Member-only story
My Eight-Year Grief Road Map
Year eight without my daughter begins with learning a new skill
Year 1
The first year is hard to recall with clarity except for the moment she died. She is in her own bed. I sit beside her and wish, with my whole heart, that I can die in her place. Is that such a strange thing to wish for? I am her mother, after all.
I walk around with an ache that squeezes my chest and takes my strength away. I am looking for her, searching for signs in every corner of the physical world for the baby who had grown into the child who had spent a few glorious years as a teenager until she vanished completely.
Well, not completely. Her ashes are in a handmade ceramic urn with a hummingbird painted on it.
I search and weep and gaze at the sky trying to make sense of the gaping hole in my life. I find some comfort in walks and poetry and birds, but there is no real solace for me. I fold cranes and I collect feathers and I learn how to attract hummingbirds to my yard.
I don’t work much. I want (fervently and selfishly) to die by some natural or unexpected cause — cancer, infection, the random miscalculation of a careless driver. I hate the world — and myself — for continuing to move forward without my sweet girl.
