There are drills, as there now are in every school. We call them “lockdown” but they might also be known as “active shooter” drills. I wonder about the missing pieces in the plan, such as how we cannot put full grown students in wheelchairs into cupboards to hide them. We can not silence students who make involuntary noises throughout the day because of their disabilities. And, can you really follow procedures that save you from assault rifles anyway? More often, I think of how I do not want to survive any more traumatic events. I am not sure I can do it anymore, begin again to heal the PTSD once I wake to it. Sometimes, I feel one hundred years old and beyond ready to leave.
It is coming on four years now since Susanna died. Without a doubt healing has happened. To try to explain it, there is peace existing alongside the immense gap where I thought she would always be. I had never imagined a world without her, but this new reality is less terrifying and fretful lately. Bushels of worries and concerns have been lifted, aspirations and appearances I used to care so much about have almost disappeared. I have always been pretty good at tolerating others, and more than ever I am able to let people be. I observe people becoming stressed over situations that are quite real to them, but I feel out of place because I do not share the same feelings. I am grateful for this reduction of anxiety, and grateful for the courage I have mustered to go to therapy, refrain from anything harmful and let in the love that can help. I cannot survive any other way.
I still do many of the same things to soothe my heart every day. I still painfully miss her. Walking, music, fresh air and trees. The truth remains that, for five short years, Susanna’s life was happy and well-lived. I remember the details and the details make me cry, but I have not lost them. Still, I am here to make my son feel loved, listened to and cared for. Still, I live with my children’s father, who often looks at me the same way he did when we met twelve years ago. I am even creating things, I even see a future which includes things I want to do.
Reflecting, this world has severely disappointed me these last four years. Horrendous news events, an unthinkable government situation and disappointing behaviors of large segments of society. I have already lost my daughter. My mother has reached almost ninety years old and has lost her ability to make sense of the world for more than a sentence or two, and her ability to take care of herself after so many decades of independence and people relying on her. I find this unfair. There is so much I do not understand.
The wounds of what I saw happen to my little girl, on that night when I knew her heart had stopped, along with all the others I have accumulated from living for more than half a century, these are real and these are sacred parts of my life. Susanna’s death has made me mortal, all day long. I do not need to be reminded that anyone can leave at any time, because they have the flu or because they are shot in a school or shopping mall, because they have a heart attack or one of the cancers we try to screen so often. I know this. What I know less about is what comes after we leave here. I am convinced, though, that it all will mean something. I am convinced that listening to the ways the earth and sea and ethers communicate, the song of the birds, the inspired or mysterious words that pass through the lips of our friends, the art in the museums, the stories, the good things in the world. I believe these things can save us while we are here, and these are things we cannot really lose.
Susanna's Golden Ball 