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.