love big. love hard.
We lost much this past year.
We lost graduations and weddings and funerals. Backyard barbecues and big Thanksgiving dinners.
We lost our sense of normalcy, our sense of connection – physical and emotional. We lost the security of schools and jobs and routines and the daily interactions we didn’t realize meant so much.
We lost faith. In our institutions, in the people ho were entrusted to run them, in our fellow man. We lost the idea of absolute truth. Of science. Of civil responsibility.
We all have roles that require more of us than we think we have to give. Not because we are martyrs but because there are people and events that are bigger and more important than we are.
This is one of those times.
And while it is tempting – while it is human nature in fact – to curl into a ball on the bathroom floor and curse the fate that has befallen us, we must rather pick ourselves up and simply do what must be done, however best we can do it.
So go ahead and eat all the Oreos and the Doritos and whatever makes you happy. But also eat some vegetables every once in awhile because they’ll make you feel better.
Friday night, I put on my Lucky Orange Pants for the last time this season. I didn’t know it at the time, although I suppose I imagined it was a possibility. That is, after all, the nature of the post-season. Survive and advance or lose and go home. But truthfully there wasn’t a part of me that believed that Friday would be the end. No, I was intoxicated by the belief that this was the season Virginia was destined to win it all.
But this isn’t a post about basketball. It’s a post about love. About family. About hope.
I have always been the girl who believed, no matter the odds, no matter how much it hurt, no matter how loud the voice of caution rang in the back of my head. I believe that the good guy will always finish first. I believe that love always wins. I believe in the storybook ending.
An old friend once referred to it as innocence. He said it with a slight trace of pity, as if I just didn’t know better. I worry that it will break your heart one day, he said.
And it did. Though not in the way he expected.
It was a doctor who stood in a hospital corridor, looked in my eyes which were begging him to tell me the impossible, and said softly, There was nothing more we could do.
That does something to a person. It did something to me.
I am not talking about the obvious ways you would expect to be changed by the death of a parent or affected by witnessing a trauma instead of just hearing about it. No, I mean the way in which your psyche is fundamentally altered when you have spent the currency of every last hope, every prayer, and every last dream believing in a miracle that does not come.
That is what it feels like to have your heart break.
And in that moment what you need is something to believe in again.
For better or worse, since my dad died, I have placed the full force of my love, the weight of my grief, and the survival of my last shred of hope on the Virginia basketball team. I wore that team like a mantle upon my neck the way my son wears his blanket like a superhero’s cape. They gave me an outlet for all the emotions like joy and hope that seemed to have no place in my new life and, in losing, a conduit to grieve all that I had lost. More than that, they gave me a bridge between my past and my present – a communion of the love that was born on my father’s lap 36 years ago and now courses through the veins of my boys.
And the truth is, in my heart I believed – I really believed – that somehow winning a national championship would be the final victorious chapter in my storybook of grief. A heavenly sign from my dad that I had survived and advanced.
But as the clock ticked down on the greatest upset in college basketball history, I knew there would be no storybook ending.
And when that happens, you can let the loss define you. You can dwell in the misery of wondering what might have been. You can equate falling with failure. You can give up on the storybook ending.
Or…
Or you can remember that success is not measured by a day. That life doesn’t always go according to plan. That loss is an outcome, not the end.
The truth is, sometimes the greatest success is getting back up after we have been knocked down and having the courage to believe one more time. And I would rather be the girl who believes in everything, even if it breaks my heart, than the girl who believes in nothing.
We fall and we get back up and we do it again. And again. And again. Because for every thousand times we fall, there is one where we fly.
Because we remember that falling hard is the price we pay for loving hard.
Friday night at midnight – after we got back to the hotel, after the tears had subsided – the boys decided we should send a text to Coach Ron. Even in their own grief, they knew someone else was hurting more. This is what they asked me to write:
“We know it might not help but we love you and we’re proud of you. You had the greatest season in ACC history. We were here with you tonight and we always will be.”
And for the first time that night, I cried.
Because that’s what real love is, isn’t it? Caring about someone else more than ourself. Allowing ourselves to celebrate the good in the midst of the bad. Knowing that even when we don’t have the answers, sometimes all we need to do is reach out our hand and say “I am here with you. And I always will be.” Believing when it is hard to believe.
This isn’t a post about basketball. It’s a post about love. About hope. About family.
Because even when we lose, we survive and advance.
#LoveHard
#Wahoowa
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We have seats. Really good seats. Behind the bench in the middle of the field. But every Saturday, before the game starts, the boys like to climb down the Hill.
The way down is precipitous and steep, momentum propelling us faster than we can control, our ankles buckling on the uneven ground.
When we finally reach the bottom, they sit as still as can be, as the percussive vibrations of the band commingle in the air with the raucous cheers of the crowd.
Two boys who rarely stop moving for anything are rendered completely motionless, despite the chaos that surrounds them.
Because this is the moment when they feel my dad next to them. Sometimes they give it a voice, announcing to me that he is there. But mostly they don’t need to. I can see it.
I can see the calm in their bodies, the concentration in their faces, as their minds struggle to recall memories that are slipping away with time.
No one tells you the hardest part of grief is the forgetting. The resilience that propels you through the blur of tragedy is a double-edged sword.
Eventually you strain to hear his voice, to remember the way he casually flicked his hair from his face. And the forgetting hurts as much as the losing.
But sometimes, when the smell of mud and grass and popcorn waft to your nose, when the air crackles with excitement and the possibility of the impossible, sometimes you remember everything.
And that’s when you stand as still as a statue, afraid that the slightest movement, the tiniest noise, will break the spell.
So I stand behind them and wait. I remember too.
We climb down the Hill because for one brief moment we want to return to the valley of grief. To remember the exquisite pain of what we have lost. Grief, after all, is just a measure of the vastness of our love.
And when we have felt it coursing through our veins and bubbling up through our skin, we turn and pull ourselves up the Hill once more. Out of the past and into the present.
Because just as much as we need to remember the bottom of the Hill, to feel the hurt anew, we also need to remember what it felt like to climb back up. That we have the ability to wade through the morass. To make our feet plod, one in front of the other, up to the top. Even if we get stuck in the divets. Even if we fall down. Even if we get muddy and dirty and bruised.
We have good seats. Really good seats. But on Saturdays, we climb down the Hill to remember what was. And to remember, no matter how deep the valley, we know how to climb back up again.
#LoveHard
#ClimbHarder
#wahoowa
When you lose someone, everyone is quick to tell you, in soft voices laden with reassurance, that you will forget. That time anesthetizes the sharp pains that disrupt your sleep and interrupt the most mundane moments of your day.
And they’re absolutely right.
But what they don’t tell you is that the forgetting hurts as much as the initial loss. That in the forgetting, you lose another piece of that which you have already lost.
That the resilience that propelled you through the gasping breaths of panic and the heaving sobs of loneliness is a double-edged sword.
It doesn’t happen all at once, but bit by bit. Time slowly erodes the trauma of the loss itself until the scale slowly tips the other way. Until it is not the first thing you think about in the morning and the last thing you think about as you drift off to sleep.
I’ve done it often enough to know it takes two hours and 35 minutes to get from my front door to my seat in John Paul Jones Arena. Five hours round-trip, give or take, depending on traffic and how many times I need to stop for coffee.
There are times when it seems longer than that — when we are mired in traffic, when we are racing against the clock to make it into our seats before tip-off, or on the long ride home after a late game on a Monday night.
Don’t worry — I am keenly aware it sounds crazy to have season tickets to a basketball team that plays 150 miles away and adds 3,000 miles to my odometer each year.
It’s more than just the extra 3,000 miles of course. It’s late nights and cranky mornings. It’s actual practices missed and metaphorical balls dropped. It’s the anxiety as we watch and the tears when we lose. It’s more than a time commitment. It’s an emotional one.
Objectively it absolutely sounds crazy.
Squeezed into my seat in the rafters of JPJ is where everything is okay for me. For us. It is our time together, uninterrupted by work, by technology, by friends. By life. It is our shared passion.
It’s where their blisters made them special, not left out.
It’s where magic happens and superstition is real.
It’s where I allowed myself to grieve and where I learned how to hope again.
It’s where we met a special friend who also happens to be a pretty spectacular coach.
It’s where – in one split second before the ball tips – I feel all the feelings all at the exact same moment — hope and fear and love and heartbreak.
There is a different kind of peace on the drive home. In the darkened car, eyes half-closed, we talk about what went right and what went wrong. Both in the game and in our day.
Maybe it’s because they are tired, from the late hour or because the adrenaline has finally stopped surging through their veins, or maybe it’s because we all have more courage to speak in the dark, but some of the best conversations we have ever had have been on the long ride home.
After everyone has fallen asleep I listen to the snuffling of noises around me. I feel the hum of the Sequoia’s engine, groaning slightly about being overworked again. I steal glimpses in the rear view mirror of those soft faces illuminated briefly by the headlights of another car on the road and see traces of the babies I held in my arms. I listen to songs that take me to other moments, other decisions, other faces, other feelings. All the things I didn’t think about in those blissful 2 hours inside JPJ.
The next morning, when we are rumpled and cranky and late, I always wonder if if is worth it.
Because there are nights when we walk in the door at 2 am and my 8 year old, rumpled and disoriented from sleeping in the car, rests his head against mine as I fumble to unlock the front door, and whispers “I know we lost mom. But it was just fun being together.”
Or when my 10 year old, exhausted and teary, extends a hand to a stranger wearing the jersey of the winning team and says “Good game.”
Or when they run into the open arms of Coach Sanchez who is waiting for their hugs.
Or when my 8 year old tells me he’s writing a poem at school about happiness. “We had to say what we thought happiness smelled like. Some people said Christmas and some said the beach. But I said JPJ.”
Or when they reach for my hand in the middle of a game and don’t let go until the buzzer sounds.
And in those moments I know it is worth every mile, every hour, every dollar. I know years from now, my children won’t remember what they got for Christmas, or the grades they made.
But they will remember how to lose graciously.
They will remember that love will break your heart into a million pieces but it will just as surely put it back together again.
They will remember that success cannot be measured in one game. A year cannot be defined by one day. A person cannot be defined by one moment.
They will remember that losing isn’t always a bad thing. That sometimes losing can show you what your weaknesses are so you can fix them. That sometimes losing is the only way to know what really matters to you.
They will smell popcorn and remember the moment before the ball tips – the one where everything is still possible.
They will remember that even when we lose, we survive and advance.
They will remember the long road home.
#lovehard
And for a minute, it felt like salt in my wounds because he’s not here anymore damnit and I silently cursed myself for forgetting to delete his account again.
But then I went on a field trip with 20 first grade boys who were silly and sweet and wanted to feel and touch and learn.
And one of them – one who always has trouble staying out of trouble – seemed to need my attention. So I held his hand while we walked and I gave him my sandwich when he asked if he could have it because he didn’t like his own and I played games with him on the bus to distract him from hitting the other boys.
And at the end of the day, he quietly came and took my hand and whispered “Was I good today?” I realized this was a question he asks a lot and I know what the answer usually is.
I looked in his eyes and the rush of my own loss and pain and love smacked me in the face as I realized my dad is still here damnit. He had been there all day, standing next to me and this little boy, pushing his hand into mine on a day when we were both struggling. On a day when we both needed each other.
The boy saw the look of shock register on my face, mistook it for a condemnation of him, and said dejectedly “I wasn’t, was I?”
I knelt down and held his hand again and told him he was good. He was more than good. And he smiled. A real smile. A smile from some place deep inside where words can not form. And I whispered “Happy Birthday Daddy” as he gave me a hug goodbye.
That was the first of many hugs. Every Thursday, he comes to find me in the Lower School library where I volunteer and gives me a hug.
On Valentine’s Day, he walked in and pressed this into my palm.
He had no way of knowing of course, but Tootsie Roll was what my dad used to call me.
He still struggles. I do too. Maybe that’s what we see in each other.
Since August, I have been grappling with big doubts, big feelings and big questions about my purpose in this world, about whether loving hard is making a difference.
My family and my friends and so many of you have been patient and supportive and loving, even when I could not be those things to myself.
But the truth is, the one person I wanted to talk to most, the person who understood me better than anyone, the person who could calm my heart with a hand on my arm, wasn’t here.
For the first time in my entire life, when I needed him – when I really needed him – he wasn’t here.
Until today, when I walked into the classroom and that same little boy came up behind me silently and gave me a different kind of hug – the kind of hug that lasts so long you need to catch your breath – and whispered “Hugging you is like hugging my mom.”
The mom he doesn’t live with. The mom he misses every day.
I hugged him back, and I whispered, for the second year in a row, “Happy Birthday Daddy. I miss you too.”
It’s really easy to dismiss all these things as coincidence. To say that we who are left behind on this earth are so desperate for a connection to the people we miss that we find meaning where there is none. And I wouldn’t blame you.
But I respectfully disagree.
Over the last two and a half years, my dad has sent me signs to let me know he is still here. He is always here. They come when I least expect them, but when I need them the most.
And perhaps the biggest lesson I have learned since my dad died is that love is bigger and stronger and more purposeful than I ever imagined. It is bigger than life. It is bigger than death.
We have been taught – by society, by experience, by life – to be afraid of love. To view it as a weakness. To think it is valuable only if it is returned in equal measure.
But when we do that, we lose sight of the fact that love is only real if it is given with no conditions, no expectations, no reward. And that is hard. It is hard to be so vulnerable. But the very thing that makes it hard is what makes it true.
Love hard friends. Even when it is hard. Especially when it is hard.
#lovehard
Over the last few weeks, I have been open about the internal doubts and crisis of confidence that brought me to my knees. For all I know you are tired of hearing about it. And that’s totally fine.
But I’m going to keep talking about it for two reasons. The first, and entirely selfish reason, is that, as previously noted, I am a talker. I say what I am feeling the moment I feel it. And as this is my space, the one place where I get to make all the decisions, well, I get to talk.
The second, and more important reason, is that I have learned over the last few weeks that so many of you have faced the same questions. And that has given me great comfort.
But what has been troubling me is how many people are scared to give a voice to their own struggles. How many people wrote or called and said they too had questioned their self-worth, had wondered if the path they were putting their children on was the right one, had had someone make them feel like they were lesser and how good it felt to finally realize they were not alone.
Some told me they were reticent to admit that not everything in their life was perfect.
Some said they didn’t feel like they had anyone to talk to who would understand.
Some were afraid that by opening the flood gates they wouldn’t be able to close them.
But here’s the thing friends. If we don’t start the conversation, then we will never be able to find the answers. If we don’t acknowledge what’s wrong, there is no chance of it getting better.
So to those of you who doubt, who wonder, who question, who slump down to the kitchen floor in tears because you are overwhelmed and don’t know where to begin, I say this:
We are supposed to feel all of those things.
We are human beings. We are messy and complicated, passionate and apathetic, confident and confused, good and bad – and sometimes we are all those things all at the same time.
And we have to stop only talking about the parts of life that are pretty and safe and uncomplicated. Those things are good but they are only part of us. We need to start talking about everything. We cannot be afraid to tell the truth. Each of our truths.
The heaviness comes, not just from the problems we all face, but from holding it all in. The heaviness comes from thinking we have to figure all of it out on our own, all at once.
Instead of viewing all of those doubts and insecurities and emotions as weaknesses that should be hidden, we need to stop worrying about making other people uncomfortable – about making ourselves uncomfortable – and start having the conversation.
With our family, our friends, ourselves, anyone who will listen. And if you don’t have any of those things, then call me.
Most of all, we need to stay close to the things that make us glad we’re alive. The people and places and things that fill our hearts with love until we remember how to love ourselves as much.
Thank you to the friends and strangers who have stayed close. Thank you to those of you who have asked questions and provided answers. Thank you for your candor, your support, and, most of all, your willingness to join the conversation.
The other night I had a dream about my dad. I opened a door and there he was, just standing in front of me. Unlike the dream I had six months ago, I didn’t waste any time looking for a pair of missing keys.
This time, I flung my arms around him, buried my face in his chest and cried. We didn’t speak. We didn’t need to. We just held each other close.
I woke up the next morning not with the hiccuping gasps of tears and aches of loneliness that accompanied the last dream. I awoke feeling…relieved. Relieved that even in dreamland, I had known what was important and I had held onto it.
I am better than I was. I will be better than I am. And I am staying close to the things that make me glad I am alive.
#lovehard
Just people. Sand and seals and starfish. Card games and songs and mini golf. Lobster rolls and three different clam chowders. Bright sun and cold fog. A precious baby boy who shares my name. Family.
I was so unplugged I didn’t even take that many pictures. And it was amazing.
Maybe I didn’t check out as much as I checked in.
There was some hard stuff too. That town, that house – they are filled with ghosts for me. I stood at the same counter where I heard my dad’s last words. I walked the same stone terrace where my brother and I lay hand in hand later that night. I drove the same winding streets where we followed the ambulance for miles.
And finally I walked into the room where my father died.
I stood on the threshold just like I did that night two years ago and tentatively peered inside.
It looked different than I remembered. The bureau was sitting at the wrong angle. The walls jutted out in the wrong places. All of it was…wrong.
The funny thing was none of it had actually changed. No, apparently, it was the details which have been so clearly seared into my brain for the last two years that were wrong.
We are all guilty of living in the past. What I realized, or maybe what I remembered, was that our memory can trick us. And if we aren’t careful, it can interfere with how we see the present.
I sat in the middle of the floor and waited, studying the knots in the wood looking for some discernible pattern, some order in the chaos. But no map appeared showing me which way to go. No timeline tracing the evolution of my grief.
I’m not sure what I was looking for in that room – turmoil or peace – but what I actually found was…nothing.
It was just a room. Just a place. Just a thing that happened.
Maybe that was what I was looking for all along. What I needed was simply to prove to myself that no place, no thing, no one event has power over me.
Yes there were ghosts. But without the distractions and the noise of everyday life that usually drown them out, I noticed them. I listened to them. They followed me quietly, slipping in and out effortlessly, until they became so intertwined with the present that I couldn’t tell them apart.
On the drive home, as we came across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel, the light slipped through the clouds in soft streaks. Tiny spotlights illuminating pockets of the rolling water.
The map I was looking for wasn’t in the knotted pine of a bedroom floor. It was in the way the dark clouds made room for the light. In the way they could coexist.
There will always be ghosts. There will always be memories – both good and bad. But instead of pushing them away, I will make room for them. I will let them slip in and out quietly. I will let them remind me of what I was and what I have become.
I will let the past become part of the present, instead of letting it overshadow the present.
I will remember that the light will always shine through the darkness.
#LoveHard
Dear Daddy,
It’s been over a year since I last wrote you a letter. Two years since I stood in church clad in a black dress that mom told me was more appropriate than the orange one I wanted to wear.
I had thought about that dress the whole 12 hours we drove home from Cape Cod, in the silence that filled the car between the calls. The calls about death certificates and funeral receptions and Valium prescriptions. I thought about it as we drove past New Haven and I made Billy stop the car so I could walk on the Green just as I had 15 years before. Just as you had 40 years before.
I thought about it hanging in my closet at home, the tags still dangling, and for some reason that still baffles me, it made me smile.
When mom told me, diplomatically of course, that orange would be too gaudy, too cheeky to wear to your funeral, I should have just said of course. But instead, I stormed off to Nordstrom to buy a black dress I never wanted, leaving a trail of tension and discord in my wake.
In retrospect it wasn’t ever about the dress. It was about control. Perhaps subconsciously I did want to be disrespectful, as if my refusal to bow to the conventions of proper funeral attire was my way of giving death the middle finger.
It was silly to get worked up over a dress, even an orange one with a scalloped neckline, and she was probably right, but it burned me up nonetheless.
As I angrily pawed through racks in store after store like a sullen teenager, I heard your voice gently telling me I needed to let it go. That just as the orange dress was my way of trying to exert control over a situation that could not be controlled, mom was doing the same.
That sometimes yielding is more courageous than fighting.
I knew you were right. You were always right.
So I took my stack of black dresses and went to the dressing room, but nothing was right. They were all ill-fitting or too racy or too casual or not orange. One by one I threw them off until they littered the floor around me.
Alone for the first time since I saw you lying on the ground with your glasses askew, I sank to the floor and surveyed the carnage. And a barely audible voice that I did not recognize as my own asked “Oh Daddy. Why did you leave me?”
The question hung in the dressing room, swirling around me and finally settling on my chest. It still hangs in the air.
There are years that ask questions, said Zora Neale Thurston, and years that answer.
There are years that do both.
The last two years have asked and they have answered, sometimes rhythmically, the way that questions and answers often present themselves in tandem.
Sometimes the questions and answers appeared disjointedly, broken in space and time by gulfs that seemed too big to cross and loneliness that found me crumpled on the floor of my kitchen with my back against the dishwasher, lying on the beach with my back against the sand, or in the shower with the hot water scalding me.
Sometimes the questions were too big to answer at once. Sometimes the answers were too simple to ignore.
These years asked me “Can you?” And they answered yes.
They asked me “Will you?” And always they answered yes.
They asked me “How?” And they answered you yield.
So I did.
I yielded to the grief over the future that died with you, but also to the magic of the present.
I yielded to the anger, but also to the comfort that our life together, while too short, was complete.
I yielded to the needs of others, but also to the determination that my path could be different.
I yielded to the emptiness, but also to the love of friends who gave me a soft place to land.
I yielded to all of it. I accepted all of it. I was impenetrable when I chose to be and vulnerable when I needed to be. I allowed myself to bend, but not break. I allowed myself to accept the good with the bad.
And here I am, two years later. Another July 3rd. They say the second year is easier. And I suppose that is true. There came a time when you weren’t the first thing I thought about when I woke up in the morning. But now when I do, the timing is unpredictable and the pain is more acute. It prickles my skin and gurgles up from a place deep inside where words do not exist.
The boys both won reading awards at graduation this year Dad. After the ceremony Jack quietly slipped his hand in mine and asked why my smile hadn’t been bigger watching them approach the podium to receive their awards.
Just like you, he can read the lines on my face and measure the size of my smile down to the milimeter.
I didn’t tell him that it was because in that moment my heart ached with exquisite joy and exquisite pain at the same time. That it was enlarged by what I was lucky to have and what I was lucky to miss all at once. That I felt not just your absence at graduation but everything you will not see, every part of you they will not know, every word they will never hear.
I thought of how I strain to hear your voice in my head, to conjure the image of you brushing your hair from your face, to feel the way you used to pull me into your hugs and hold on as if my life depended on it.
I cursed the resilience that allows me to move forward by forgetting what has passed.
Truth be told, I feel like you are still with me most of the time. But sometimes you leave a calling card. Just to let me know you are here, when I least expect it but most need it.
The other day I was finally cleaning out the office and I found this. A letter you wrote me thirteen years ago.
It might seem strange to other people to receive a formal note from their father, but it was so perfectly you.
You who were brimming with words of support and praise and love. You who knew that spoken words were fleeting and easily forgotten.
You who knew that one day I would unpack a box from years past and find a card with your handwriting. That I would gingerly hold it in my shaking hands and quickly brush away the tears before they could smudge the ink. That I would hear your voice in my head. Those words are from another time. Another life. Another me.
I know too that you are still proud of me, of all of us. Not for being strong or stoic or responsible. But proud that we are still the people we were before you died. That we are still becoming the people we were meant to be. Proud that we listen to the questions and wait for the answers.
Someone told me that I would never be able to wear the dress I wore to your funeral again. That it would be forever tainted with the memory of that day. But I have worn that black dress many times over and felt nothing.
It is the orange dress I have not worn. It still hangs in my closet, the tags dangling from the hanger.
It sits there, reminding me that yielding is sometimes more courageous than fighting and that love never ends.
I love you Daddy. Until our trails cross again…
#LoveHard
This Sunday will be the second Father’s Day since my dad died. Thus begging the tricky question of what to do on Father’s Day when you no longer have a father.
For some, I imagine that Father’s Day without a father is a reminder of the giant gaping hole in your life. The display of Hallmark cards, the inundation of emails entitled “Give Dad What He Really Wants!” and the heartrending TV ads of dads as our first loves and our heroes all feel like salt on wounds that have not healed, but have just been bandaged over.
For some, it is a day to just get through in one piece. For others, it is a day awash in jealousy as social media is flooded with grainy photographs and sentimental memories shared by friends. For others still, it is a day of quiet reflection punctuated by a surge of memories that come without provocation.
Although we put artificial timelines on grief, there is no magic wand that erases the sense of loneliness that washes over you when the person who knows you the best is gone. Grief, after all, is just a measure of the vastness of our love. Grief never really ends because love never ends.
As much as I thought I understood the eventuality of losing my dad — as much as I believed I knew how it would feel — I utterly failed to appreciate the enormity of losing a parent. It doesn’t matter whether it was sudden or expected, whether you are old or young, or how many years you had together — you are never prepared to be fatherless. Especially on a day devoted to fathers.
I suppose I could feel sorry for myself on Father’s Day. But instead, I’m going to celebrate the shit out of it…
For the rest of the article, please head over to Babble!
#lovehard
I was reminded yesterday that it was Ella Fitzgerald’s birthday. I grew up with Ella playing on scratchy LPs as I danced around the den on top of my father’s feet, listening to him sing off-key.
My father had eclectic taste in music, and he clearly felt it was one of his greatest parental obligations to introduce us to all of it.
Music, for my father, was more than a song. It was a story.
He would play the staples of his college days–The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel–and tell us the story of the anti-war movement, the drug culture, and the sexual revolution. He would play Broadway show tunes and tell us about political corruption in Chicago, the gangsters and bootleggers of the 30’s, or wartime in London. He would play Motown and tell us of growing up in the south and how music changed his generation’s views on race. He would play some new band and remind us that songwriters are the poets of modern society.
And sometimes he would play Ella and we would just dance. There was no story he needed to tell. Ella sang love like no one else could.
He wasn’t the greatest dancer but he taught me that dancing isn’t really about the steps you know. It’s about knowing your partner. Knowing when to lead and when to support. When to brace and when to bend. And when to just enjoy the moment.
When it came time to choose a song for our dance together at my wedding, Ella was the natural choice: “They Can’t Take That Away From Me.” A nod to our past, to those early days dancing on his feet, and a reminder that nothing could ever change the bond between us.
My father adored Billy from the moment they met, before we even started dating. He thought Billy was smart and funny and thoughtful. But mostly, he loved the way Billy loved me. The way we loved each other. Perhaps he felt a twinge of nostalgia as we stood at the back of the church, arm in arm, but neither one of us had any delusions he was giving me away. He couldn’t have if he tried.
The doors flung open and the sounds of brass swirled around the vestibule. I started to leap forward, vibrating with excitement. He softly put his left hand on my arm, and whispered “wait.”
It wasn’t because he wasn’t ready. It was because he knew I wasn’t. He wanted to stop me so I could catch my breath before I flew through the moment instead of living it.
He was right. A decade later, I barely remember all of those details that were so damned important at the time. But I remember that moment. The pews creaking as everyone stood up and craned their necks around, the weight of every past heartbreak lifting from my shoulders, the giddy anticipation of reaching the end of that long aisle and the beginning of my future.
Mostly I remember the feeling of my dad’s hand on my arm. I can feel it still, even though he is no longer here. And that is enough. Some days it is everything.
Later we danced. I didn’t have to stand on his feet anymore, but just for old time’s sake, he whispered with a smile “stop leading Cameron…”
So I dance with my boys every chance I get. We dance in booths at restaurants and in the middle of convenience stores; we dance at crowded parties and in our den when no one is watching.
I pick them up and swing them around and duck under their arms as they twirl me until we are sweaty and dizzy and tired.
I’m a terrible dancer but they don’t care. It’s not about the steps we know. It’s about the memories that will make them smile long after I’m gone.
The way your smile just beams
The way you sing off key
The way you haunt my dreams
No no they can’t take that away from me
— George and Ira Gershwin
#LoveHard
I sat on a sofa, waiting for them to come around the corner. My 7 year was the first one down, his hair askew, holding his blanket around his neck like a superhero cape. The child whom, a few hours earlier, I had held while the paramedics tried to resuscitate my father. The child who believed the reassuring words I had whispered in his ear to muffle the sounds of the static on their radios. He rounded the corner cautiously, afraid of what he might find, yet positive, in the way that only a child can be, that there was a happy ending. My 5 year old followed him, blissfully unaware that the world he knew when he fell asleep was no longer the same.
I was cognizant that I had to be the one to shatter their sense of security and make them feel safe again, all in the same breath. In that moment, I had to be not a daughter reeling from shock and pain, but a mother. This loss was not mine alone. It belonged to them too. It belonged to my mother, my brother, my husband, and so many more.
We all have roles that require more of us than we give to ourselves. Not because we are martyrs. But because there are people and events that are bigger than we are.
There has not been much in the last 18 months that felt like it belonged to me alone.
Except for Virginia basketball.
The past two seasons I have worn the mantle of this team the way my son wears his blanket. Amid the raucous screams and electric atmosphere of John Paul Jones Arena,
covered with popcorn remnants and sticky substances that I can only hope were spilled drinks, I found peace. Onto that court I poured all the elation and fear and heartbreak that had no outlet in my daily life. A sacred space where I was in communion with my father and my children. My past and my present.
Update: See this piece featured on Mamapedia!
A few weeks after we were married, Billy and I strolled into a coffee house in Alexandria. There on the bulletin board was a sign advertising beagle puppies born on our wedding day. If ever there was a sign, this was it. It seemed serendipitous to start our new life together with a little ball of fur to whom we were forever joined by a sunny day in January. We named him Charlottesville, in honor of the place where we met and fell in love.
Charlie shared our first home, our first months as newlyweds, our late nights and our early mornings. He took our loud voices and our moves in stride. We cut our parenting teeth on him, learning that when you become a parent, the things you give up pale in comparison to what you receive.
He welcomed our babies without hesitation, sleeping beside me as I held my newborns, resting his head against theirs, never worried that my love was compromised. Beagles are, after all, pack dogs. There is no jealousy, no territorial affection. For them, more people just means more love.
He cried when they cried. He ate when they ate. He walked next to them as they took their first wobbly steps. He was patient with their unrestrained affection and protective of their little bodies. I talked to him often and, as is the case with most owners I’m sure, I am confident that he understood me. He followed me from room to room throughout the day just to be near me. He stayed close to me when my father died and closer still to my children.
Today I walked into the vet with him in my arms and walked out with my hands holding only an empty collar. A fast-growing tumor had overtaken his abdomen and there was no medical solution.
It might have been a painful decision but it wasn’t a hard one. There is nothing a mother won’t do to protect her children, even if that child walks on four legs. So with tears running down my cheeks, I chose to give him the one thing I had left – compassion.
I watched the vet put the vials of medication in his IV. I rubbed his head and whispered in his ear as his muscles relaxed and thought about how grateful I was to be able to tell him I loved him as he took his last breath.
We talk about our pets as if we are their owners but I didn’t own Charlie. We simply belonged to each other. We shared a home. We shared our anxieties and joys. We shared our love. We shared a life.
And now I wait for my boys to come home and think of how to tell them for the third time in their short lives that someone they love has been taken from them. Because Charlie was not a something. He was a someone. Maybe it is not the same to you. But maybe to them it is exactly the same.
And I am so tired. Tired of losing things I love. I wander through the house picking up his beds, washing his bowls, collecting his leash and already the house seems emptier. I have never thought about the idea of our pets in heaven. But I know that his soul is too good to be anywhere else.
Two weeks ago, I thought I would be spending the day in Houston, watching through tears as my beloved Cavaliers brought home a championship. Instead my tears are for my first baby, for the dad I miss in moments like this, for the end of the season that gave me back my belief in miracles, and for all the things I have lost in the last two years. For the price we pay for loving hard.
#lovehard
My favorite time of the day is the space between sleep and wakefulness, when you are vaguely cognizant of being warm and comfortable and you have not yet remembered the things that hurt. The blurry place before the light sharpens into hard angles when you cannot yet distinguish between what you have dreamed and what is real.
The place where, for one brief moment yesterday, I had a father again.
Like most of my dreams, this one came back to me in a series of disjointed pictures. We were looking for something. Keys one minute, pieces of a puzzle the next. One nameless object after another.
And then he was gone.
My body realized it was a dream before my mind. The weight of it crushed my chest, forcing out sobs of confused panic and longing that I had long since forgotten.
All loss is like that I suppose. There comes a time when it is not the first thing you think of when you wake up. But when you do, the hurt is so much more acute.
Not the good kind of hurt that I feel when I walk through the gates of Scott Stadium for the first time in the fall. Not the good hurt that comes when a little boy who is also lost gives you a piece of candy for Valentine’s Day with the same name as your dad used to call you.
It was the kind of hurt that you feel when you find something you had lost only to have it slip through your fingers. The kind of hurt that is tinged with regret for words not said. For something that ends before it could even begin.
I suppose I should have been grateful for the chance to see his face and hear his voice and watch the way he ambled into a room again.
But I didn’t. I just felt angry. Angry that he didn’t tell me we were living on borrowed time. Angry that he didn’t tell me it wasn’t real.
In my dream I was so busy focusing on the task at hand that I missed the gift of just being with him. If I had known our time was brief, I would have stopped chasing keys and puzzle pieces. I would have stopped hurrying. I would have sat down at the table beside my dad and just held his hand. I would have realized that the only thing worth looking for was the person in front of me.
And maybe that’s what the dream was about. Maybe I needed to remember all the things that hurt. Maybe it’s okay that he didn’t tell me our time last night was finite. After all, we rarely have the luxury of knowing that the last time we see someone will be the last time.
Sure, we say we live our lives as if there is no tomorrow but how often do we actually do it? Not as much as we think. We tell our kids to hurry. We run from one activity to the next. We chase nameless objects in pursuit of nameless goals. We succumb to the pressure to want more, to be more, to do more, when the more that really matters is right in front of us.
Love hard. Love big. It is the only thing we take with us when we leave this earth and the only thing we leave behind.