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Susanna's Golden Ball

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Mother, writer, artist and teacher grappling with grief and loss.

    • Susanna’s Golden Mouse

          At first, I was the only one who had seen the mouse. A flash of golden fawn, confusing. The first time was under the sink by the garbage can, followed by twice in my son’s room, on and around the old, crappy, black futon with built in storage. We have had many a mouse inside, but this was the first time I had seen one of this color. My son was disturbed, and I was thinking more about the mouse going away than about the wonder of it arriving.

         “Fancy Mouse” is the name of the breed, domestic pets which come in an array of colors such as champagne, chocolate, lilac, cinnamon, and fawn. The color seems to be what distinguishes them from the household pest variety, the feral ones in dull gray and brown. I do not know what would happen, should someone catch a rough and ashen household variety and make it a pet, but our golden mouse was a pet and became ours for a couple of days.

         On Saturday afternoon, I watched the mouse jump from the kitchen counter into one of the gas stove burners. I yelled for my S.O. to come (he is super handy in these situations). I was not enamored yet, I wanted to just make sure it was gone. Once C. had seen the mouse, who popped its head up, I would describe his words as cooing. “Oh, that’s a beautiful animal. What a beautiful baby”. Within a couple of hours, he had finessed it into a cereal box. He fashioned a temporary container from a large glass globe from a lamp fixture, on top of a small bicycle tire to hold it steady, covered with an old pot lid which had a hole where the handle used to be. This was our mouse cage.

         I searched for information about this situation. It does not seem to come up often, finding a stray pet mouse in your home. What little I found suggested that Fancy Mice do not live long in the wild. Among wild mice in general, I also learned, the great many are destined to die rather quickly. It is rare to survive long enough to reproduce. In my search for possible spiritual and symbolic meaning, mice represent paying attention to details. They represent change coming, or how small we all really are. In the greater system, a mouse sacrifices for its size. A lifetime spent being crushed by circumstances, living often to be food for larger animals. Humbling, all in all. 

          By the next day I had thought to call an animal rescue, once I saw posts of mice available at one nearby. My son did not want a mouse, even a caged one, and I worried about us losing it, or my dog catching it (our dog killed a mockingbird last summer, but that is a whole other blog post. It was self-defense). The shelter agreed to accept our mouse, of unknown gender at that point. In the meantime, C. and I figured out how to clean the lamp fixture cage. He caught the mouse with a paper towel roll to transport it to a box, and back again. It had kept tipping over the water, so I found a medicine dropper to offer some. Tiny feet gripped it and the adorable little mouth dribbled, just like a baby, suckling on its mother. I loved her. After transporting her to a plastic carrying case, I could see she was a girl.

          I dropped off my golden girl mouse at the shelter on Tuesday, two days before the seventh anniversary of the death of my beautiful five-year-old daughter, Susanna. Susanna’s resting place, glorious Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, was a block away so I walked through toward the subway. The weather, the sky, the fiercely green grass, and spring half blooms were unspeakably pretty. I felt guilty for not feeling good, but I was so sad. I was devastated, I realized, because I was able to save the mouse, together with C., the way we could not save Susanna. I am always sad that I could not save Susanna. I live with this sadness, a part of me now, and it presents itself in different ways and in different strengths, as time goes on. I am grateful that Susanna’s father and I could share in this kind act. We provided a better life for a living being. This feels good. It does not matter how small someone is, or what species, when there is an opportunity to be kind.

        I wonder, as I sometimes do, what Susanna would think about what happened. From her perspective, where she is, discarnate, I wonder if she has empathized with a life small and short and found meaning as I did. Susanna loved the word fancy, and anything golden. She would certainly make a connection to Cinderella, and any other princess who may have spoken to mice. Maybe Susanna orchestrated the visit, I do not know how these things work. I do know that there is much more to the universe than what we see here. Beyond a life that may be short or small, there is eternity. Not only monumental love, but eternity.  I picture Susanna, dancing and singing, from golden mountain tops. I love you, Susanna. Save me a spot.

      




      

      

      


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      I Have Covid-19, Don’t Panic
      



      

      

      

      



      I have COVID-19. I cannot prove it, I am not eligible for a test, but I am certain beyond a reasonable doubt. I am one of the approximately eighty percent recovering at home with no test. So grateful that this is so.
      

      This is the story. I felt it best to share this, as I want to help others not to panic, since I am coming through. Please do not panic, you need your strength.
      

      A week ago, Sunday, March 22, I woke up with a good deal of nasal congestion. Naturally, I went right to the internet to make sure I did not have COVID-19. The symptoms, as everyone knows, are dry cough, fever and shortness of breath. Did not have those. I decided to stay inside and forgo walking around the park or walking my dog, in case I had pollen allergies (which I don’t think I have, but anyway, maybe that was it). I felt stuffy, and when I would bend over my head felt full. Classic sinus infection. I put a warm washcloth over my face. That felt lovely.
      

      In the evening, I decided to take a nice hot shower to relieve the stuffiness. I brought my bottle of scripture inscribed Dr. Bronner’s lavender soap, as well as a bottle of eucalyptus oil, into the shower and loaded up a washcloth to put on my throat. I could not smell anything. Later, I stuck many more bottles of oils up to my nose, as well as a jar of minced garlic, a big jug of vinegar, a bottle of Pine Sol. Nothing. Not even my dog’s bed, face right in it, nothing.
      

      As the day had gone on, eventually I started taking my temperature. It hovered above 99, a couple of times passed 100. Officially, this is not a fever, but as I slept, humidifier bubbling with a scented stick of rosemary/eucalyptus/smelled like nothing tucked inside, I felt my system fervently fighting something off. I dreamt of healing entities in some type of astral doctor’s office and awoke with someone telling me I was healed. From something. I was being called “Ms. A.”  I do not know what this means.
      

      By the next day, I was searching for info about “anosmia”, the term I had just learned. The term for not being able to smell anything. The first search turned up some concerning articles about the connection to COVID-19, but the symptom was not yet widely accepted. I decided I would rather have a sinus infection, another possible cause. I did not want to have the Coronavirus. Who would? Everyone on Facebook was seeming to be maintaining a permanent fortress of disinfection and fear, not to be entered. I felt like if I caved and accepted the dawning truth, I would become a receptacle for the world’s enemy.
      

      I distracted myself in the foray of “remote teaching” for a couple of days, which I likened to rowing a leaking vessel which has been put into the air to keep it from sinking. My weak little fever never came back from that point, but I felt a bit breathless, a bit not right. Finally, on Thursday night, I consulted with a doctor. I have been between doctors lately, and not needed one for a while, a blessing of good health. I called one offered by my insurance company’s “telemedicine” option. The doctor was a soothing and competent person, calling me from California though licensed, as required, in New York. He told me the following things, to paraphrase: The data used for the usual symptoms list was taken from people who had presented at hospitals for treatment. People whose illness was mild enough to stay home were calling him with other symptoms, such as nasal congestion and loss of taste and smell. I was told to assume I had it, isolate at home and avoid my family. My son, who is healthy and twelve, is not much of a concern. My partner is healthy but sixty-seven. (I know he has no symptoms of anything wrong because I ask him at least every hour, still, and a couple of times during the middle of the night. He understands.) My instructions were to stay home, treat my symptoms, and go to the emergency room if I were to get a high fever or have trouble breathing. Beyond that, I can not have a test or see a doctor now. I can not have access to anyone who can listen to my chest with a stethoscope, who can give me an appointment, or a bed for a couple of days. We are all our own doctors currently.
      

      I spoke to this doctor on day four of my illness. He cautioned that between days seven and nine or ten, some people were becoming sicker. Hence, the instruction for going to the emergency room. From this point, my fears of knowing I had the virus were supplanted by my terror that I would suddenly stop breathing. I was aware of what is currently happening here in New York. The steady drone of sirens, the lack of equipment, the death tolls, the makeshift morgues. A few days later now, these things are worsening, and the peak is supposed to be two weeks away. I thought about needing to go to the hospital, breathless, and dying in the doorway because there would be no one to help me. I thought about how there is no one who can adequately take care of my son. I thought about all the people who face health diagnoses every day, which include prognoses and percentages of survival. I cried for them. I have had bad things happen in my life but had not felt these fears.
      

      Today is day ten, and these things have not come to pass. I am not feeling completely well, but I am closer. I have been somewhat able to function normally, with extra rest and remedies. Lots of steam, hot teas with ginger, honey and cayenne. Some Flonase and Robitussin. This virus, though I have a mild version, does not feel like a cold. I have had a persistent sort of burning “cloud” of illness that I can feel in my throat and head, like I have been invaded by something malicious. Sometimes it feels like nausea, sometimes like car sickness. I do not believe I have shortness of breath officially, I can breathe, but sometimes I need to rest and slow my breathing because my chest feels too full. This is lessening now. I remembered how the pediatrician showed me how to gently pummel my kids’ backs with a cupped hand when they had chest congestion. I’m doing that to myself because no one can touch me or come close to me yet. I sometimes feel like I inhaled poison, like the assault to the lungs a young person feels when smoking a cigarette for the first time, except it stays. I have gone back in memory to find the feeling, I vaguely remember respiratory infections as a child, maybe a bad bronchitis. It might feel like when I had mono in high school, but that was a long time ago. When I have been going to sleep at night, I breathe deeply and purse my lips to exhale. I need to choose to sleep, to breathe well. Each night I have slept peacefully, trying to remember to visualize healing through my body, once I get past the fear. The congestion is leaving now, as is the intermittent panic.
      

       
      

      I was exposed to COVID-19 at my workplace, my school. After school had closed, the first weekend, we were instructed to come to the building for three days so we could learn how to move school on to the internet, for our student population who have severe and multiple disabilities, and families often without devices. In hindsight, we all should have stayed home. I should have listened to the wisdom of my son, who said early in March that he did not want to go to school and catch the Coronavirus. He is almost always right, and I should listen to him more.
      

      Each day, I cling to seeing the names of my coworkers on the chat screen of the team meetings, and sometimes hearing their voices before someone starts saying “mute your mike!”. I miss them, and the students. I miss people and the world. Today, we were told that a coworker has died from this virus. Someone who seemed young and healthy, who I have known for years and will miss very much. This is not my story to tell at this time, it is his story, but I have felt devastated all day that this rampant disease is killing people close to all of us. It is nowhere near the end.
      

      Six years ago, my daughter Susanna died in a Brooklyn hospital, after a ruptured brain aneurysm we had no idea was there. I knew, as the pandemic approached, that I would think about all that happened when we lost her. I know what the people who are working in the hospitals now are like. The are made of steel and golden light. They save people and send them home, and they are there with families whose loved ones are dying. They need to tell people that there is nothing they can do. They are heroes in the biggest way. I have been remembering talking to the pediatric emergency physician, on that worst night of my life. He asked me what I needed him to know, and I said this: “No matter what is going on, I don’t want to give up on my daughter.” In hindsight, I think that everyone, including me, knew that Susanna was too far gone and would not be coming back. He said this to me: “Now listen to me. I am a pediatric physician. I will never, ever give up on anyone’s child. I will do everything in my power for you and your daughter”. I know he did.
      

      While Susanna rested in a coma, I felt I needed to show her picture to the nurses. I needed them to know that the very sick little body they were caring for belonged to my daughter’s beautiful soul. One of them said, “Oh, I can see her beauty”. Another nurse played the music from Frozen for Susanna on her phone. “I know it is my daughter’s favorite,” she said. And when Susanna died, as I watched through a glass partition, doctors and nurses had come running to help. They worked together, pumping and counting until they had to stop. And they came to me and hugged me, and they cried. They cried with me.  It is such a horrific world sometimes, but we are not alone in the presence of all that people do for each other.
      

      Please stay home, please care for each other, please hang in. Peace.
      

      




      




      




      

      

      


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      Two Weeks Past Imbolc
      



      

      

      

      



      When meditating yesterday, during this coldish winter break, I received some late winter advice. “It is not time to gather a bunch of flowers yet, but still time to gather a bundle of firewood”. I have stretched this message into urban life, no fireplace here but I continue to ride out some winter. Winter has almost skipped us in Brooklyn this year, barely any snow and frequent warm temperatures, but I still feel dry and sniffly. I have needed the introspection and lived in some shadowy respite just the same.
      

      My mother passed this winter, four days after Susanna’s birthday. I have made it through this so far without finding many words. It is not a matter of avoiding things but of access.  I have been grieving through dreams because there is dream language where words fail me.
      

      Last night there was a recurring theme. I was traveling alone with my son and tending to his fever (he did not have one in waking life, just the dream). Susanna had never died but was resting safely somewhere, well cared for. This is the part that repeats lately in my dream life. I do not write about my son much, he needs his own private life, but I will say only that I am disappointed by what life is giving him often. This is not a secret. My beautiful Susanna, she does not need me in the same way. I wish this were not true, but it is.
      

      By day I walk in nature even when it is cold, this saves me as it has for nearly six years now. The crocuses and daffodils are emerging. I worry briefly about snow coming to freeze them, but I believe they are resilient. After I leave the park or pass the allotted bits of soil near the sidewalks, I also catch some fledgling Easter displays in storefronts. Some sparkly yellow marshmallow Peeps or a white bunny eared head on a pole, to stick into a front yard. I still panic at the sight of this. I need to think myself through the scenarios. Easter will come, the day after Easter, too. April 22nd will come. The Tuesday after Easter and April 22nd will not be the same day as they were in 2014, complicating and elongating things. All these days will come and go but that does not mean I will have to live through losing her again. In my mind, I will live through it as I often do. But chances are the people I love will remain alive throughout the holiday. For now.
      

      I am appreciative of the healing that has happened. I am appreciative that I lived through Susanna’s abrupt and shocking death. Lately, though, I see a paradox. I survive, but one day when I cross over, at whatever age I am, I will still be aching for my daughter. No matter what the situation is, there will be a part of me waiting for the pain to stop. There is a part of me that died with her. There is a part of me that dies a little more each day.
      

      My mother, who lived to be nearly 92, lost one of her own children. He would have been my older brother, Michael, who passed before he was born. My mother carried him to full term and knew by the day of his induction that he was not alive anymore. I knew about this from as long ago as I remember. To me, Michael was a relative on the other side, like an ancestor. To my mother, he was her child. At some point I saw a TV movie about stillbirth, in which Minnie Driver’s character and her husband awaited the birth of their son who had died. The doctor asked them if they wanted a deck of cards to pass the time. This made me think of what I had heard my father say about what happened. “I don’t know how she went through with that. It was awful. I give her a lot of credit.”
      

      I can not say when I had the last conversation with my Mom before her dementia set in. But she was here with me, to see Susanna’s life and play with her, to watch Susanna put on performances for her in the living room. To write letters to her and send them in the mail. To give my son Matchbox cars she had collected over the years. To spend the day with us, all day, on the last day of Susanna’s life. It was later than that, the day that I spoke to her on the phone and she confessed to me that she did not remember my son’s name. “Say hello to the little guy, and the big guy. I don’t remember their name; I know it is the same.” The names and the words were less important than the well wishes. When I close my eyes to find her now, like I do when I want to see Susanna, it is the creaky but calm voice of her as Grandma that I hear. It is love. Mostly she says, “There is nothing to worry about, it is all going to be alright.”
      

      I have a different scope since Susanna died, however you want to interpret that. I do not believe in death and time the same way; I think love supersedes them. I think love lasts. It is like finding oceans when inland, green grass when the ground has browned and frozen. Love is not what makes you any different than someone else, it is what makes you the same.
      

       
      

      




      




      




      

      

      


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      Dreams, and my Mom
      



      

      

      

      



      feet original
      

       
      

      My Mom passed a few days ago. There is much to be said about her, I loved her very much. But I am going to write about a dream I had. My Mom’s passing is the end of one story but the beginning of some others.
      

      Last week, my Mom lie resting in an exceptionally loving hospice center in another state, where her care included live harp music. My sisters sent me videos, I listened to her breathe and saw her face, different than it used to be, but still deeply familiar. I listened for text notifications as I taught my art classes. At home, my son helped me make an altar including the quilt she had made for Susanna, still resting on her bed, and candles, in hopes she could see the light on her way.
      

      The last morning, before her death, I woke from a painful dream. It went like this: I was trying to type in a request for a substitute teacher on the “Subcentral” website, which had to be sent 90 minutes before school started at eight. I missed the deadline and was frustrated in my hectic morning household. This could have been a real- life situation. However, in this dream world there were four people present and Susanna had never died. That was certainly not the painful part.
      

      In the dream, I went to get my French Bulldog, Zorro, who had been sleeping in his bed. He was alive, but he was obviously ill and covered with a disturbing orange bodily fluid of unknown origin. I scooped him up and ran with him to a set of spiral stairs, knowing I needed to descend the stairs and try to save him. I wanted my mother to help me, and screamed for her, but I knew that she was dead. This fact struck me painfully, I woke up with it. I did make the Subcentral deadline, but was left with this dream of Zorro, with the orange liquid, and myself screaming for my mother who was never to be there again.
      

      This dream, I knew, was really about Susanna. Forgive me the graphic nature of this, but in waking life, Susanna was covered with orange liquid when we found that her heart had stopped, after the rupture of the aneurysm. I never have known the medical reason for this. There was more liquid as her father and our neighbor resuscitated her with CPR, and I fumbled to call the ambulance and run screaming for help into the street. After I helplessly watched my daughter die in the hospital the next day, I wanted to return home and scrub that liquid from my floor, to be rid of it. I did that. I also looked at her dirty clothes in the hamper and wondered aloud what I was to do with them. I washed them, folded them, and put them away in her drawers. What else could I do?
      

       
      

      I have been grateful for the opportunity to raise a puppy the last few months. Zorro has thrived. The dream illuminated in me some of my deepest fears. Inside, I have felt inadequate and undeserving. What type of mother cannot save her little girl from death? How could the universe trust me to care for even a dog? How could the universe trust me to mother my son?
      

      I called out, in my dream state, for my mother. No mother can save anyone from imminent death. Mothers do save their children, from illness or accidents, often. But when a person needs to leave, love of any kind does not stop this. I could not save Susanna.  I could not save my mother as she spent the last years of her long life descending into dementia. That was not fair. These are the things we experience; these are the things that humans bear.
      

      Six times now, I have crossed through Susanna’s birthday without her. I miss her terribly every day and have accepted a certain level of terminal sadness. What a gift though, to learn so much about healing. Dream language comes from the deep places, the ones that connect to the divine. The earth, the past, the dreams of everyone the earth has welcomed home before us.
      

      Yesterday, it was hard to hold a close view of a casket draped in flowers again, from the front row of a church and a cemetery. But once again there was the presence of family and friends from long ago. Some of us commented on how we should get together more often, not just for a funeral. We stood in small circles, and in the spaces between us, I am sure stood all the loved ones passed on. Their shoulders secretly touched ours and they silently nursed us through the day. There were ancestors there, perhaps even angels. This may be my personal interpretation and different than someone else’s, but the point is that we are not alone. We are not born alone, we do not die alone, and this is far from all there is.
      

      Last night I had another dream. I was baking a chocolate cake. I had been given instructions by an employer who wanted to try a new recipe, one that was supposed to be simple but delicious. There were special notes handwritten in a script that resembled my mother’s. Again, I struggled with a deadline, but I woke to the dark sweetness of life. My daughter and my mother are somewhere else today, but I am still here. I will talk to them, certain they will hear me.
      

       
      

       
      

       
      

      




      




      




      

      

      


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      Earth Day Again
      



      

      

      

      



      Five years ago, today, my daughter, Susanna Elizabeth Freer Sanchez, died. She was being prepared for a brain scan following the rupture of an aneurysm which no one knew about and a subarachnoid hemorrhage on the left side. The night before, she had fallen asleep in the car after visiting her grandmother on the day after Easter. As she slept the rupture probably occurred, her brain bled and her heart stopped. We did not know anything had happened until her Dad carried her in from the car, and I saw her face, without Susanna living and breathing behind it. I wish this were a softer story, one with rainbows, butterflies and angels. There is room for those things, but this story is about my little girl abruptly dying. It is a story full of excruciating pain and bitter confusion.
      

       
      

      Susanna spoke in sentences before she was a year old and never mispronounced words. Sometimes, she would fake moods and tantrums in order to experience them, because she did not encompass much angst. She could sing and dance and draw, as if a pure channel. She had a precocious depth of understanding of what is important in life. This was especially true regarding being kind and loving toward others. This was not learned but natural, like breathing, for Susanna.
      
Susanna died, on the table before the brain scan, on Earth Day, a little more than three months past her fifth birthday. Her most recent joys had included planting flowers at her school, the day care center she attended since she was a tiny baby. She had been registered to begin kindergarten the next September, but would not discuss this. She said she was not going, because her school was “the best school in the world,” so she had no need. About a week before her death, we were walking by the proposed future school and I tried to make conversation about how exciting it was that she was growing up and would be starting something new at PS277. She stopped on the sidewalk, started to cry, and said, “I want to go see Grandma!” We did, and she never went to kindergarten.
      
Miss Rachel, Susanna’s amazing care provider and teacher, and second mother to my whole family, related the following story a short time after, which I will paraphrase.
      
The children are sitting at the table for a lesson about Earth Day. Miss Rachel is describing Earth. Earth has blue skies, green grass, oceans, animals.
      
She asks, “Who wants to live on Earth?”, and before her question is finished Susanna is raising her arm up high shouting “ME! ME! I WANT TO LIVE ON EARTH!”
      
Susanna did live on earth, so fully and richly and in a way that accomplished so much, in such a short time. I will never understand why this had to happen, this loss of someone so precious to me. After my return to work later that spring, five years ago, a coworker from another generation and a faraway place said to me only this, in a whisper: “These are things we must bear”. I did not find this comforting at all. I did not want to bear this. Now, I do find its simplicity comforting, because no one has to make sense of tragedy. We just bear what happens.
      

       
      

      I do know more, out of necessity, than I used to about the afterlife, the other side. A few weeks after Miss Rachel had told me about the Earth Day lesson, I had a series of dreams where Susanna described where she was. She mentioned kaleidoscopes, and pinnacles. I wanted her to come home with me in one dream (as I always want) but this upset her. She had been promised an adventure and said “But I want to go!” I am sure that she is somewhere, and in that somewhere she is still embracing her life. More to be revealed.
      

      I miss you Susanna. I love you, forever and ever.
      



      

      




      




      




      

      

      


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      Some Disney Stories
      



      

      

      

      



      Icy rain laced the snow, coating the sidewalks between the Times Square subway station and the theater. My son and I pulled hoods close to our faces and minimized our activities other than claiming our seats for The Lion King. There were things we knew ahead from watching segments on YouTube. Stilts, eclectic animal costumes, familiar songs with words in Zulu and Swahili. But a live, human performance was something we have sorely needed these past winter months. Life and school seem drenched in inescapable drudgery. We painlessly turned off our phones for the day, held close to each other and watched the play.
      

      When my son was about three years old, and Susanna about two, we obtained an old VHS version of the animated film and popped it into a player. When we reached the middle, and Mufasa died, Susanna lapsed into inconsolable grief. She sat on the sofa and wept for a long time. She refused from then on to watch that film, and never saw the rest. Memories like this make me wonder about the things only our souls know, leaking out just a bit, mysteriously. I wonder if Susanna was remembering her mission in some small way. I wonder if she was knowing that our foursome, full of cartoons and frivolity, was going to be gone abruptly in a few years and never regained, due to her untimely death. This is a sad and irreparable situation, still.
      

      I wept a lot during the live performance. I did not start when Mufasa died, but at the beginning of the first number as the performers entered the stage from all sides. I wept mostly in relief, because I have felt so far apart from life lately. Amidst the music and energy, I realized that life was still waiting for me. Things have been difficult, but I have not died. The stress and problems have not evaporated, but I feel a bit more accepting and a bit less alone since this.
      

      When the play reached its midpoint, and again Simba’s father did in fact die, I glanced around to see if any children were crying. We were in proximity to many little girls. Mufasa was pushed to his death and I heard one girl in front state, matter-of-factly, “That was mean”.
      

      Another little girl behind me asked, innocently, “What happened?” I did not observe any children crying, but it was a huge sea of red velvet seats and I could not see everyone.
      

      This brought to my mind an exercise I learned in therapy. When I fear that my child is going to die suddenly (this happens quite a bit, since I have experienced this firsthand), I picture two adjoining screens. To the left, there are the few children who die, like Susanna. On the screen to the right are the many billions of children who do not die. There is a typical journey. It is the few and certainly not the many who leave so early. It helps sometimes.
      

      If we all continue after our death, as I am sure we do, and we reunite with loved ones on the other side, there is nothing left to genuinely be afraid of. Mufasa himself tried to make light of this, in his royal way of describing that he will join his ancestors in the cosmos. That is fine, masterfully demonstrated in the starry stage props, but I want more. I will keep seeking Susanna and how she remains with me, though I accept that I have purchased one velvet seat beside me instead of two. It is a messy and uncomfortable process.
      

      We returned home on the subway. As it was rush hour, we were in seats but separated. I looked at my son sitting on his own and noticed how in between things he is, his body nearly adult sized but his face obviously young. I am not him, but I imagined the enormity of how that must feel. Growing into his adult throne and kingdom of sorts, whatever it will be. He is at the point where baby Simba becomes adult Simba and searches himself beyond the borders.
      

      Later at home, we remembered more about watching our animated The Lion King. For days we had called my S.O. Mufasa, and he had lifted my son, Simba, above the imaginary cliff as if beginning the circle of life. I also remembered more things about Susanna and Disney cartoons. How she refused to stop rewinding and searching Bambi because she wanted to see the hunter who killed Bambi’s mother. She could not accept having that happen without seeing who was responsible. My son and I kept explaining that the shot came from a hunter, and she kept saying, “But I cannot see him!”
      

      It would be a couple of years past Bambi and the mystery shooter, when Susanna would often sit quietly in front of a screen, watching Frozen and singing “For the First Time in Forever”. In my memory she was present in body, but also ethereal, like we all are. Her eyes reflected her deep concentration, her body was taken into the song. This was happening right as we approached the door, the day between then and now. That song from Frozen became my constant companion in the early time after Susanna died, playing in my mind throughout the days. I hoped she was singing to me from a broader and grander ballroom than I could offer here.