Holding Up or Hanging On?

Robin Botie of Ithaca, New York, as a toddler holding up her younger sister, Laurie Botie.“Hold up yaw sistuh,” my mother said years ago as she posed us for a photograph. But my sister didn’t need my support, even then. Most of my life I’ve hung onto her because I depended on and needed her, and didn’t want her to fly off without me.

This past weekend we got together to celebrate her birthday, at my mother’s place. Shortly after we arrived, the conversation turned to last week’s blog post where I’d Photoshopped an age progression on a picture of my daughter who died.
“Why do you feel the need to do that?” my mother asked.

I am not going to share who said what about letting go, hanging on, moving on, and so forth, in the skirmish that followed. It got me wondering about the differences.

Holding up is to keep something from getting away or falling, to keep in high regard, to endure. You’re holding up quite well under the circumstances, I like to hear, as opposed to why do you have to keep hanging on? Hanging on is to hold tightly, to grasp, perhaps in desperation. Hanging on is waiting, persisting with some effort despite difficulties or setbacks. It is clutching at something and letting it lead you who-knows-where, maybe even allowing it to drag you backwards or under.
“I am not hanging on,” I insisted, and then announced, “I’m gonna hold Marika forever.”

Are you hanging on to someone or something for dear life? Or are you holding up your dearest memories of a most precious one in order to honor her and recycle your love for her into something more. Can you carry the one you love, and thought you lost, into your future even when others are telling you to get over the loss?

I’m not saying whose resolve was not budging and who was close to tears defending her position.
“I loved your latest post and the age progression photo you did,” my sister said. I shut up and smiled gratefully. She had my back and was holding me up this time.

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Missing Children Photos

MarikaAgedFor the past two weeks, all over the media, an image of a little girl who was found dead in a trash bag along the shore of Boston Harbor has yanked at the hearts of more than 51 million viewers. Having lost my own daughter four years ago, I was mesmerized by the picture. Someone’s beautiful daughter, her riveting eyes. Thrown away. How could this happen?

The computer-generated image was produced by Christi Andrews at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Using autopsy reports, morgue photos, and stock images of facial features, Andrews constructed a digital composite that should come close to what the toddler looked like in life. Andrews selected a similar face shape, added eyes that matched the toddler’s in size and color, and filled in the features with stock photos. She likened the process to building a Mr. Potato Head.

Forensic artists like Andrews often include age progressions in their composites, modifying images to reflect the effects of aging, to show likely current appearances of long gone missing children. They use the same Adobe Photoshop program I use. When I investigated further, to learn how Andrews recreated the face of ‘Baby Doe,’ the child found near Boston, I made a discovery: many bereaved parents find age progression on photos of their deceased children to be healing. They use services such as Phojoe Photo in order to see what their children might have looked like as adults.

With all the photo manipulations I’ve done on my daughter’s image, aging her face had never occurred to me. What would Marika, who died before turning twenty-one, look like at my age, I  wondered?

On one half of Marika’s face I deepened her natural lines and then added from my own stockpile of wrinkles, sags, and age spots.

So now I have something else to stare at.

 

What images do you find comforting?

 

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The Joy of Bugs

Robin Botie of Ithaca, New York Photoshops moths from Moth Night with Cornell University Insect Collection manager.“I don’t like spiders,” my son says, glancing down at me with a look that communicates more than a trivial dislike. I often call him Bug, because as a boy, he had a little bug-nose. Now, his tattooed deltoids are at my eye level as we stand side by side in the mudroom, looking up at two mysterious round sacs attached to the tiniest web in a high corner. “You know, any day now those things are gonna hatch and millions of spiders are gonna be all over the place,” he warns.

“Well, I don’t like spiders either,” I say, giving him a look meant to convey that he is the warrior of the house and should take care of the spiders, and that I am his poor weak mother who keeps the refrigerator stocked with food. Most of the time.

A few hours later he has purchased munitions at Wegmans, fumigated the room with Raid Max, and captured the threatening cocoons in a bundle of multiple plastic bags that is now mine to dispose of. “You can spray the outside of the house so they don’t come in,” he says, pointing to a huge unopened can of Bug Barrier.

It feels like a fair solution to the spider problem. Over half a century ago, my sister and I used to flip a coin or something to decide who was to kill the spider and who was to remove the carcass from the wall. That had seemed fair too at the time. Well, maybe not for the spiders.

Getting rid of bugs is just a yucky job.

But a day later, when I get an email with a link for National Moth Week and Moth Night, presented by the manager of the Cornell University Insect Collection at a local park, I decide it is time to consider changing my attitude towards creepy-crawly insects. A party for moths. Maybe I can learn to live in peace with the bugs in my life. After all, anything’s possible – even joy.

Robin Botie of Ithaca, New York attends Moth Night with Cornell University Insect Collection.

What bugs you?

 

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Signs From Dead Loved Ones

Robin Botie of Ithaca, New York, Photoshops the raven design she made for Silk Oak, an Ithaca-based design studio“The blue heron was flying too close, right at me.” The small group sat around the table, taking turns talking about signs they’d received from their children who died: ravens that stared, the moon suddenly peeking out of a totally clouded sky, a butterfly landing and staying longer than it should, phone calls with no caller, a television that suddenly turned on by itself … I nodded in agreement. Yes, I’d seen that, I’d felt my daughter’s presence. But it had been a long time. I was sad, wondering if maybe my time for receiving signs was over.

The signs I’d gotten were different. Small notes Marika had written would appear at pertinent times. Like the Mother’s Day card I found in May last year. And her drawing of a rabbit, our favorite animal, in a heart with a speech-cloud that said, “Welcome Home Mom.” I’d found it just before leaving on the trip to Australia to scatter her ashes, and then placed it on the mantle by the front door, to be the first thing I saw when I returned home. Sometimes I’d be searching for something and a gift of Marika’s would surface instead. From the time she could hold a crayon, she’d been writing and drawing. During her lifetime, she and I must have stashed thousands of these things away. The “messages” kept popping up the past four years even though I’d long ago cleaned out Marika’s room and scoured the house for any signs of her.

The morning after the group meeting I was searching for my will. When you look for something, you always find something else, I should know by now. Stuck under a pile of papers was this:Signs From Dead Loved Ones, Robin Botie of Ithaca, New York, finds a story created by her daughter Marika Warden, who died of leukemia in 2011

Farther and farther I went. I found my mother she went with me.
I went back up. I gasped for air. W[h]ere was I. I was on land! I am magic!
I am a beluga whale. I was just made. I looked at my creator for the last time. She was gone. I was falling deep into the water! I heard a soothing sound like a lullaby. I started swimming.

 

What signs have you experienced or heard about? Do you believe in signs from after death?

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Dancing with Goats

Robin Botie photoshops multiple images of herself dancing with baby goats. Original photos by Mary Jane Hetzlein of Ithaca, New York.I had no idea I was being recorded. Or that I was being watched by anyone else besides Mary Jane Hetzlein’s goats.

“Go out and do something happy every week. Every day, if possible,” I always tell myself. “It doesn’t matter what. Just find something that feels joyful.” This is one of my solutions for warding off depression.
“You wanna come over and play with some baby goats?” Mary Jane had said in her email. After several days of rain and flooding, I finally grabbed my camera and the Wellington boots I inherited from my daughter, and drove the short distance from my house to Mary Jane’s. And there was the happiest scene I’d ever stepped into.

Mother goat in Ithaca, New York by Robin BotieGoat nursing in Ithaca, New York, by Robin BotieA goat smiles in Ithaca, New York. By Robin Botie.

Later that night, as I transferred the goat pictures from camera to computer, the television was bursting with reports of the Charleston church shooting. Looking back and forth from the TV screen to the computer, I found I’d taken a hundred photos of field and dirt with an end of a goat’s leg or a tip of an ear. There were only three shots that did not look like blurry clouds racing off the picture. All the gentle goats prancing in the tall grasses, their sweet smiles, the baby goat that chewed on my shirt and danced with me as I backed away to focus on his face – all gone. It was now just a memory stuck in my head, disappearing quickly behind the television images of grief-struck people in Charleston.

What was I doing seeking comfort and joy in a yard of baby goats when people can’t even be safe in their place of worship? I wondered. Could I justify writing about goats when people’s hearts are breaking? And should I dare try to convey the silliness of being with baby goats if I didn’t even have photos?

I went to bed miserable, thinking of my poor photography skills, the floods, the people crying in anguish, madmen with guns, … and wished us all peace. Find something joyful, I told myself. The next day Mary Jane sent me eleven emails with photos of me dancing with goats.

 

What do you do to balance bad times with good times?

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Where’s the Joy?

Tory, the dog that loves water, photographed by Robin Botie of Ithaca, New York.I get a headache just thinking about all the things that need tending. Some people can plow right through these like they are simply small puddles in their paths. Some eagerly lap them up or skirt around them. But there are others of us who have a way of making our puddles grow into deep swamps until we are sinking in mud.

The Internet was down and the kitchen sink was full of dirty dishes the day the electrician came to fix some dead electrical outlets, and the plumber showed up to repair the heater/air conditioner, and the excavator put in a drainage pipe to stop the garage from flooding. I was supposed to be pulling cattails from the pond but instead I was shooing away crows from the newly seeded lawn and following the electrician up and down the stairs. Where’s the joy? I wondered, thinking about the responsibilities and the bills that would follow. Abandoning my post, I phoned my friend Liz.
“Take me away from here,” I pleaded. “This is too much. I need to escape. I’ll go anywhere.”

She took me to Cayuga Landscape and then The Plantsmen Nurseries. We walked the grounds, sniffing the spirea, searching for a male holly and deer-resistant evergreens.
“Don’t look at the boxwood; it smells like cat pee,” she said. “This one you have to keep deadheading if you want it to flower. What’s your budget? Whoa, how many plants are you getting?” she asked as I dragged multiple flowering shrubs from their rows.Robin Botie of Ithaca, New York, selects plants at Cayuga Landscape and The Plantsmen Nursery

We drove home, the back of her car packed with Blue Princess hollies, Purple Candles astilbe, yellow coreopsis, blue catmints, and Buckley’s Quill mock orange. It was late when we got back. We unloaded the car and Liz left.

I looked at the fourteen plants that stood quivering on both sides of my front door, begging to be watered and planted. It was time to start facing my mud puddles.

 

What do you do to escape your responsibilities?

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