Tag Archives: daughter died

Rituals for Life, Love, and Loss

Robin Botie of Ithaca New York photoshops a ritual funeral for a dead bird.This sky lantern is for you, beautiful one, wherever you are. For your, (what do they call it?), birthday-in-heaven. Also, since the lanterns came only by the dozen, I’m mailing the other eleven to family and friends. So in this month before your birthday, you will get twelve lantern-launching ceremonies. If I could send you a dozen roses or a trillion chocolate Kit-Kat bars, I would. I love you. Lots. I didn’t really need to write this on the lantern; I’d already said it, in our driveway under an almost-full moon, to my daughter who died.

Long ago, the first rituals I created were funerals for dead birds. The neighborhood kids shared solemn words as we wrapped small creatures in Kleenex, with shriveled dandelions and daisies, and buried them in my mother’s rock garden. Later I created ceremonies, mostly around food, to acknowledge monumental changes in my life. We’re not talking séances or anything strange here. Rituals are simply small acts done to honor someone or recognize some event. We do rituals all the time. Like lighting candles on a cake and singing happy birthday. Like raising the flag. Planting a tree after a birth or a death. Clinking our glasses to toast someone.

For some reason, my most recent rituals almost always involve sending things UP. When my father died we gave his ashes to a friend, who had a small airplane, to toss them out over the Long Island Sound. For my daughter, we let loose a bunch of homing pigeons. Over the last five years, I’ve released balloons and butterflies for her, blown bubbles off high cliffs into the wind, read poems to the sun, and sang to the moon. Why, I wonder, do I keep looking UP for my daughter even though I found a page of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself among her things, the part where he wrote, “If you want me again, look for me under your boot-soles”?

I’ll plant daisies, or roses, too, I tell her. It all helps. Rituals make me feel closer to my daughter. More connected. And all the singing, the lanterns, the birds, and butterflies I send UP – in the process, I’m lifting myself as well.

 

What other rituals might I do for the upcoming birthday? Or for the coming of spring and summer?

REPLY TO ROBIN

Addiction Like Cancer

Robin Botie of Ithaca, New York, Photoshops a collage to illustrate being lost in the wild woods of addictions and cancer.“How’s your daughter doing?”
“What’s your son up to these days?” I’m afraid to ask my friends. Because too often there’ll be a scrunching of brows over eyes suddenly filled with torment, followed by a torrent of emotion, the significant word finally gushing out – “addiction.”

“My daughter is….” “My son … heroin, meth, …addicted,” people who know I “lost” a child send me emails and personal messages online. Offline, I hear it going around the table during introductions at bereaved mothers’ gatherings. Almost every day there’s another heartbroken parent. Waiting for The Phone Call. Preparing for the worst. Aching. And OMG, I hear the pain.

I remember that pain. It isn’t so different from when your child has been diagnosed with cancer. Your heart sinks into your gut. And there’s little you can do to get rid of this scourge. You start wondering how you contributed to it, what was the something you did or did not do. You’re angry, sad, and ready-to-embrace-whatever-might-help scared.

Addiction, like cancer, is a deadly disease. Mostly, what I remember from plodding through the wilds of cancer, is fighting for my daughter, for her health, her life. Fighting and worrying. And loving. You love so hard it tears the breath and light from you.
“We will never be out of the woods,” one mother told me. And it’s true.
“You don’t want to be out of the woods,” I wrote her back. “Because then you’ll be in my neck of the woods.” There’s no more worrying here, but –

There’s nothing I can tell them. “I’m sorry,” I say, the same words people said to me when my daughter died.

The only thing that helps, either side of the forest, is knowing you are not alone. There are gazillions of us crying for our children, praying for our children, singing to the moon hoping our children know we will always love them. However they are. Wherever they are. Or are not.

If you are the parent of a child with an addiction, I humbly share your tears.

 

What do you do or say when someone is in pain over a loved one’s addiction?

REPLY TO ROBIN

Look for the Light

Robin Botie of Ithaca, New York, photoshops borders around a picture of her daughter Marika Warden riding in fields with horses.“Look for the light, Marika. Follow the bright light,” my sister Laurie called out when my daughter died. That was almost five years ago. Since then, I’ve learned to keep my daughter close. Since then, light is not what it used to be.

On cloudy days, I imagine Marika riding off into sunlit farm fields with beautiful horses. Or standing in the driveway, laughing at the sky as snowflakes land on her iridescent eye-shadowed lids. In my mind she’s always smiling. Nothing’s as bright as my daughter’s eyes were, when she was happy.

“I’m stuck in black and darkness here. The light’s so near,” Marika had written in one of her poems. Walking her dog in the driveway on frosty moonlit nights, I scan the sky for distant lit planets and sing to the moon. Because, wherever Marika is or is not, she would look to the moon in the dark.

“Look for light,” said Harry my photography instructor at the community college. In the windowless classroom, I’d fallen half asleep on my feet as students spoke endlessly about their work. “Look for light.” It startled me awake.

Three mornings later, on the coldest day of the year, I headed down my long driveway to catch the early morning sun kissing the field across the road. By the time I reached the edge of the field and tore off a glove to adjust the settings on my new camera, the sun had disappeared. I waited, the camera before my face, the glove dangling from my teeth, thinking the clouds would break up. But it turned dark, and it was too cold to stay outside for long. The weather report said the sun was not due to shine again for days. Before turning back for home, I stood in the wind a moment, with hands bunched in pockets, and planted a picture in my mind of Marika racing across the field with ponies. Finding light in winter, in Ithaca, New York, is harder than hanging onto the ghost of my dead daughter.

 

Where do you find light? What lights your life?

REPLY TO ROBIN

Wearable Landscape

Robin Botie of Ithaca, New York, wears a landscape she Photoshopped from her pictures of hiking in Tucson.“You have to go this year: the Oscars 2015 Gala at Cinemapolis, great food and film. You just have to go.” My friends convinced me. But what would I wear? I spent the rest of the week rummaging through the house, looking for the right clothes.

All my life I’ve been looking for my clothes. Even in my dreams I am endlessly looking for a lost sock, a special dress I’m sure is somewhere nearby, an outfit I need as in REALLY NEED and will spend a whole dream tearing the house apart for. And much of my waking time, I search for what I will wear or for some extremely significant piece of apparel like my father’s ancient sweatshirt from his army days that I tucked away in a safe place. In the end I usually opt to wear my default black sweater over jeans. But I almost always go through the commotion of the hunt first.

In trying to solve the mystery of what to wear for the gala, I mourned the half-dozen gowns I’d given away that belonged to my daughter. The daughter who, before she died, loved to dress up for parties and proms, always accessorized with sparkling heels. I was hoping to find something of hers, just one little shiny thing to feel fancy in. But all I found was old baby clothes.

I can do this without going shopping, I told myself. And finally, in the bottom of a storage bin shoved high into a remote closet, I found my mother’s mink stole from before I was born. It was elegant and had a warm sheen that was perfect over my black sweater and jeans.

The assignment in the Digital Photography Studies class this week was to create a self-portrait in a landscape we’d presented earlier in class. Here was something else to stress about. But in the middle of the night, after dreaming about missing a plane because I couldn’t find a black sweater to match my jeans, I decided that for the assignment I would dress myself in a landscape.

 

What is your special piece of clothing and is it in your closet or in your dreams?

 

 

REPLY TO ROBIN

Surviving a Family Reunion

At the annual family reunion, Robin Botie of Ithaca, New York, poses the family behind an empty chair.At the dinner party on the last night of our annual family reunion, I surveyed the dining room for a seat.

The Kids’ Table was bustling with parents settling their young children. I remembered years back, reluctantly leaving my babies at the Kids’ Table and watching from the Parents’ Table as they ate more and laughed more without me hovering over them. My 26-year-old son now sat with his 30-something year-old single cousins at the Kids’ Table, along with adorable almost-2-year-old Tovah.

Glancing over at the Big Table, I thought of my father and long gone white-haired grandparents. And my uncles, Henry and Martin, who sat there not so long ago. It was always the smallest table but it was where the big people sat so we called it the Big Table. It was the table that got served first and was closest to where the food was parked. My favorite cousin, Brigite, was sitting at the Big Table because she was the organizer of the event and both her parents sat at that table.

I was about to take a seat next to my sister and other cousins at the Parents’ Table when Brigite beckoned to me, “Robin, sit here.” Immediately, without a word to my sister, I flew to the empty seat next to Brigite, at the Big Table.
“Thank you so much for inviting me to sit here. I’m so thrilled,” I told her as we waited for our appetizers.
“Robin,” she said, raising an eyebrow and twisting her head to address me directly. “I need to give you a little perspective here.” One of her eyes was wincing. “There’s Number 1.” She pointed to her father, my Uncle Max, who sat across from us staring into space with a smile. “There’s Number 2,” she said, indicating her mother. “Number 3, Number 4.” Our Aunts Bope and Terri. She poked her head in the direction of her older brother, “He’s Number 5.” Then she looked squarely at me with somber eyes.
“I’m 6. And you’re Number 7.”

Three sleepless nights later, after I’d calculated that I was Number 5 on my mother’s much smaller side of the family, I knew it wasn’t a numbers game. It was more like musical chairs. If I could stay fast and strong enough, I might be able to bulldoze my way to the last empty chair whenever the music stopped. I intend to live long, for myself and for my daughter who died. Maybe I will be the one to live to a hundred.
But I will not be the first. Several times during the reunion I heard it said of my Uncle Max (Number 1) that he’s gonna outlive us all.

How do you survive the sad element of loss at family reunions?

REPLY TO ROBIN

Not Cancer

Robin Botie in Ithaca, New York, holds newborn Marika Warden like she is holding the moon.I am guarding life. I’ve seen it decay and be devoured by cancer. Twice I watched it disappear. So I guard it like it could melt away in a moment.

Once upon a time, to guard life was to sing to my growing belly for months and then hold the warm wriggling creature I birthed like I was holding the moon. Guarding life, I rose each morning earlier than I wanted to feed and carry and keep my beautiful helpless one from ruin. I caught the sun for her, made every day the best day, and collapsed into bed at night to sleep with one ear always awake.

Later, when cancer hit home, to guard life was to wait at her bedside and rub my daughter’s feet. It was to find favorite foods or a puppy, anything to bring sunshine back. In the end, I looked into her unconscious eyes as the nurses peered in with flashlights. They asked the family to leave but I stayed. I watched her take her last breath and felt my heart seize when her pulse stopped. Still I stood guard. I sat there until it sank in that the life was gone out of her.

Then lifeguarding became gathering up the prom dresses, the photos and journals, the bottles of bath gels and body lotions, the twenty pairs of boots, sneakers and sandals. It became learning about the parts of my daughter’s life I hadn’t known about. I looked for ways to keep her close and wondered what would get me to rise all the next mornings of my life.

After Marika died, I had to become my own lifeguard. I kicked myself up and out of bed. First I lived for her. Then I tried to live more like she did: like life was to be loved. Like my own life was worth something.

I guess I didn’t do a great job. My next three years were riddled with accidents, illness, sleepless nights, falls, and broken bones. And now there were worrisome symptoms.

The test results came back one by one. Each phone call from the doctor resulted in new pills, things to avoid, more to take care of, and mostly, gratitude. Iron deficiency. A dangerously low vitamin-D count. Giardea. Lymes disease. Each diagnosis was a blow.

But it wasn’t cancer.

REPLY TO ROBIN