Tag Archives: writing to heal

Duetting: Memoir 23

Robin Botie of Ithaca, New York, photoshops a collage of her daughter's ashes in an effort to heal her broken heart.

In late July 2011, I bring home the sealed black box containing my daughter’s ashes, and assemble a small altar in the living room, above the TV. Around the box I place photographs, daisies, chocolates, Marika’s stuffed Puppy, and two Lonely Planet Guides to Australia. The first summer without Marika is half over when I finally end my travels. I hadn’t found her anywhere else in the world. The box is where she lives now. Each day I stand before it wishing Marika good morning and goodnight. Her ashes are not just dust. The ashes are her, humming and dancing inside the box, watching me come and go.

With Rachel’s help, I clear out most of Marika’s bedroom in the house. Then, in a reckless determination to purge, I attack the attic, my son’s sprawl of accumulated stuff, and my own closets. I sell off my father’s stamp collection and deposit carloads of clothing and toys at the Salvation Army. It all has to go. The only things I want are Marika’s words. And once they are photo-copied, I send the original journals off with Rachel to give to Marika’s father. Then Rachel and I empty Marika’s bedroom at the apartment she shared with friends.

“What’s up with you?” I ask her. Rachel looks like a wounded animal. “Are you okay?” My eyes are drawn to the silver Tiffany’s necklace she wears, the one Laurie gave Marika for graduation.
“I’m not with my boyfriend anymore,” she says.
“Should I say sorry or congratulations? Well, either way, congratulations. ‘Cause you’re with you.” It’s what I say to anyone who tells me she’s survived a separation and is suddenly single or alone. It’s what I tell myself: You still have you. But I don’t recognize this as a gift yet. I feel I’m only a ghost of the person I was before. And it’s still hard to face people. I’m sure there is whispering and pointing just beyond my earshot and sight. Like last year, at a party, when my friend Andrea nodded discreetly in the direction of an acquaintance, “Do you see that woman? She’s been through hell and back, and she looks it.” I’d regarded the blinking, quivering woman who did indeed look like she’d fallen to Earth from outer space, breaking the sound barrier, her heart, and every moving part of her in the fall. Is that what I look like now? Floundering and crazed?

After Rachel and I bag the last of Marika’s shoes, I wash my hands singing “Happy Birthday” twice to Marika, and consider the strange haunted face in the mirror. Red rheumy eyes stare back. Graying roots jeer at me. Ugh. This has to go too.

Then, in early August, on a Sunday morning hike with Suki and friends, I fall in a slippery stream bed, and break my wrist. Right away I know it’s fractured although it is the first bone I’ve ever broken.
“Go. Get back to enjoying your Sunday,” I tell my friends who take Suki and drop me off at the hospital. “I’ll be fine.” But I am not fine. It’s my first time back at a hospital since Marika died. Waiting alone in the ER, I break down in howls. All the tears I had stuffed away for months each time I bravely faced the world beyond home, come gushing out of me. Marika’s supposed to be here, not me.

And then, as I bumble around the next several weeks in a cast, I suffer all sorts of snags. Mishaps. Glitches. Calamities. I get the flu. I mislay bills and incur late fees. By a hair, I miss hitting a deer on the road. Everything I cook burns. My keys disappear. My house is plagued by deferred maintenance. Skunks move in under my deck, and the pond is overrun with muskrats. I can’t sleep nights. And at the end of September, I get a traffic violation for failing to pull into the far lane when passing a blinking, parked cop car.

“Mom, you’re such a wimp,” I hear. And I know I’ve got to do better. So, I begin to drag myself out of the house and down the hill to the community that loved Marika. I start co-leading Chronic Disease Self-Management Workshops for the Tompkins County Health Department. I join a six-week hospice-sponsored group, Singing Through Your Grief, where mourners are supported as they share stories and sing. CompassionNet, a program serving New York State families of children with life-threatening illnesses, offers to pay for life coaching sessions.

“Why don’t you write a book?” asks my life coach, Marci Solomon.
“I would never,” I say, scrunching up my nose like Marika did when I suggested she wear shoes and socks in winter instead of sandals. But I enjoy writing responses to the questions Marci asks each week. And I eagerly do the homework from the Hospicare singing group.
“Your assignment is to pick a prompt from the list and write what you would tell your deceased loved one,” say Jayne Demakos and Kira Lallas, who lead Singing Through Your Grief. At the session that follows I read aloud what I wrote. A reverential silence followed by exuberant praise energizes me like richest chocolate.
“I will write for five hours this week,” I pledge at a Chronic Disease Self-Management workshop. Even the co-leaders are required to make and complete Action Plans, weekly contracts to do something for themselves, and then share their successes or failed attempts at the next meeting. The following week, “I will write for ten hours.”

It was just letters to Marika at first. Like on the TV game show Jeopardy, I teased out questions from her poems and songs, questions I wish I’d asked during our time together. What’s it like to be twenty and have cancer? What do you fear? How does cancer affect your relationships? … Memories swell up inside me. Words churn in my head. And when all the commotion is captured onto paper, I experience a thawing, a lightening. When I read aloud what I wrote, it becomes part of me. It makes me feel stronger. And it makes me sure this is not something I want to do on my own.

“Hey, Rachel, I’m writing a book,” I say over the phone. Then I call a dozen other friends. “I have an idea,” I say. “I’ve been writing a book and want to test it out. I want to do a series of simple dinners where I read aloud. Chapter by chapter, as I write. I’m calling these dinners ‘Feed and Reads.’ Would you come?”

It is so exciting to enlist listeners. With thirteen positive responses I begin two small groups that will fuel my energies over the next year with their kind and brave commitment. December starts out dreary. But I write for hours every day. Often by candlelight. For Marika, and now for the women who will gather together to hear me. Addicted to light, I line the driveway with solar-powered garden torches. I frame the mudroom door with rows of red mini-lights, and plant battery-operated plastic candlesticks in the windows up and down the house. I buy hundred-watt bulbs and full-spectrum therapy lamps to write by. Sweet light blossoms all around me, breaking the darkness as I write. Warm welcoming lights brighten the winter nights, the empty house, the long lonely driveway, and my dark heart. They beckon, they plead: come to me, come home.

 

 

 

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Duetting: Memoir 15

Duetting: Memoir 15 Robin Botie of Ithaca, New York photoshops a poem written by her daughter who died, placing it over an image of silhouettes.

Marika’s classmates and teachers had been sending notes of support, and “Marika Kicks Leukemia” tee shirts circulated throughout Ithaca High. In a daze, but smiling, Marika listened to her benefit concert over my cellphone held to her ear. The guidance counselor called daily to see if she could attend the graduation, but no one knew for sure if Marika would be able to walk, sit up in a wheelchair, or even tolerate the trip back to Ithaca. At the last minute the Roc Docs said yes. In a stupor of disbelief, I drove her home.

There was plenty to worry about. Marika could pass out at any time. It was hot, and the red wig was heavy under her cap. She could barely walk, but insisted on walking. There were stairs. Her last name beginning with ‘W’, she would shake the same germ-riddled hands that shook all four hundred classmates’ hands before her. Concerned about her meager immune system, I presented her with a pair of purple latex gloves. She ignored me. She was uninterested in instructions on how to gracefully avoid handshakes and hugs. How would she hold up during the half hour wait in line the students had to endure before claiming their seats? She was determined to do the whole thing the way she’d always expected. So I left her off as close as I could to the stadium at Cornell University where the event was to take place, where there was already a traffic jam, long lines, and huge tangles of people and germs.

We were all there at Schoellkopf Hall. Laurie. Greg. Rachel. Marcus. Marika’s father and his wife. Our mother-daughter tribe. Teachers Marika hadn’t seen in weeks. People I hadn’t seen in years. I was hugged repeatedly as Laurie and I made our way to the spot high in the bleachers that Rachel had staked out for us. The band began to play and the class of 2008 filed in and filled the expanse of seats below us. Teary-eyed, I kept my gaze fixed on Marika during the speeches. Then, finally, the students rose from their seats.

Marika stood. Soon, she was walking. She was next. The stairs—suddenly I couldn’t see through the crowd—she’d somehow climbed the stairs when her name was called. There was a burst of applause. There was thunderous clapping, cheering. She smiled, embarrassed, up on the stage. I had to stand to see. People all around were standing. She stopped before each of the graduating officials to receive their blessings. The audience stomped and roared. Marika stood there, astonished, surveying the scene for what seemed like forever. I clapped hard as I could. I cried.

The bleachers shook wildly when she stepped down off the stage. The rumpus continued as she headed back to her seat and was ambushed in hugs. And as the din died down, I scanned the crowd. How astounding it was to be held in the hearts of so many. I’m her Mom, I smiled through tears. Right then I knew I’d always remember the sheer glory and magnificence of that moment. What I didn’t know was how later, and forever, the memory of Marika’s graduation would stir up an ocean of pride and tears. Like it was just the other day.

 

 

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Duetting: Memoir 3

Duetting: Memoir 3 Robin Botie of Ithaca, New York, Photoshops an illustration for her memoir about her life with her daughter.I hold my daughter’s ponytail to my nose and sniff, then slip it back into the bag, and hurry off to the funeral home where I give it to her father.
“So you can visit her anytime you want,” I tell him.

Writing would become my way to visit my dead daughter.

But writing the story that pulverizes your whole world is like becoming a lifeguard when you’re terrified of drowning. I’ve done both though neither was ever in my plans. At the age of fifty, to afford sending my children to summer camps, I became a hiking counselor at Camp Scatico in Elizaville, New York, never expecting they would train me to be a lifeguard. Afraid of going underwater, it took all my courage to pass the part of the lifeguard test that required diving into deep water for bricks. Diving into my worst fears turned out to be good training for what was to come.

I never wanted to be a writer. The day my daughter died I sank, and then got my life handed back to me, unrecognizable, like I’d picked up someone else’s clothes at the cleaners. Then suddenly, I start writing a long letter to my daughter. Writing jolts memories. It dredges up painful debris. Alternately I sink and swim. I scramble up from great depths, cradling bricks in my arms, in search of the surface so I can breathe again. I let loose the bricks, one by one, on the pages I write.

In desperation one day, six months after I sank like a boulder dropped in water, I wanted to duet with my daughter. Too late, you can’t have a duet with a dead person. Someone who’d had her own heart broken told me this when I showed her the letter. I’d poured my heart out into that one long letter, for months, filling it with I’m-sorries, pleadings, and promises: When your tide broke, mine did too. Waves crashed over us. As they washed back out to sea, I was left alone with the sand seeping out between my grasping toes. Somehow, I am still here. So I will tell the story of our broken tides. I will cherish the words you left. Where your words and my words sit on a page together, we will have our duet.

I didn’t know about Marika’s poems until she was gone. If I couldn’t have a duet, at least I could riff off her words until I had a song of my own. So I put the poems, her side of what happened, in the telling of our journey as it unfolded. Then I responded to her words. What did I know about writing? I’m the one who drew and painted. But everything is changed now.

So I write to own what happened. She died. I let her die. To own this is to grow beyond it. I write so that someday I can look at a rainbow again or be hugged without crying my eyes bloodshot.

I write because she wrote. She left behind a brand new, otherwise empty journal with a single poem on the first page. In the bare pages that followed, Marika beckoned me to continue. No. She dared me to carry on.

And mostly I write to separate, in my mind, her story from my story. Because, before her death I was my biggest and bravest self as my daughter’s lifeguard. Before March 2011, my life was all about holding on and keeping her safe. Even as she fought to be free.

Eventually most mothers watch their children go off on their own. There are two stories as each one’s life takes its own direction. Two stories. They wend and wind. Tangling up at times. And then, unraveling. It’s not as if our two journeys were ever supposed to come out even or end up in the same place. A mother is lucky these days if her path intersects with her grown daughter’s for an occasional birthday or Thanksgiving. If a mother pines an hour or so each time her child leaves home, she is fortunate. One more countless sweet sorrow that is not forever. In a heartbeat, I’d give anything to have this be our parting rather than what we got.

Still. Separation was complicated enough before Marika died. From her earliest years on I tiptoed the tightrope between keeping her happy and keeping her safe. Regularly I’d hobble off, wounded, exhausted. But I always came bounding back. I was her least favorite person. But she—she lit up my life. Now I’m left to resolve the questions: Where is she now? Whose life am I guarding? Who am I, if not her mother? And how do I live without her?

 

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Duetting: Memoir 2

Duetting: Memoir 2 Robin Botie of Ithaca, New York, photoshops an illustration for her dead daughter's final wishes.I’m an intruder. Stalking through my daughter’s sacred and secret things. No mother should ever have to do this. It’s all upside down, inside-out. Backwards. Yet I feel my dead daughter is watching and directing my every move.

Marika hadn’t even died yet when her father began to whisper about what we should do with her remains. Scrunched together with his wife and our son Greg in a curtained-off alcove fifteen feet from Marika’s ICU bed, he said he wanted her to be buried in a cemetery near his house.

“So I can visit her.” His eyes winced wildly. I tried to contain the scowl twisting my face.

“Marika would want to be cremated and have her ashes scattered in Australia,” I said, the words flying out of my mouth even though Marika and I had never discussed this. I caught up my drooping jaw and gulped. And realized it was the first time in years I was sure of anything about her.

I was right. Days later when Marika died, Rachel, her closest friend, found her final wishes. In a shoebox under the bed, in the apartment she rented with friends, where she’d moved half her stuff, and stayed when she wasn’t sick puking or in pain.
“You should write some final wishes. Just in case,” I’d told my daughter, four months earlier, back when writing wishes was more like making a shopping list. She’d actually done something I’d asked. Now I ache to think of her sitting alone in that place, imagining herself no longer alive when these words would be found.

“In the Event of my Death,” Marika had written by hand in November 2010. The document is simple and short, like her life. “Final Wishes” is penciled in diagonally at the top, the two words flying heavenward off the page. “If I am ever in a permanent vegetative state, do not keep me alive on life support.” Then she bequeaths her personal things. First, I would get Suki, her dog. Her closest girlfriends would get “whatever clothing they desire.” She shopped for her clothes at the Salvation Army and other secondhand stores. Who would want her clothes? But I want her fake leather cowboy boots and the sweaters she never returned that I lent her, and she lent to Taylor or whomever. Her jewelry is to be divided among the girlfriends. Figuring money was what her brother would value the most of all her earthly possessions, she requested her college fund go to Greg, “If possible, … along with the bracelet he gave me from Iraq. I wore it almost every day.” To Russ, her music partner, she leaves her guitar and lyrics. Other friends, the guys, get the pipes and party paraphernalia she’d given pet names to, Cricket and Halo. And on the bottom of the second page, she had signed her name with a final request. “Marika Warden. I would like my remains to be cremated and scattered in Australia, as that is where I would be if I were alive (If possible).”

Wishes. Last wishes. Wishes on stars. Birthday wishes. I was with her on every one of her birthdays. Twenty birthday cakes. With candles. Always one extra for good luck. Her last wish—leaving her ashes in Australia, where she had intended to begin a new life, free of cancer, and me—she must have known I’d make it possible. Anything would be possible. For her.

Her father hadn’t been mentioned in the wishes. Through the black hole of the past week, he had needed to grab onto every last little thing that had been Marika’s. He can have it all, I tell myself, the next four days as I poke through her soccer trophies, beanie babies, CDs…. Then, on the fifth day, my house fills up with people. Time to go to Bangs Funeral Home.

Marika orders me to bring her stuffed Puppy, some photos, and the first journal I discovered with the one poem. Looking for a bag to carry these to Bangs, I scrounge through a closet until a perfect-sized black canvas tote surfaces. It seems to be empty as I begin to load my few items. Then I notice a small plastic bag in the bottom. I take it out and unwrap the paper towels inside. Suddenly I’m holding Marika’s ponytail. Almost dropping it, I gasp at the silky-soft honey-brown bundle still bound at one end with a rubber band. Three years ago, when it became apparent she was losing her hair with the start-up of chemo, Marika’s friends had chopped it off and shaved her head. Not quite the requisite ten inches needed to donate to Locks of Love, a nonprofit organization that makes wigs for children suffering hair loss from illness, the ponytail had been stashed away.

I hold her hair to my nose and sniff, then slip it back into the bag, and hurry off to the funeral home where I give it to her father.
“So you can visit her anytime you want,” I tell him.

 

 

REPLY TO ROBIN

Duetting: Memoir 1

Duetting: Memoir 1 Robin Botie of Ithaca, New York, uses photoshop to print and illustrate a poem written by her daughter who died.My dead daughter drags me up the stairs and into her bedroom. I thought I’d left her for good, in the hospital, in Rochester. But she walked in with me when I got home. Now, she is all over the house, excited, calling me to look, see this, find that. And she pulls me up the stairs. I don’t want to see that room. But I can’t sit still. Can’t think. Can’t eat. I want to be where she is. I want to be dead. It’s almost bedtime now and for hours I’ve resisted her luring me up here. But she wins.

Look, she says.
For what, I wonder? I scan my daughter’s room, trying not to believe she’s ninety miles north, in a bag, in the hospital’s basement refrigerator. No. Remember her here. In this room. She slept with her eye makeup on, smudged, her red painted toes peeking out from under four quilts. I’d wake her with breakfast trays—smoothies and grilled cheese sandwiches—to coax her into the morning. Now, sinking nose-down into the princess’s bed, I sniff, searching for her dwindling scent left buried in the linens. I roll over to see the room like she did. It feels like her hundred thirty-five pounds are sitting on my chest. Is she okay, I wonder? No. Nothing’s okay. I can’t keep her warm and comfortable anymore. Who am I without her? Am I still her mother? Now what? What am I supposed to do now, Marika?

Floor to ceiling, every inch and corner is filled with stuffed animals, photos, books, and memorabilia. Clothes. Papers. Nothing has been thrown out in three years. Since cancer. The room is crammed, and I am completely empty.

Look, she kicks me.
In the middle of the bookcase, a small spiral-bound notebook stands out an inch from the other books. It appears to be an unused journal. Until I pick it up and flip the pages backwards. There, on the first page, written in her most polished handwriting, is the poem above.

A wave crashes over my head. Inside me a seawall breaks. I take the poem and her stuffed Puppy to bed. The night fills with images of my almost twenty-one-year-old Marika flying over hills and mountains. And in the morning, I find myself back upstairs, haunted. Hungry for more. Another journal beckons, and then another. Rummaging through her things I find sketchbooks. Notebooks with poems and plays. Letters. When did she write all this? Songs. Diary entries. Bittersweet glimpses into her short life. And it’s like an invitation. I’ve found my daughter again. Marika’s not gone. She is upstairs in her room in a dozen different journals, in a million words, waiting for me to finally—really—get to know her.

 

REPLY TO ROBIN

Getting a Life

Getting a Life Robin Botie of Ithaca, New York, photoshops a cover for her manuscript that helped her heal from child loss, and will now be shared on her blog.“Mom, get a life,” my daughter Marika often told me, mostly when she was angry with me. It was the last coherent thing she said to me, “Get a life.” And after she died I did everything I could think of to make a new life for myself, one she’d approve of.

Mainly, I tried to do all the things Marika loved to do. Things I’d never considered before. Like writing, blogging, and photographing. It was comforting to coop myself up at home for endless days crafting weekly blogs and a 200-page memoir about our journey together through the wilds of cancer. It was like duetting with my daughter. Or with her ghost. Writing and rereading the manuscript brought her back to me, made her come alive again and again. It helped me heal. I never needed to get the work published. It did enough just giving me a foothold to re-enter the world.

There’s a problem with getting a life, or getting a new life. Living isn’t just about doing things or maintaining one single mission. And people change. I’ve changed. Nine years after Marika’s death, I’m finding I need more time to watch birds, or to simply sit and do next to nothing. I want to spend more time in the company of friends, to listen to others’ stories. To listen to music, to maybe even dance. These days there’s never enough time to record meaningful material for my readers. It takes me forever to compose. Yet writing, blogging, is a connection to Marika and to my newfound community that I do not want to give up.

When Marika died, long before I could begin to write, it helped to read what others had written about their losses. So I’m hoping you won’t mind if I share bits and pieces of my own manuscript here, in my weekly blogs, over the next weeks. Or months. Just to keep in touch while I venture out to discover where life will lead me next.

 

 

 

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