I didn't believe...

 I deserved to be happy. Insert eye roll. I get it, that phrase itself is overused, trite, gag-inducing. But hear me out, perhaps it's really just misunderstood. Maybe what I didn't understand was what "happy" itself meant. Not the dictionary version, but the living it, feeling it version.

Ready for another rather obvious insight? We sabotage our own happy. We do. And I think because of that, we're bringing up the generation behind us to not even know if happy exists for them. We've turned it into an unattainable "unless it's picture perfect, then we all know that's a filter, so it doesn't exist" emotion. We've improperly labeled happy. 

We expect it to be something to attain, something to aspire to instead of something we feel. We confuse happy with stuff and clout and attention and success. That means that there has to be more stuff and clout and attention and success in order to stay happy. There's no enough, and I believe one can't be truly happy if one is constantly having to collect it.

Maybe what we need to look for is contentment. I've always loved that word. To me, it means "enough" in the most beautiful way. It's a state of being where we aren't always searching, where what we have is all we need and if something else comes our way, then that's just gravy. And I love gravy.

We all know people, maybe we are people, who seem to have contentment within their reach...they just need to stretch their fingers a little further. But suddenly, as if hearing a sound behind them so compelling they can't ignore, they make an abrupt turn and walk away from it. It's so frustrating and heartbreaking to watch. Like "Dude, it was right there! Finally. How could you leave it?" I've been that dude.

For me, and undoubtedly for you, it's fear; sometimes it's shame. We don't deserve it, because we've done this and this and this. Now, I know it can be doubt or confusion or insistence on being a martyr, but all of that is still fear or shame. I firmly believe it. 

It becomes a self-fulfilled prophecy. Something feels "right" and "good", and we're afraid of it so we do something to destroy it, which creates shame, shame creates unworthiness, so we stop looking for it. When it finds us...this "happy" or "content" we can't trust it (fear) because we don't deserve it (shame) and on and on.

Some of this is rooted in things that happened to us and some of it comes from things we've done to ourselves. And we did that to ourselves because someone did something to us. Around and around it goes... where it stops...

It can stop, with us. Not all of it. Not all the time. Not happy all day every day but happy every day. We have to figure it out so we can help the kids coming up. We've created a world where joy is unspeakable because it's unattainable not because it's full of glory.

Everything is awful. Isn't it? People are absolutely mean. No one cares about their fellow man. If what you are living is hard, just turn on the tv and see even harder. Families torn apart by hate and anger. Empty seats at tables because of senselessness. Loss and loss and loss. People giving as good as they get, except it isn't good they are giving or getting.

Except... the stories of sweet children making Valentines for the people in nursing home. Organ donors. Couples being married for 70 years. Videos of babies hearing their daddy's voice for the first time. Animals being rescued. Momma's kissing newborns. Mindy's countdown to spring in the midst of her grief for her husband, reminding us that the light does always return. Dancing for mourning, beauty for ashes, laughing through tears, coffee in the morning with your love, pizza with a dear old friend. A baby learning to walk. Laughing until your stomach hurts. Holding hands. Petting a dog. A bird singing (not too loudly and not to early in the morning). The smell of fresh cut grass or drying leaves. Someone finding their voice and speaking their truth and taking their power to move and inspire others. Being secure in your beliefs. Music, art, touching words. The sound of my husband saying "hey baby". The smell of chicken frying. The perfectly round cookies my mom bakes. The smell of the ocean. The quiet of snowfall. Hope. Love. Grace.

Joy unspeakable.

We deserve it. Our kids deserve it. We have to show them. They have to know they are worthy and no matter what they've done, they can have it. In the middle of the storm, you can find a place of peace, you can find the laugh, you can find the sweet, sweet spot where happy is. You won't find it in comparisons to others. You won't be able to see it if you are constantly looking toward what is next...what you have to attain or gain or collect believing that happy is in that thing or job or person. It's right here.

Happy is in finding contentment in the right now. I'm not asking you to find it in everything. This isn't a "happily ever after" story. I'm saying to pick one spot and live on that spot. Hold it and nurture it and watch it grow.

I know it's possible. Want to know how, because I'm doing it. Not always perfectly and not always successfully, but it's happening. Sometimes I'm reaching for it and shame or fear calls my name and I turn away from it. But sometimes, oh beautifully, my fingers close around it and you couldn't take it away under any circumstances.

Want to know another way I can prove it can be done? Read back over the paragraph about all the exceptions. I bet you felt something. I bet one of those things resonated  with you. I bet you thought of at least one thing more. You felt a spark. Give that spark oxygen. Talk to it. Build on it.

We need happy. We need contentment. We have to show our kids that having and doing and getting isn't where it's at. It's in being. It's in living now with what you have while carrying the hope of what will be, letting it motivate us, of course, but not letting us miss what is surrounding us in this moment. Because right now is full of good stuff.

I used to be afraid to have a good day, because a good day made the fall into a bad day worse. The comparison was too stark, too harsh. I wonder how many happy days I missed. Perhaps I spent so many days looking for fresh hell instead of seeing the lovely I deserve.

Not today. I'm not doing that today. I'm going to stand up, walk into the sunroom, see the birds and smile at my husband and just feel it. Just feel the unspeakable joy.

I recognize my place of privilege in writing this. I'm sitting on my couch in my warm home with my WiFi. I'm going to make an early lunch with the things in my well-stocked refrigerator. I'm healthy and so is my family. I am what the world unfairly most rewards with the exception of being a woman. I am unafraid in so many ways that I take it for granted. I recognize taking any of those things away considerably alters my ability to find contentment. Which leaves little room for me to not acknowledge that it is easier for me to find.

It's been a year...

in a lot of ways. It's been a year in the - wow that was...uh...something - way and it's been a year since she had to leave.

We, my family and extended family started 2020 with the profound and immeasurable loss of my brother's daughter, Delaney. That had quickly followed us closing 2019 with the birth of Delaney's son and the lovely wedding of my husband's oldest child.

Great love and then great loss, as the story of humans frequently seems to play out. Come and go. Laugh and cry. Give and take.

I've reminded myself and my stepdaughters (and lovingly they've reminded me) that we have already lived through the immediate impact of Dee's death. That first moment of knowing is not reproduceable, thankfully. However, one does relive it in a million different ways. Of course, moving forward carries great relief in knowing that we'll eventually learn to carry the grief we will never be able to truly put down. We somehow become accustomed to the weight. But moving forward is also  moving away -- from the sounds and sights and smells of them. The essence always lingering, but their hands unreachable.

I couldn't change the calendar from January 2020 until well past the first of July. She existed in January, but not February, March, April, May, June.

My husband and I went to Fort Morgan, Alabama at the end of February. It's our favorite place. The Gulf was made to seem small in comparison to our grief. We came back to a pandemic, a shelter-at-home. We came back to confusion and fear and anger. And I, so full of loss, had no room for those things.

My immediate family took it seriously. As a group, we chose to trust experts and our guts and our own common sense. (I said ours, not yours.) We social distanced, wore masks, washed our hands, but we didn't hoard toilet paper. We followed what is part of our family creed; we loved our neighbor as ourselves in the best way we saw fit.

We were called stupid and sheep, directly to our faces and indirectly on social media posts meant for the general population. And we understood and believed it to be true, that we are sheep, we all are. We just follow different shepherds.

All the while we grieved. We met and adore Dee's son and his father and his family and family of choice. We did this while being isolated emotionally and physically. Forcing ourselves not to focus on Dee not being here with that precious little man...not to think about all that she was missing. But we still did think all those things.

I watched from afar my mom, Dee's grandmother, bend to grief and then rejoice, as is her grieving process. Always believing that Dee is in her future now, just as she was before she was born. I watched the burden of a lost child settle in the corner of my brother's eyes and the way he now carries his body. I watched my sister-in-love pick up the broken pieces of her children and her husband all the while trying to hold herself together. I watched it from six feet away. Oh the irony of it being six feet. The permanent physical distance between us and Dee.

Out there beyond our personal hell, people were losing and grieving their loved ones, jobs, homes, businesses. I wanted to look at it, see it, weep for them, but I was still in my own world of loss. I couldn't see it for that.

Grief, to me, is constantly near drowning. You come up just long enough to rake air into your lungs, only to be swallowed by another wave of it. Over and over and over.

Meanwhile, our country is on fire, and I struggle to focus because grief is selfish. I'm busy watching my nephews and niece stumbling at times to move forward because the path of deep loss isn't smooth. I'm watching my stepdaughters bob up and down in their own waves.

So perhaps that's why I wear the mask. Staring into the deep well of our loss and finding it unthinkable that I could cause that to a fellow human. Thinking about how deep that well would be if something happened to my mom, my FIL or my stepdaughters' mother. If I'm wrong, no harm done. If I'm not...there's that deep well I couldn't bear causing someone else to fall into.

Remember how I changed the calendar from January to July in one motion? August brought the loss of my husband's aunt. On the day of her memorial his aunt's nephew, my husband's first cousin, his first playmate, his first best friend suddenly went too. He left three little women reeling in the wake of their dad's death. They still are nearly drowning in their own river of grief. My dear old friend, KMC, his ex-wife, was left holding the pieces of her family together not knowing how or where or if she herself fit in. Trying to fix the unfixable in her girls. 

My husband, still steering me through my grief, now wears a blindfold of his own, yet still manages to hold my hand and keep me moving forward. Add him finding his job has an end date. A job with people he cares for and respects, a job that gave his family before me and now me a comfortable life, will end sooner rather than with a retirement party. He's worked since his was 11 years old. He's had a full time job since he was a senior in high school except for the time he was in trade school for six months. Now he's being told that his loss is for the greater good, and like many, he's wondering about our good...his good.

Give and take. Sow and reap. We went back to the Gulf and it seemed bigger in November than in February.

And our country is more on fire and it would get worse. Things no American has ever seen or experienced or imagined have happened. I moved through it with a vague awareness. Aware enough to vote, aware enough to fear and be ashamed, but only aware enough to feel not act. Because grief, my friends, continues to make me selfish.

A little girl I used to babysit, who is now all grown, lost her only child -- her adult son. I know only peripherally the weight of the loss she was just assigned and will forever carry. I know that many many parents were suddenly, needlessly assigned their burdens -- many family members lost their loves without a proper goodbye this year. Knowing that becomes part of the weight of the loss. Others grief reminds you of your own.

We moved through the Fall and the election and the mess of that into the holidays that already have huge holes in them because before if she wasn't at the table, she was at least out there, but also because of the distance we needed to keep so hopefully we can try again next year without more empty seats. 

Grief has holes in everything...the spaces they took up. Everything is missing something. It's missing them. It's writing and thinking and talking in streams of consciousness instead of more linear, the way we were taught in elementary school to do those things...beginning, middle end that circles back to the beginning. I can't write (obviously!) or think or talk that way right now because the ending is too fresh and painful and lonely. Because almost constantly, in the background, I hear "Delaney is gone."

My friend, CS, put a shell on a rock on a beach in memory of Delaney. It's just a lovely, poignant gesture. I've visited that shell often in my mind. Is it still there? Did it travel out to sea? Did it pass the sea turtle Delaney helped find its way to the water shortly after it hatched? Is it beautiful sand now? Did I pick it up at the Gulf and it's now in a jar in my house? I hope it's still there. Sunning itself. Beautiful and a little out-of-place, like our Delaney always was.

Between the "hello little bitty pretty one and goodbye sweet girl" there was so much love.

We're nearing the end of this cathartic wail. We're nearing the end of the year since she had to go, but never the end of the grief. I feel myself moving toward the anniversary of her dying thru no power of my own -- a simple yet profound flip of a calendar page -- and I feel myself adjusting to the weight of the loss. Some days even being able to carry it gracefully.

I guess there is at least a beginning, middle and end to this writing. It does circle back to the beginning. As I said, it's been a year in many, many ways.

P.S. I'm okay. I am. The players on my team are the best and my bench is deep and my husband continues to hold my hand and my heart so gently. BCL.

I rest easier in the assurance that Delaney will be waiting for me. She'll be standing at the gate, opening it for me...pushing when it's clearly marked pull, because that's just her way.