome event. Or it is truly lost, cannot be recovered. And hope is yanked away completely.

It is Monday, the eleventh day. I mindlessly eat a bowl of leftover tiramisu in front of the TV as the mystery of Flight 370 continues. I crave sweetness and still wait, along with the family members of the lost passengers, wishing for a miracle.

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