Tag Archives: mother daughter relationship

Duetting: Memoir 38

Duetting: Memoir 38 Robin Botie of Ithaca, New York, photoshops her daughter's poem onto a scene of driving the highway at night.

I’m an expert on fear. Long ago I defined two categories, based on how hard it hit: the immediate mind-gripping terror where one may respond quickly and with focus; and the kind of fear that festers deep inside, an ache that slowly gnaws away at one’s heart and gut. Fear is what fuels most of my functioning. It’s also what immobilizes me. I’ve learned to mostly tame it by looking ahead, asking, “What’s next?”

At the end of July 2012 on Long Island, after moving from my cousin’s place to the Ronald MacDonald House, and spending weeks wandering the halls at the North Shore Medical Center, my daughter and I were permitted to go home. We would need to make weekly trips back to Long Island. Even so, the prospect of having several days a week in Ithaca for whatever summer was left, cheered us. But shortly after arriving home, Marika developed chills and fever. We dashed to our local hospital where she was pumped with antibiotics, and then we were sent back to Long Island. Marika’s leukemic white blood cell count had climbed high off the charts. Afraid of a repeat of the syndrome that put her into respiratory failure and nearly killed her the first summer of cancer, the new Long Island team gave her a dose of a Phase Three experimental drug that was only made available to patients who had no choices left. Mylotarg was called a “magic bullet.” Unlike chemo drugs that kill or damage everything, the Bullet targeted only leukemia cells for destruction, and left the liver, kidneys, and other organs intact.

The Bullet worked for Marika in just one dose. But the trouble with the Bullet was its frequent side effect, horribly high fever. Fever that surged after a day of hibernation. Fever that was impossible to tell if it was from the Bullet or from some hidden, lurking infection. Getting close to summer’s end, Marika desperately wanted to be home where most of her friends were preparing to leave for their colleges. We both yearned to go home. Fever was the only thing holding us back.

When she was free from fever for two days, we left Long Island. It was a Friday afternoon, when everyone else was fleeing for the weekend. We slowly inched our way out as the Brit in the new GPS dragged us through the scenic route of New York City. We were stuck for hours in traffic. In the heat. Sitting in the passenger seat, excited to be going home, Marika was talking to me once again. She was pink. Maybe too pink in the air-conditioned car. Between us a brown paper bag held her meds and a thermometer. Finally out of traffic, we approached the more remote parts of Pennsylvania, and stopped for dinner.

“I’ve got a fever again,” Marika announced, removing the thermometer that chirped the now familiar alarm of four sets of three high beeps. She took a dose of Tylenol, and we downed hamburgers and cold drinks at MacDonalds, ordering extra drinks for the road. She took her temperature again, and drank another icy diet coke as I started up the car.
“Mom, it’s up. It’s a hundred-two point nine now.”
“We’re in the middle of nowhere,” I said. The single server at MacDonalds had been unable to help locate a hospital, so we got back on the road to Scranton. Marika checked her temp every ten minutes and toyed with the GPS as I drove. One hundred-three, she whimpered. I think I began to pray then.

“Mom, a hundred-three point four.”
“Are you okay?” I fixed my eyes on the road and heard my own voice getting higher.
“I’m okay,” she said.
“There’s a blue hospital sign. The blue H,” I pointed out. We drove on and on and there was no other sign. It was dusk and it was getting hard to see. I almost ran a stop sign looking for anything that resembled a hospital. Please help us. Someone. Where’s the darn hospital?
“A hundred-four, Mom.”
“Okay, another blue H, I think this is it, can you read that sign?” A one-way street and hidden entrance to a full parking lot, “This doesn’t look like a hospital. Is it? Yeah. I’m gonna drop you off at the emergency entrance.”
“No! I can wait. I’m okay,” she implored.
“Mareek–I have to park in the garage, way down the road.”
“I’m not getting out,” she hollered. So I parked illegally, as close as I dared, and together we headed into the emergency room.

“This is a cancer patient on two trial drugs with a hundred-four fever,” I screamed to the woman who seemed too calm behind the glass window at the emergency check-in. Marika was looking very gray now that she was on her feet. Someone shoved her into a wheelchair and took off with her, and I ran to keep up as they wheeled down endless halls and around corners of the strange single-story building that was unlike any of the hospitals we’d frequented the past two years. What kind of hospital was this? Now that we were back in a hospital, a part of me believed we were safe, or that her safety was out of my hands. So then the second type of fear, the gnawing, festering fear-ache, took over. It had sat heavily in the back of my mind ever since I’d been given the papers, in triplicate, labeled ‘Healthcare Proxy.’

Marika had first asked Rachel, and Rachel, knowing what it was, had turned her down. I was Marika’s second choice. Though I did not fully understand what the document meant, it meant everything to me to have been chosen over her father. I had never really considered the day I’d actually have to represent Marika or guess her wishes. But now we were in a strange hospital somewhere outside of Scranton, and Marika was burning up. I unfolded and refolded the piece of paper that lived in the bottom of my tiny purse. Was this going to be the night? Would I have to make life and death decisions for her? Tonight?

At two in the morning, when the fever had died somewhat, after tons of tests and our promise to go straight to our local Cayuga Medical Center, we were released.

Driving in the dim hours before dawn, I was wide-awake. Something had changed around us. My heart was no longer pounding but I was acutely aware of my daughter as a time-ticking catastrophe. Out the windshield, the sky was a vast ocean over the black hills scooting by. Stars shone above the deserted highway that wound toward home. The world was frighteningly beautiful. Quiet. Peaceful. And in the car, on that almost-last night in August, riding side by side the final two hours to home, Marika and I shared brief bits of conversation, too drained to keep up our usual guarded disconnection.

“I’m gonna take a road trip next summer, with a girl I met in Australia,” she said. “We’re gonna start out in Boston and visit Laurie and my friends at Clark.”
“Neat,” I said. “You think you’ll wanna try to do camp again?”
“This is before camp starts,” she said, “Yeah.”
“Well, this summer’s done.” My eyes widened, taking in the shadowy landscape as I drove. We were planning, considering, “What’s next?” and didn’t know—we had no clue—this would be Marika’s last summer. I said, “Next year we’re gonna have a real summer. No hospitals or cancer centers.”

REPLY TO ROBIN

Duetting: Memoir 35

Duetting: Memoir 35 Robin Botie of Ithaca, New York, photoshops an old photo of her daughter, Marika Warden, singing at her concert, making beautiful trouble.

My daughter was living like she had only an hour left. Like the lights could go out at any moment. By the beginning of 2010, Marika was back on a chemo maintenance regimen, taking ATRA on alternate weeks, mornings and nights. The weeks on ATRA were riddled with headaches and nausea. She would come home from her apartment and stumble from bed to bathroom and back to bed again. But the weeks she was off she made music, went on road trips, and partied to make up for lost time. Laurie and I muttered that Marika was in denial, that she thought she was immortal. But since trouble was what she was given, she made trouble dance. She made it sing. She made it beautiful.

The day the doctors said Marika could go to Australia, it was like I was thrown into a storm cloud. Trapped in the midst of mighty updrafts, downdrafts, rising temperatures and intense atmospheric instability. Any decent lifeguard would have already cleared the waters and taken control by the time the magnificent but unpredictable cumulonimbus clouds gusted overhead. But I was stymied. The Australia idea was immovable. Like cancer. Once the seeds were planted in Marika’s head and she was okayed by the Roc Docs, there was nothing I could do about it. And since they said she could have two weeks in Australia, it seemed that life—hers, mine, ours—must be somewhat stable. Suddenly I had everyone’s blessings to take a respite from caregiving. So when friends invited me to hike for two weeks in Turkey, I went.  

Marika watched the house, and the cat and the dog, while I wandered in Turkey and stopped at every marketplace to buy earrings for her. At the sacred House of the Virgin Mary in Ephesus, I hung notes with Marika’s name on the prayer walls. At every mosque I whispered good wishes for her. My bags were loaded with gifts, mostly for Marika.

When I came home the house was just as I’d left it. There’d been no parties, no broken or lost furniture. And just as I got back, in mid May, Marika went to Australia for two weeks. For almost a month we were on opposite sides of the earth.

While she was away I kept busy rewriting my resume and applying for teaching jobs. I tried not to worry. I told myself she was seeing the same full moon I watched by the pond. Its reflection, a bright silver light, danced, waxing and waning nightly in the water.

Marika called me once from Australia. We talked briefly. She was having the time of her life without me.

But the best times fly. She returned home, to her apartment. I gave her back the dog. She gave me a postcard and chocolate TimTam cookies. She was in a hurry to see her friends, so we didn’t talk much about our trips. I retreated to memories of my time in Turkey, where songs of prayer were broadcast in the skies over cities and towns. Where I’d climbed a hill overlooking Istanbul, and watched the city wake up to welcome each new morning. The air was filled with echoes of voices that flew from every direction. They chanted and prayed for the good in this world, for the best the day had to offer. For the best times.

Reply to Robin

Duetting: Memoir 31

 

Duetting: Memoir 31 Robin Botie of Ithaca, New York, photoshops an old picture of her father and children to illustrate a story about fathers and daughters.

 

On our first night home after weeks in the hospital, Marika could hardly walk. So I settled her into the guestroom downstairs near my bedroom and left her with a commode, a walker, and a Harpo Marx-type bicycle horn.
“Mom, I’m not using that thing,” she said in her whisper of a voice, her throat still sore from the breathing tube.
“If you use the commode by the bed, you won’t have to call, but the horn’s there in case you want help getting to the bathroom,” I told her, not sure which of the three items she was referring to.

“Okay. You can go now,” she snarled, as I lingered in the doorway, knowing how desperately she wanted to be independent of me. Knowing she probably would not call. Then, in the early hours of the morning, I woke to a crash. Running from my room, I found her face down, flat on the floor, in a puddle of urine, unable to get up, tooth in lip, blood, tears. She had tried to walk unaided, and now she was on the floor. Bigger than I, and still bloated from all the IV hydration and steroids, I couldn’t lift her. There we were, stuck. Time to phone her father. I hated that I had to bother him again. I could just hear Laurie’s criticizing, “Robin, you have to stop calling him.” What did she know? Who else was going to help me get Marika off the floor at five in the morning? Marika would expect nothing else.

Her father had moved out of the house in 2002, when Marika was twelve. She adored him. But he could stir up even more of her anger than I did. He was clueless about her. Still, he loved her and tried to please her. He was clueless about me; but with me, he’d stopped trying long ago.

Story by Five-Year-Old Marika

Once there was a squirrel and a bunny that were friends.
They wanted to grow up and get married because they loved each other.
But how could they marry, they are both different animals?
But they loved each other so much that they grew up and got married anyways.
The End.

“Marika’s okay,” I blurted out to her father, first thing. “I’m sorry. She fell. I phoned the on-call doctors and they don’t think we need to go the hospital. I just can’t get her up off the floor,” I said. I wrapped blankets around her and we sat on the wet floor waiting for him.
“I lost my tooth,” she sobbed.
“It’s just chipped. The doc says we should call the dentist later this morning. I bet they can fix it easily. Maybe even today.” I tried to sound reassuring.

“Thanks for coming over. I’m so sorry,” I said, when her father arrived. I looked at him briefly to convince myself I’d once been married to him. For fifteen years. He was not happy about my summoning him so early but he gently picked Marika up and got her back into bed. I thought of my own father while he spent a few minutes with her. And then he let himself out of the house without a glance or word for me. I made another vow not to call or need anything from him ever again.                                      

In my father’s home, I was Daughter Number One. That just meant I’d been around the longest of the three sisters. Often, with no reference to my name at all, he introduced me as, “My Number One Daughter.” When I was with my father, I was a princess. I didn’t have to worry about anything. Money was his currency of love, and he was generous. He started college funds for both my kids when they were born, and happily managed the account during Marika’s one year of college. At almost ninety, he still gave us family vacations and plane tickets to visit him, and dinners out in fancy restaurants. Then, at the beginning of this nightmare summer of 2009, he was hospitalized. His disease, some mysterious ailment, took control of everything. If I hadn’t been in the hospital with Marika, I would have been in the hospital in Florida, with him.

In September, Laurie and I visited our father. In the middle of the night in Delray Beach Hospital’s Intensive Care Unit, we watched him sleep, hooked to machines and monitors, sensor pads pasted all over his worn sun-browned body. His glasses, dentures, and hearing aids lay on the bedside table. He was beyond fixing.

He woke up annoyed, tossing his head from side to side, No. It was not supposed to be like this. He had planned and prepaid for his trip out of this world. The bills had been paid and a large loose-leaf binder was filled with his living will, advance directives, insurance information, and paperwork on everything he owned, including a prepaid cremation. Squinting, he looked at Laurie, Daughter Number Two, The Doctor. The one he’d designated as his healthcare proxy.

“It’s time,” he said, from his hollow mouth half hidden under an oxygen mask, not blinking his black marble eyes that caught great glints of light from the humming overhead fixture. “You,” he said turning to me, in a voice with no life left in it, “go home and take care of Marika.”

Hours later, the nurses moved him downstairs to the Hospice Unit. They herded his trembling younger brother, his broken-hearted sister, his three very different daughters, and all the rest of his family down elevators and hallways, into an empty, sunny room. Where was he, what was taking so long? Was he scared, I wondered? After a while they wheeled him in, unconscious and finally freed from all the life-supporting paraphernalia. He lasted long enough for me to say, “Thank you for making my life so rich, Dad.” I wanted the last words he heard to be “thank you.” I watched him take his last breath. Then he was gone. Dad. My first soldier.

After his funeral I went home to take care of Marika. And I made a promise to be his devoted Number One Daughter forever.

 

 

 

REPLY TO ROBIN

Duetting: Memoir 29

Duetting: Memoir 29 Robin Botie of Ithaca, New York, photoshops an illustration of her child in the hospital with cancer holding her favorite stuffed animal.

A good lifeguard is a dry lifeguard. Meaning: a good lifeguard is diligent in predicting and preventing trouble. I remembered this from my training days at Camp Scatico. Waking up on a Sunday, I had my cry, did my morning hike, loaded up the car for the week and took off for Strong Memorial. By the time I parked, I had morphed back into my Strong mode. Starting the week off on the right foot, I climbed the eight flights to the ICU, and was on guard again. Ready to meet trouble. I would handle anything Strong sent my way that week.

The Red Cross books on life-guarding and first aid list the first step when you arrive at the scene of an accident: “Survey the scene for danger.” I always got that. My skills in diving underwater and hauling frantic victims to shore were questionable but surveying for danger came instinctively. Always wary of what might lie behind a closed door, in a bag left on the road, at the bottom of a kitchen sink filled with murky water, or in an old takeout container abandoned in the fridge, I exercise caution. So on that Sunday afternoon, arriving back at the hospital, I knew immediately something was wrong.

First clue: Marika’s father and his wife were still there. They wore twin frowns. Marika had been taken off the ventilator earlier that morning, recovering after two unconscious weeks, and now the monitors sat silent and still. I quickly pushed through to her bedside.
“Hi Mom,” she said in a voice higher than I expected. She smiled joyfully at me.
“Hi. Are you okay, Mareek?” I asked, my own voice rising in pitch to meet hers.
“Puppy.” She said, holding up her stuffed animal. I looked back and forth from Marika to Puppy to Marika again, to size up the scene: my Marika smiling at me, waving Puppy. Smiling. At me.
“Hi Puppy, it’s good to see you again.” I shook Puppy’s threadbare paw. Marika eyed me expectantly as I continued making a mental snapshot of things. Skirting familiar territory, in my special education teacher voice I asked, “Umm, can you count to ten, Mareek?” The situation was strange only because it was my own daughter I was assessing. Off on the side, her father was holding his head.

“Okay,” Marika said eagerly. “Okay. One, two. Three. Mom, Puppy.” She shoved Puppy at me like when she was three years old and wanted me to make Puppy dance. Baby Marika. Yow. What was happening? My little girl was back. And she liked to say “okay.” And now she wanted to sing. So we sang.

Surprisingly, Marika could remember many of the words to past camp songs and from beloved Broadway musicals. She now had me working hard to remember the words to Joni Mitchell’s “Circle Game.”
“An’ go around an’ round an’ round an’ round,” she was stuck like a broken record until I finally changed the tune.
“Oh the sun will come out,” I began an old favorite song by Charles Strouse and Martin Charnin from the musical, Annie, and she joined in. “Tomorrow. Betcha bottom dollar there’s no sorrow, come what may.” I held Puppy up and she watched, totally engaged. “Just thinkin’ about, tomorrow…”
“Keep her singing. It’s improving her breathing,” said Robert, the nurse who was adjusting the monitors next to us.
“Lah la la-la … hang on ‘til tomorrow,” we sang.
“Keep it up,” Robert encouraged, “It’s definitely helping.” Marika and I continued, both struggling to remember the words.
“La la-la-la something—something—sorrow,” we sputtered and came to a stop. And suddenly a deep baritone voice resounded around us,
“When I’m stuck with a daaaaay that’s gray and lonely, I just stick out my chin and grin and saaaaay—Oh—,” Robert sang with gusto, with hand gestures. We picked up our cue.
“The sun’ll come out tomorrow, so ya gotta hang on ‘til tomorrow,” the three of us sang loudly. “Tomorrow, tomorrow, I love ya, tomorrow! You’re only a day a-way!”

“Bravo!” I cheered, and turned to Robert. “You’re brilliant. You know all the words.”
“You wanna know how many school musicals I sang in?” Robert said. “I know all the words to everything. But I think we have to stop singing now. It seems to have increased her heart rate.”        

I assumed Marika was just dopey from the lingering sedation, and that she’d come around shortly. But by Tuesday the Roc Docs were conducting tests to determine the cause of her change in mental status. Laurie was on the phone, upset because the doctors wouldn’t return her calls.
“I’m not used to being an obnoxious, interfering relative, but if that’s what I have to be, I’ll do it. I’ve had a few patients die in the past twenty-nine years, and I can’t help but wonder whether the outcome would have been different had I spoken up and made the specialists listen to me,” she said. “I don’t ever want to feel that way about Marika.”

I’d forgotten one small detail in reporting back to Laurie. The doctors wouldn’t speak to her because Marika had arrived at the hospital this time with her friend instead of me, so the forms listing who should be privy to her medical information didn’t have Laurie’s name added. And now there was intense bleeding, nosebleeds so severe they made Marika’s blood pressure drop dangerously low. The doctors put us on alert. The Red Cross called Greg back from Afghanistan to be with his sister. Diagnoses and hypotheses showered down around us. But I was looking right into the eyes of my baby Marika who could barely see me, but was happy to have me there. And that night, after her father and his wife left, Marika’s breathing rate increased. Her oxygen level dropped and her heart rate shot off the charts. Afraid she wouldn’t be able to sustain the effort she was putting out just to breathe, the Roc Docs shoved the tube back down her throat and put her on the ventilator again.

I rubbed her feet and lay low under the tent I imagined around us, sheltering us from the storm that dropped down in a tumult of medical terms. “Encephalopathy.” “Aspiration pneumonia.” “Chemical pneumonitis.” “Necrosis of the red blood cells.” And “leukemia cells in the spinal fluid.” They drifted beyond our small world where I alternately rubbed her feet and snuck around the tubes and trappings to come closer, to sing into her ear in a high choked whisper, “The sun’ll come out tomorrow, so ya gotta hang on ‘til tomorrow….”

 

Reply to Robin

Duetting: Memoir 26

Duetting: Memoir 26 Robin Botie of Ithaca, New York, photoshops a collage of a tiny book made years ago by her daughter Marika Warden, who died with cancer.

For my holiday gift I’d asked my son for a shooting lesson. So on the unseasonably warm afternoon of Christmas Eve 2011, Greg comes downstairs with two long guns. Trembling, I wrap up in scarves, earplugs, earmuffs and hooded jacket, and follow him out the door and across the lawn. He stops just short of the pond, props his shotgun against a tree, and hands me the rifle. Remington.22, he tells me. And then he shows me how to hold, load, and ready it for shooting.

“You don’t pull the trigger,” he says, “you squeeze it. You hug it with your whole hand.” Willing my eyes to stay open, I squeeze and shoot. It’s not nearly as loud or as jarring as I’d expected. Marika would have said, “LikeBAM!” Hardly drawing a breath, I shoot again. Bam! The sky echoes with each ferocious bark. Handling this loaded rifle, cradling it so close, and then blasting the air—LikeBAM! —I am spellbound, conscious only of being just on the cusp of control or calamity.

We had placed two targets against a large willow tree across the pond. The targets were a gift I’d painted for Greg. The one I’m to use is a cartoon image of a rotund woodchuck with a bulls-eye bellybutton. We train the scope, first focusing far, and then zooming in so every breath and movement I make is exaggerated in the scope, and the woodchuck bounces in a dizzying scene. When it settles, I hug the trigger. LikeBAM! With no movement of my target, no trace of a hit, I aim and shoot again. BAM! I continue to load the magazine and shoot. My woodchuck hasn’t budged. Greg fires his gun and with each shot creates small clouds of smoke before his target.

When our bullets are spent, we walk together around the pond to inspect the targets. Surprisingly, the bullets sped through mine without moving it and I’ve hit the woodchuck’s belly twenty-six out of twenty-eight times. Pleased with myself, I’m hooting and cheering. Until we remove the targets from the base of the willow.
“Oh. No,” I wail, “I’ve been shooting clear through to the tree. We’re killing the tree.”
“Oh, well. ‘Goes with the territory,” he shrugs.

Some things, like the differences in our respect for life and living things, will never jive. I say a silent apology to the tree and then follow Greg into the kitchen. He takes the two rib-eye steaks I got for our supper, pierces them several times, plants them in plastic zip-lock bags, and marinates them in Johnny Walker whisky. He pours two glasses of the whisky over ice.

“Did Marika ever shoot? What’s the best prank you ever pulled on Marika?” I ask, thinking I’ve got him relaxed and ready to chat. “What would you fight for or even die for?”
“Mom. Just enjoy the Johnnie Walker. Okay?” And then, “Do you still have my extra passport photo somewhere? I need it back. I’ve got a job in Afghanistan as soon as I get my papers cleared.” He’s leaving again. Whatever holiday I’ve been avoiding is now totally shot.

Later that night, on the first Christmas Eve without my daughter, the single drawer of the small night table next to my bed is stuck open. I rarely use this drawer but I had rummaged through it for Greg’s passport photo. Now the drawer is jammed and I can’t get it to close shut. I slam it and it breaks. When I wrench it back out, a tiny green cloth packet falls to the floor, and I remember a Christmas long ago when Marika had no gift to give me. She had scurried upstairs, bounced back down, and handed me this small pouch of jeweled sequins. Now I empty the contents into my hand. Sparkling butterfly-light jewels catch the lamplight that blurs through tears. The remaining sparse contents of the broken drawer lay on the floor. And in the middle of the small mess, bound with shiny red holiday ribbon, sits a tiny book written and illustrated by Marika in 2001, when she was eleven years old.

Book of Wonderful Memories. From: Marika. J.W. To: Robin Botie
1.The costume parade. You were there for me every step of the way! I’ll never forget your face when I got 4th place. You were so happy! 2.That one teddy bear that you would look at when we were fighting and tell me a story of you. Mom … 5.Even with the most boring books, it seems so exciting with your voice. … 6.When I’m scared you are always there for me … 8.Always loveing even when I’m a brat.

Mareek! Are you here? I cry out. Are you helping me get through Christmas? What the heck am I doing in this drawer anyway? It’s almost midnight and I’m holding the most precious gift, now received twice over. Why does it feel like you’re watching me? Sometimes it’s hard not to believe in ghosts, in after-life. Here I am, holding this tiny book you made ten years ago, before all the road trips, before cancer. Before our mother/daughter divide. Ten years ago when you adored me—Maybe you never stopped adoring me—Maybe you just stopped showing it.

She’d made me a book. And now I am making a book for her. She wrote. So I’m writing. Words are my new medium and I’m using them to paint our portrait, mixing words like I used to mix colors. All the sweet or savory, whispering or roaring, bland or bewitching words that dance in my mind. Like : meandering, infinitesimal, crimson, petechiae…. Reading my book aloud at the Feed and Reads, occasionally I glance up from the pages to peek at my audience, their jaws dropped and eyes begging me to continue. My gift to Marika, I tell myself. Really, though, she has gifted me, and is gifting me still.

My first manuscript is a plot-less lament to my dead daughter. But that doesn’t matter. Because, daily, I lose myself and find myself in what I write. Some new determination to live, lives on. And I feel hope. It’s back. And hope implies future. So I continue to write, and look forward to the sharing. And I love my book like it’s my daughter.

REPLY TO ROBIN

Duetting: Memoir 24

Duetting: Memoir 24 Robin Botie of Ithaca, New York, photoshops Andrea Riddle and Marika Warden wearing headwraps and hoop earrings, as cancer patients.

There is always some anxiety as I wait for guests to arrive. My friends are so different from one another. They range from Marika’s age to my mother’s age. For the Feed and Reads I’ve gathered them from my hiking group, from foodie endeavors, former workplaces, and past mother-daughter relationships. One friend’s daughter will join us, and also a woman I’ve never met who felt linked by loss. And Rachel. If I can reach her.

“Hey Rachel, where are you? You haven’t called or emailed me in over a month. I’m getting worried,” I leave multiple messages on her cell, “You’re coming to the Feed and Read aren’t you?” Rachel usually communicates with confidence, like she’s the Mayor of Cool. But when I last spoke to her she’d sounded almost suicidal. Too wrapped up in my own pain, I’d never really considered how Marika’s death affected her best friend. 

Soon I’m more warmed than worried, looking around the first assembly of my readers. They introduce themselves and talk like they are old friends. And in the months to come, they will be. In their courageous effort to help me, they will discover familiar connections and create new ones. But there are two who are missing. One is Andrea. She had often “borrowed” my children over the years, spoiling them and stretching their minds. She’d visited Marika several times in the hospital. Andrea had given me my first teaching job, knowing what I could do long before I did. Two months ago we walked in the woods as yellow leaves fell. What kind of horrible joke was it that she was recently diagnosed with cancer herself? I wanted to be there for her. But wearing her head wrap and hoop earrings, she so resembled Marika, I could hardly look at her. Now Andrea is too sick from chemo to join the Feed and Reads.

The doorbell rings and I run to answer it. Rachel.
“Sorry I’m late,” she says, all bubbly at the door.
“Look at you!” I gush. “Your hair. You look adorable. You look – happy.” She looks like she owns the world and has just walked into her own birthday party. Her makeup and manicure are gone. And her hair is shaved off except for a bit at the top.
“It’s a Faux-Hawk,” she says, brushing at her almost bare head. “Do you like it?” It’s freezing outside, but she’s wearing a wife-beater undershirt, neon Michael Jordan sneakers, and low rise baggy khaki shorts that might be her dad’s. She looks like the beloved janitor from some old TV show. But she still has on the fragile silver necklace that was Marika’s.

“I’ve been sober for fifty-six days,” Rachel announces at the table as we feast on butternut squash soup, cheeses, salad, sushi, and shrimp cocktail. She proudly shows off her tattoos. One particularly huge one spreads across her ribs on her right side, “Be strong when you feel weak,” a quote of Marika’s. I’m very aware of how different Rachel is, from before, from the others. And I’m proud of her, like she’s mine.

When the meal is over, we move into the small living room for the reading. A photo of Marika sits on a tiny table next to me. Next to it is a box of tissues. And pencils and notebooks, for comments.

The Feed and Reads will go on for over a year. Whenever I have a couple of new chapters to share we will feast. My work is the focus at these gatherings, but everyone here knows grief. Before and after I read, we share our stories.

“It was just like that for me when my husband was in the hospital, before he died,” says Jane, the friend-of-a-friend I hadn’t known before. Next to her, Barb, who will host most of the Feed and Reads, sits stunned, holding a tissue in mid-air between her lap and her face.
“After my husband died I wrote him letters too,” says Annette, whom I’ve known over twenty-five years, “It was a powerful healing tool.” Celia, who remembers everything, brings the group back to my story saying, “You forgot to mention the prom. You have to write about the prom.”

It’s as if they all know I need them here. They somehow sense the best way to support a grieving parent is to show up and listen. So I keep writing and rewriting. To read aloud my daughter’s story. All a bereaved mother really wants is for her child to be remembered. For the rest of my life I will listen patiently while friends ramble on about their kids graduating, getting their first real jobs, getting married … and there will be no more news of Marika that I can contribute to the chatter. But here is my time to tell about my beautiful brave girl, her accomplishments, and her extraordinary passage through the bloom of her short life.

 

 

 

 

 

REPLY TO ROBIN