Quarter of a century...

 

half doz red roses, top down shot, watermark Grief And Creativity dot com

Hey Babyboy Kota...and your brothers, too, but specifically you coz you'd be quarter of a century today. Sigh. I miss you AND at the same time I still am glad none of you decided to fully come here because, wow, we are in a hellscape in this world now. I'm scared all the time for your living sibs and the grands. You all deserved so much better than what the elders of this capitalist hellscape have done to all of us.

All that said, I still miss you. Dreamed about last night sort of ... it was impression of you, not like clarity of previous dreams. Was walking this different spaces realizing that I had to cast spells to fully see what was in those spaces. In one there was M the cat from upstairs on a pillow in a window and there was a light / aura residue that you'd been there petting him not long prior. 

Left me feeling fully that quarter of a century is forever and no time at all in the same breath.

25 years.

How is it 25 years. And yet also geesh 1999 was forever ago, too.

Realized in this new year that I'm very very far away from the poetic life I thought we'd have. In all ways. It's been years since I had a regular practice of writing poetry. And the ideas I had for what made a poetic life changed materially in the outbreak of the plague. This world will not recover in my lifetime, so I will have to redefine poetic life if I want any touch into that again. It's amazing how grief makes us redefine EVERYTHING over and over again. 

Wrote my first poem in years the other day:

Disconnected

I feel completely disconnected.

My inner landline needs a jack, 

but you keep pointing me toward cell towers.

My inner modem wants to beep boop ring-sing before being available,  

but you want to swipe up and be on.

I am of this world,  

but not sure I'm entirely built for it

Age of GenX straddling the pre-tech to tech world maybe? Questioning all the foundations. 

I wonder where you are...what are you...what is it that i still vision as you...why you materially came to us and then left - though i know the why if i'm honest. But still the great why of being human. I wonder what would interest you? What kinds of questions would you be asking of life? What disillusionments would you share w me if any? What would be the thing and experiences that make you happy or feel safe or like it was all worth it? Would you have ended up disabled and chronic as we both have given the way the plague ran through here in 2019 Christmas? What of your brothers? 

Looking out at the trees and drizzle rain and just feel nothing.

One day runs into the next. The accomplishment and promises of adult life were all carrot and stick lies of capitalism to keep us running bunnies. It's all bullshit. There are only the dopamine moments you create for yourselves. And I'm not sure that's enough to justify this bullshit hellscape. I am still glad you and your brothers chose to not stay here. You are better off. 

Dad and I miss you much though...my selfish craving for dopamine hits that include you :) I'm sorry I didn't get a cake and haven't had the bandwidth to make cupcakes. I brought you the roses above...the lure of Spring's soon arrival. Looking forward to the tree swing and sunshine and rainbow sunglasses that allow me to see the tree tops coz they are prescription. Hope to glimpse you hanging out w the Tree Devas! xoxoxoxooxoxoxoxoxooxoxo

How is it 2023?

 

It's probably so silly as you kids would be grown / growing up so fast now that it is 2023! How did it get to be 2023 already?!? Been thinking of all of you a lot as Kota's day is coming up this weekend. I'm still glad to this day that none of you stayed here as here is just hell. I'm grateful you didn't have to survive this hellscape. But oh I miss being with you. Miss the future memories I had the audacity to have before my naivety was exploded. Miss the fact that I would never have been able to give you the gems in your childhoods that Mimi and Unkie and Memoo gave me in mine. 

As we continue to endure pandemic years here, I watch your sister's kids, your nieces and nephews, in this world and am so proud of your sister for how good a mom she is to them. They face realities I never thought I'd see. I'm so glad you didn't have to see those realities either. But I ache for those who are here trying to survive it all without even really understanding the complexities of unresolved grief and trauma we're all enduring now, that will inevitably be generational. 

Wonder so often if there is an "over there" there? And what, if anything you all see from "there"? And what you would have to say to us about your perspectives? Are you three able to be together? Do you see Mimi and Unkie ever? Do you feel how much we miss you? 

Dad's had a rough go of it these pandemic years. I'm grateful every single day he is still here with me and I am still here with him. I think we both stay only for each other and otherwise are both like UGH this dumpster fire world is soooo disillusioning. But I'm so relieved that he's made it thru multiple health challenges, especially that is no longer in every single day excruciating pain. I suspect he's is much like me in the chronic pain though but we've both learned to live with a certain level of it every single day that is just isn't excruciating. 

I miss each of you. Was re-reading that entry of a dream when, Zuzu, you shared that joke you made up. Soooo wish we had more dreamtime together. Either it is that dreamland is so rarely remembered upon waking or it just isn't a visit that happens often. Would love to hear how the jokes have evolved over time. :)

Anyway, just wanted to say Happy and Love to each of you for your days for this year. This unbelievably, impossibly here year of 2023. Streaming hugs to each of you.

xo
Mom 

21, 10.5, and 7...time marches on

Hello, my Loves.

Though I thinking of you multiple times a day, it has been a long while since I sat down to write to you. Not even sure why writing at this point means anything, but here we are. Kota's birthday this week coinciding with, oh, you know, the beginning of the end of the world, well, yeah. Your Daddy is an amazing man. I told him in the wee hours of an anxious insomnia that I was glad you all are not here to live through this. He told me he's not as unselfish as me and would still rather you be here to be hugged and told how much we love you. I do hope, wherever you each are now, IF there is a "there," that you are well and loved.

Laughed to myself on Wednesday morning in my first conscious moment of your 21st birthday, Kota, thinking I hope you would not have been an alcohol kid, but that if you were here I'd have taken you to your first venture into the pot shop. That probably tells you how terrible of a mum I would have been. But I think I would have enjoyed laughing hardily with you and savoring a birthday cake when the munchies came on! Or maybe I would have ended up being the kind of mum you just wanted to get away from, and I'd just be missing you in a different way on your 21st. Who knows.

Do you ever see Mimi or Unkie over there (if there is a there)? I miss them both so much, too. Watched Grace & Frankie the other night and found myself endlessly fascinated with Martin Sheen because his hair and body shape and movements look soooo much like Unkie before he got deathly skinny w the cancer. I wondered what it would have been like to see each of you actually animated and moving and to have seen your hair grow in even longer and curlier than it was at birth, Kota.

Anyway. Not sure why bother writing here now as I said. But maybe it is just feeling that this is one spot where I can actually put I LOVE YOU out there in a "real" way. It isn't quiet and unseen, but fully here. As long as I remember, then you are still part of me. For whatever that is worth to any of us.

I miss you.
Momma

Telling jokes

My Dear Zuzu,

In my dreams last night, it was your 6th birthday party. You were so delighted w getting everyone's attention that you announced you had a joke to tell, one you'd written yourself.

"How did the drunk man tell the perfect joke? ...

"He didn't! It was too late!"

And you giggled and giggled and giggled.

I remember thinking in the dream, ah, you would have been a writer and performance artist.

Love you millions, miss you all ways...
Mum

17, 6, 3...a customized count-down

Hello, Loves.

2016 seems very very far away from you all. Though you each come to mind every single day in one way or another, I've all but ceased recording the conversations and thoughts that stream thru my cells. I don't know why exactly. They certainly don't do much good just cycling and re-cycling through my being. But I've been hesitant for the last year to write anything to you here at all. Hesitant to write anything to you anywhere, even in private pen/paper pages.

Some of it probably leans toward shame. You see, even when I miss you most, I no longer actually wish you each were here. In fact, I'm relieved in so many ways that you are not. This world is not kind though your father and I continue to seek and express kindness as much as we can. But looking in my work and life at the cross sections of grief and social (in)justice more intensely in this past year than I probably have in two decades...well, it's ugly out here.

I'm so glad you aren't here to have to make sense of it. I'm so glad you aren't here to inadvertently become the target of some hopped up hate from ... wherever it comes from... I'm so glad you aren't here to have to figure out how to ask the hard questions, how to live with no answers, how to make sense of white violence while still being in relationship with your white mother. I'm relieved that you are free. I am looking forward to that freedom myself one day because this bs is too much.

My love for you never ceases. I do see you in many reflections here that make me smile or pine for some wistful something, to be sure. I still love adding your names to various places so those signifiers are heard or seen -- even if the people on the receiving end don't and won't really know the context of you. It's like you are my secret brigade.

I love you, little troopers. Hope wherever you are, whatever you are up to, that it is nothing like this insanity here. May you have peace and love and some fun. Wherever you are.

Love,
Momma

On his 4th death day

Memory is all we are... 
by Kara LC Jones (excerpt from forthcoming "In A Body" collection from KotaPress)

Memory is all we are.

Let it go

and we are       nothing.

I do not want to know you would have turned 4 years old this year.

I do not want to remember where we buried you.

I do not want to remember coming to in fuzzy vision, 

your father bent over me, calling my name, asking me to stay with him.

I do not want to remember the amount of blood

unless it were memory spilling out of me      emptying

til there is       nothing.

Memory is all we are.

Let it go

and we are     nothing.

one of those increments of five

...and at 15 years out, I'm not sure why I'm still here writing. But to mark the day you would have turned 15, Kota, I'll just offer this:

Thank you for teaching me not to cling to living children and motherhood.
Thank you for teaching me not to cling to dead children and grief.
Thank you for teaching me that clinging is just another delusion of the human experience.
Thank you for letting go of me, so that I could let go of you.
Now to just practice letting go of everything.