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.

3.5 months, 3 years, 14.5 years...reflections and scrambles in a body

Hello, my loves.
Today is Zuzu's third birth/death day. Daddy gave me his phone to download some of his pics, and the image you see here was one that came across. All scrambled. As if it were developed badly in the dark room. Bits and pieces of a puzzle that is put together in such a wrong way.  And yet, it was the one that spoke to me.  I told Daddy I thought it was stunning, and he smiled, saying, "You always do like the weird ones."

It got me thinking about this weird life we've cobbled together from fragments and pieces.  It reflected some sort of bodily experience I've been having all week.  And then it dawned on me.  Oh.  Yes. This was Zuzu's week.  I feel the reverberations of that disorientation.  Not the same as it was in the moment back then.  But some echo of it.  And there are still echoes of your littlest brother who was born dead just three and a half months ago, too.  I am disoriented even while seeming to walk a straight line.

My bones ache with missing all of you.  And at the same time, there is a part of me glad you never had to live this life.  The chaos of planet Earth is ... well, it just isn't something I'd wish on anyone at this point.  It can be an adventure, interesting, fun, even Light in the ways your Daddy is learning about through meditation and stillness.  But always at the edges, there is suffering.  Always dancing around the most still of beings is the chaos of the relative world.  I'm happy you did not have to go through this world.  If rebirth does exist, I hope you've found your way out of the cycle now.

For your day this year, Zuzu, I think we'll spend some time near water, the beach, something.  Even if just for the afternoon.  We'll watch the birds and boats.  We'll take in the immense nature of the large body of the Puget Sound.  I'll imagine that huge body of water as one being who is staring back at us, two specs on the shore.  A being who wonders who these two small creatures are and why they are here.  If I see any starfish, I'll send Reiki to them for you, Zuzu.  If we come across ripe, wild blackberries, we'll eat a few for you.

In the scrambled picture of the life we are still living, we'll be loving you this day.  Like we do every day.  But through and through in the ache of my body today.

You boys take care of each other.
Love,
Momma

What is seen and unseen...

Well, my dear sons, you are joined in your other-world by another sibling. Amid the big transitions your father and I were making early this year with the move back across country to come home to the island, we discovered we were pregnant again. I hardly dared touch joy. I held my breath.  We told no one.  And in the first tri, soon after starting to re-nest here on the island, the blood came and wouldn't stop.  We were not pregnant anymore.  For weeks, we told no one.

Even your Nanna-Memoo and your living brother and sister heard weeks later.  And at that, I found myself typing on chat or PM with them to tell them.  I seem to have lost my out loud voice with the death of your most recent sibling, loves.  I'm sure you know already, but Mimi died on Easter morning, too.  Your world over there is getting more populated than my living world in some ways.

Before this baby died, I was already clearing space in my life, trying to shift as many things away from me as possible to open space.  I have wanted to do nothing but focus on the work I'm doing with Auntie Cath and then have space and space and space.  Our new house share here on the island is perfect for that.  It is often quiet and sunny in the backyard with lots of growing greens and lovely creatures.  Even when we hear our housemates, it is so quiet and full of love and space.  There is a very deep, resonating chime hanging next to the house, so with the wind each day, I feel I'm hearing the ring you'd hear at silent retreat.  I knew I was wanting quiet, calm, space for this baby brother or sister.

As it turns out, I am wanting that quiet, calm, and space for myself.  For mourning his/her death.  For pondering what karma is playing out as each of you has died.  For sitting with what was probably my last chance.

It has all left me with a need for huge swaths of time alone and in silence.  It has left me very hesitant to make too many plans each week.  It has left me wanting to just have open days -- as many in a row as possible -- to spontaneously do (or not do) whatever feels ... ??? ... right? good? okay? inspiring?

It has all left me incredibly grateful for the paths I took in life to end up married to your father.  To find my way to self-employment so that I can have days as I wish.  To find my way back to this quiet island so there is space, large bodies of water, and gentle creatures who aren't afraid to approach me.  Incredibly grateful.

Odd.  Third child dead.  Heart broken with grief.  Again.  And yet.  Incredibly.  Grateful.

I miss you each so much.  I wish I'd had more time with each of you.  I will always love you.
Your Mama

Punker Skellie and love...

Hello, my lovie loves.  Been thinking about you boyz so much, and Erin, too, as we've been preparing for our transition back home to the island.  As I'm pulling items off the fridge door, I seem to newly see the photos of Erin and can't believe -- all over again -- that she's dead now.  I do hope both you boyz are able to spend some time swimming like little fishes with her wherever you all are.  I used to love swimming with her and her sister in the summers.  Certainly seems we are all a family of water beings.

As I was pondering your butsudan, trying to figure out what to take with us in the car and what to pack for the movers, I couldn't decide and so sat there doodling a little.  Out of my pen came this punk rockin' skullie.  :)  It struck me, Kota, that you'd be 14 right at the week we move.  I wondered if we'd celebrate your birthday during the whole trip home?  Maybe we'd pick 14 things along the way to stop and see?  Maybe we'd head out to the coast and throw 14 stones into the ocean and wiggle our toes in the water as a celebration of returning to the water?  Gawd, I miss you boyz so much.

Zuzu, it will be wonderful to get back to your Cedar Grove and sit with you for a bit in the silence and wind and with the birds.  I wonder if anything was developed off the back of the grove? The last time we were there, it looked like they were gearing up to build back there.  Hope that whatever has taken place hasn't disturbed you at all.  Or that you've had fun with all the diggers and stuff :)

Well, just a short note for today, loves.  Just wanted to share the punker skullie with you really.  And tell you that I love you and miss you so much.

xoxoxoxox's,
Momma

Starts and fits and stops...

I cannot tell you how many times I've started this post, deleted it.  Wrote it again, deleted it.  Started again, leaving a draft copy on the server with just the image saved and all the words deleted.  It isn't that all of you, my loves, my sons and you, my goddaughter, have not been on my mind since mid-December when the dozen pairs of toe socks in this image were donated.  In fact, Erin, on your birthday in mid-December, they were donated, as a gift to and from you to some young girls in a local domestic violence shelter who really need some color and spark and fun, not to mention some warmth for their toes.

It's just that on the very same day, I began to feel...well...just not right.  Physically.  My immune system went into over-drive, my nerve endings caught on fire, my need for sleep was unquenchable.  While I know the body is physical and I can't just blame myself for feelings that were "negative" that might cause "sickness" because frankly, I don't think it is that simple... but I know that much of the fire coursing thru my nerve endings was the fire of sorrow.  Of simply missing you all.  And missing Unkie, too.

My body felt haunted.

And as I spent the next 6 or so weeks, more or less in bed, taking frequent naps, trying to sort out some of the *knowings* I was having in body and consciousness, I began to see that haunted-ness reflected in the physical space around me.

I was in bed for your daddy's birthday, boys...I was in bed for Christmas Day.  I saw your father haunt around this house with no real community to turn to with me zapped out of it.  I saw that where I knew nettles would help exorcise some of the bodily ailments, there was no one here for me to work with, but rather I was online to Auntie Jane back on the island.  I had a moment of sitting in front of your butsudan and being haunted by the fact that your ashes, Kota, are here with me, but your brother's remains are in the sacred cedar grove on the island.  And there is also just the sort of bottom line:  As much as I miss all of you who are dead, well, living this far away from the living loves makes it feel like everyone is dead.  But they are not!  Time to be a bit closer to some of our living loves again.  Though I do have moments where I wish we could live in all three - West Coast, Mid-West, and East Coast - as we seem to be all spread out across the North now.

So it is, loves.  Another big move is in the works.  I've edited my schedule so that it can accommodate lots of naps and heART-making dream time -- I'm grateful for the visits all of you pay me in those reveries of art making in the studio, by the way.  We are slowly putting the pieces together to return to the island this spring.  Kota, I'm thinking about taking some of the dirt from your brother's burial site and adding it to your marble jar.  Or giving him his own space in a beautiful little something so that I have pieces of you both in the butsudan.  I can't believe I came this far away without an handful of his dirt.  I need to go back.

Anyway, just like the starts and fits and stops and re-starts of this blog post over the last 6 weeks or so, it seems life is the same way.  Begin again.  Remembering things like what your Auntie Sherene reminded me of the other day:  No matter how long you walk down the wrong road, you can always turn back or turn off to another road.  Try again.  Take the next breath.  Allow for the learnings.

I'm grateful for my time here for many reasons:  I got to try on a different hat.  I got a good sun fix.  I got the chance to see the difference between depth healers and plastic shamans.  I got a chance to create in cooperation with your Auntie Cath and learn how much I love being self-employed.  I got to see how integral community is so that I don't take it for granted next time I encounter it.  I got to see that stereotypes exist for a reason; there really are people who think the Civil War ended badly; and I really am a liberal, peace-nik, Northern who needs a LOT more practice at being tolerant of those who are not.

What can I say, my loves?  I, your mother, am just a messy human being, living a messy life, knowing death comes all too soon.  And I can't let any more time pass without trying to begin again, to try a different play, to re-start again in gratitude for all that has passed and not taking for granted anything that will come.  Even more importantly, to re-start again this moment with a breath, a conscious listening to the needs of my body and soul, and a gratitude for love however it is expressed this moment.

That said, in this moment, I thank you, my dead loved ones, for teaching me that, no matter how much time we have here, death will come too quickly.  So don't miss this moment to live with as full a heart as possible.

Love your incredibly flawed, human being, mother...
xoxoxoxoox

My little sprites...

Hello, my little holiday sprites.  Miss you so much at this time of year.  Impossible to go out -- or heck, even stay in and be on social media -- without seeing all the scenes with kids.  Teenagers and toddlers.  Everywhere.  And all who leave me wondering what you would be like this year.

Have had so many lonely moments recently thinking about the holidays now that your cousin Erin is dead, too.  I have felt so far from she and her sister for so long, and yet, my heart knew I was making my own family on the other coast.  I felt a trust and love for the family I left back on the East coast, knowing that they raised me with love and care, feeling they would all do the same for Erin and her sister, too.  I felt freedom enough to be on the left coast and make my family now.  But my family here doesn't look like I thought it would.

It's not that I don't feel the two of you here.  I do feel you like holiday sprites buzzing around me, trying to tickle me out of my reluctant spaces -- much as I might be doing for you if you were here as a reluctant teenager, Kota :)  But at the same time, well, you just are not *here* either.  This house doesn't feel or sound or look anything like what I thought it would.  And, yes, it's true, I practice just letting all that go so that I can be present in what IS the house now.  It's a fine enough house.  I'm grateful for the roof, meditation space, art-making space, time and light.  But I admit that when I get a peak into your sister's house with her three young kids making the very structure brim over with growth, I ache for all that we missed with you.

And I just miss you. Period.
And I find myself this year thinking about all the spaces back home that will not be the same now that Erin has died, too.  The world is so full and yet there are so many spaces that ache under the weight of empty.

Sending you love -- and wishing you were here to discover oranges in your stockings and roll your eyes in teen fashion and say, "Mooooom, this is *not* a gift," which would allow a whole other discussion to ensue.  :)
Love you, babies.
Momma

With and without...

It continues to be odd, my loves.  To have so much, to be with such love in this world, and still be without the two of you here.  And now, this year, as the holidays approach again, to also be without your cousin Erin.

With each experience of death and grief, I remember that this is all so fleeting.  To love with my whole heart means risking, means knowing that the very same heart will break when death comes again, knowing that death does and will come.

Your daddy has been doing a lot of Buddhist study in the last 6 months or so.  I'm fascinated with the idea of the differences between conventional reality vs. ultimate reality.  In conventional reality, there is birth and death, you are here or you are not, there is dead or alive, there is being or non-being.  But in ultimate reality, you see that Being IS Non-Being.  There is no difference.  You see that being alive means you are dying every moment with thousands of cells ending and you are being born with thousands of cells starting every moment, too.  In ultimate reality, I can't just point to the ashes of your remains and say, "That is my son," because you are more than that -- and you are not that at all either.

Haven't exactly made sense of it all in a way that translates yet.  But when I began hearing the dharma talks about how time is made up of non-time elements --  or death is made up of non-death elements -- or being is made of non-being elements...something in me just sang.  Took me back to Tao translation Mitchell did where he talked about how we use clay to make a pot to hold something precious, but it is actually the space inside that holds what is precious.

Something in there about my heart being made of muscle, tissue, blood, body, matter, but it is the space that opened after death broke my heart -- that is the space where I hold you two boys -- and now, Erin, too.  This is the space where I choose what I will carry forward of each of you.  This is where you continue, even in the present moment.

“If you look deeply into the palm of your hand, you will see your parents and all generations of your ancestors. All of them are alive in this moment. Each is present in your body. You are the continuation of each of these people.” 

~Thich Nhat Hanh

Can't send enough love to really say how much I love you both...please hold Erin's hand and give big hugs to her and to Unkie, too.
Love,
Momma

Of firsts and seconds and thirds...

Hey loves...
Kota, I thought you wouldn't mind if I take some space here to collect my thoughts and letters, not only to you, but also to your baby brother.  Zuzu's (your father has decided Mizuko's nickname would have been Zuzu) 2nd birth/death day was today.  It's been both a suckfest and just another day on planet earth with its rounds and rounds of monkey mind, cracked hearts, and moments of nothing but mussed up courage.

Zuzu, lovie, missed you bunches today.  Had a lovely check in with your Auntie Lynndee yesterday where I realized consciously for the first time, that I had not done a single bit of new art since May maybe??  So as your birthday rang in during the wee hours last night, I sat to sketch you a little something.  I had nothing in mind when I started.  Just a blank page.  It was the first page in a new journal, and I had the thought that it would be funny to page mark it "2" since it is your second bday.  And then the three little flowers were just sort of, you know, two candles and one to grow on, like you'd have had on a birthday cake.  And the heart is just my heart reaching for you...it is outside the body of the mother in the image because that is still how it feels here.  My heart is always out of place here, reaching for you and your brother.

I can't stop thinking of you two lately.  Daddy has changed so many things recently.  Quit fire smoking, has begun meditating, given up any food that once had a face.  I can't help but think you two probably would have always had a lean more toward veggies anyway...you'd have been breastfeeding while I was eating greens like crazy.  :)  But I sort of laugh watching how all the changes are upheaval for just us alone, and I can't help but wonder what you, still a little terrible two'er and your big bro who would be a roudy teenager now, would make of this house now?

The days like today -- well, if I'm honest, every single day -- simultaneously go too fast *and* feel like a barren land.  Auntie Lynndee helped me re-check to figure out even how to hear what the days call me to now.  Some days just feel so lost -- especially since your cousin Erin died last month -- that my head won't stop hurting, and it just seems easier to sleep and wish it all to be gone.  Of course, you can imagine that makes Daddy ache as he wants to have full days together and steal every moment dry of all it has to offer.  I always have been more of the Eeyore in this family.

Baby Boy, I miss you terribly.  I wish there were more to do for you from here, other than build cairns out on the trails.  The present moments we have, are...well... just are.  But they are always also without you.  And with you.  But I do wish they were moments with you here in a more physical way.

I would have made you avocado chocolate pudding or brownies today.  Sending them in spirit.  Get messy and eat them up yummy, love.
xoxoxoxo
Momma

COMING BACK ONLINE

Kota, my love, yes, I am reluctantly coming back online after your 13th birth and death day.  The top photo is my birth/death day groan to world.

Your daddy bought me that beautiful sculpture in the middle photo.  It was something I had seen a year and a half ago maybe, but passed it up at the time.  Regretted it from the moment I walked away from it.  And with each foray out into the world, I'd look for it or a similar one again.  Never could find it.  Then, the day before your birthday this year, we walked into a little shop and there it was.  Daddy bought it right away.  I'm sure it is *far* from what you would have wanted as a living breathing 13 year old, but since you are not here -- since it is a gift in proxy -- well, this was the heART that came home with us.

We didn't either much feel like cake this year either -- again, I'm sure a growing and constantly hungry 13 year old would never have wanted watermelon, but there it is in your absence (in the bottom photo).  Was sort of funny to light candles on a watermelon, but it worked.  And it was yummy :)

In my reluctant return to the grid, I miss you more than ever.  I view the world with more and more questions and ponder the absurdity of it all.  Why some live and some die?  Why anyone wants to continue living in this ridiculous world?  What would you have made of it all as you grew and learned and woke up to adulthood?

Your daddy keeps telling me to stay in the moment.  Find the joy right now because everything else is illusion.  Stay with my breath and keep creating the playground of my life.  Some moments it is so difficult to do that as the world seems pointless.  The best I could in the days around your birth/death day was to escape.  Two films save me over and over...

"I feel so happy here. This place makes me feel flooded with love. The important thing is to have lots of love about. I was very stingly with it back home. I use to measure and count it out. I had this obseesion with justice, you see. I wouldn’t love Mellersh unless he loved me back exactly as much, but he didn’t and neither did I. The emptiness of it all." 

~Lottie, Enchanted April

"Any arbitrary turning along the way, and I would be elsewhere.  I would be different. What are four walls, anyway?  They are what they contain.  The house protects the dreamer.  Unthinkably good things can happen, even late in the game.  It's such a surprise." 

~Under The Tuscan Sun

Remember, baby boy, your momma loves you!

BECOMING A TEENAGER

Teenage years. 

Oh baby boy, I can't believe you'd be 13.  I can just hear you now. "Mooooom, I'm not a baby."  

I remember your brother and sister as teenagers.  Peter started sharing his comic book and video game favs with me.  Bethany let me talk her into watching "Roman Holiday" even though she thought it would suck because it was a black and white movie.  :-)

No, at 13 years of age, our children are not babies anymore.  They start taking form as their own BEINGS.  They begin asserting their likes and dislikes.  They begin to question everything.

I wanted so much to see you do these things, baby.  

It seems more difficult with each passing year to explain this reality to others.  In some ways the grief ebbs, but the isolation grows.  How do you meet new happy la-la friends at the local arts festival and then tell them you'll be checked out of the world this week because your dead son would be 13 this week and you still hate the world for him not being here?  It's kind of absurd, which often translates into others thinking I myself am absurd (not that I don't already think that about myself and the world!).  It's a mutual absurd fest.

After your birthday last year, I decided that I had to find meaning again for me, for why I'm still here, to figure out what I want to do with the days I have left.  So I began doing things, silly, just for fun things off my bucket list, like going for the first time to multi-day film fest and going to my first comicon and going to Vegas for the first time.  All interesting for exercises in the absurdity of being human, but what does any of it really mean?  Leaves me questioning everything.  Paris and Tuscany are still on the list, but they are just other places.  Making my own short film or writing my first comic book are still on the list, but those are just other exercises yakking my jaw of human absurdity.  

It sort of mirrors the existential angst I had as a teenager, too.  Maybe I'm just channeling the challenging existential stuff you yourself might be starting to experience in the teen years? :)  Maybe it is a practice of being an alive, awake, conscious human being to question each morning we wake and figure out a reason for getting out of bed and wonder what to make of this day?  The human epic of living creatively.

The human epic of witnessing the death of self when our children die.

One little ray of heART I decided to create for myself this year is organizing a Day of the Dead themed art auction to benefit the MISS Foundation.  We have a dozen or so artists so far, all handmaking Day of the Dead artworks that will be auctioned this Fall.  The proceeds will go toward the amazing work your Auntie Jojo started over at MISS oh so many years ago in Cheyenne's memory.  Tell all your friends over there on the other side I said thank you for inspiring their mommas to participate: Lucia, Nora, Maddy, Lyra, Liam, Theo, Kae, Aurora, Soren, Imogen, Heloise, Roku, Seven, Juggernaut and any other loved ones who are being remembered through this project.

I love you, baby boy.

I miss you with more aching than my body can take some days.

I wish I could do more than send you love across the time, space, life/death continuum.

xoxoxooxoxoxooxo

Momma

HEY BABY...

Hi lovie...it has been a very very long time since I was here. Sorry about that. I even managed to miss your birthday here this year though a handwritten letter did go into your birthday book here at the house. 

So many things have happened since I last wrote you here. Your baby brother Zuzu died at birth last summer 2010. We uprooted our island life and moved back to the mainland to Sedona. And I can't believe you would be 12 years old this year. I can't even vision what you as a 12 year old would be begging for for Christmas this year. I miss you so much. 

When we landed here at the new house, your Auntie Katie came over with a house warming gift. Sharing a photo of it here for you. Would you look at that? I have looked a long time for a butsudan for you -- and now for you and your brother. And Auntie Katie showed up on our doorstep with it when we landed here. I was so overwhelmed by her kindness. When I did our Day of the Dead altar this year, I did it around the butsudan. 

Anyway... did you know you your sister had another baby this year? You have a nephew -- beautiful baby -- we've all taken to calling him Buddha as he's so round and happy and then meditative at times. With our move down here to Sedona, I do miss the grandbabies very much. 

I don't know, Kota. Somedays you seem so far away. Other days I ache with how close you are and yet out of physical reach. Your daddy found an article about how cremated ashes can be fired into crystal beads. They are so beautiful. I thought about doing that with your ashes and presenting them to daddy for the holidays. But I'm so scared to "send you off" anywhere. Silly isn't it that I should be scared. But I feel your ashes are all I have left. 

I miss you so much, my-should-be-growing-boy. 

Sending you love and tears and hugs...wishing always that you were here... 
xoxoxooxoxoxoxoxoxo 
love, 
momma

POETRY HOP: A GHOST STORY...PART THREE

Just like the movable feast parties where you hop from one location to the next for each course. This is a Poetry Hop. Each course offers you a different taste of our ghost story. This game was created in celebration of Kota's 11th birth and death day. Read a course here, at the bottom, you'll find link to hop to the next course. 

Enjoy your trip, y'all! 

Ghost Story III

by Kara LC Jones, 

Kota's mum 

Memory smashed against the wall, 
shards streamed across the mine field 
of the hard wood floor. 

She stood motionless in the doorway, 
machinations stewing in pot, 
a broken heart, blackened and burnt on the stove top. 

On the other side of the room, 
the table was set and every chair filled 
with the remembrance of a dead child. 

The kitchen betrayal 
reneged on promises of hearth, 
shot spoonfuls of grief 
at all who dared enter. 

Click here to read, Ghost Story IV.

11 YEARS OLD ON THE 11TH

Hi, my lovely boy. 

So here we are. Another birthday. You'd be 11 today on 3/11. Amberlee's mom told me that in their family when the age and date match like that, they consider it a Golden Birthday. Attaching a photo to this post that came from Christian's mom. It was a golden sunset, and she said she wondered when she saw it at how much it felt like a boy's sunset, like it belonged to you. Nora' mum and family made sure trees were planted for you again this year. Cheyenne's mom is doing a Kindness Project for you today. And so many have left kind notes and sweet thoughts for you. The ZAMR family imagined you running on the beach, yelling back at all of us, "Come on you, slowpokes!"  

You are so present still. 

Odd. Yesterday was this sharply sunny, blue sky day. Like the day you were born. I stood outside in the sun yesterday afternoon and watching the wind sail the clouds across the skySea. You were still so present. 

And yet today. Today is one of those claustrophobic Spring days, hemmed in by a foggy gray, ceaselessly falling rain, a chill that streams through the very walls. And you feel so far away. 

How I long for the floodgates of my life to open. I feel the cusp of it. I wonder what role you play in all of it. I know my love for you flows through it all. My determination to never stop voicing the LIFE and LOSS experience in the same breath always. And yet we continue to struggle here. There has just never been a moment where it tumbles forward off the cusp yet. 

Had two interesting interactions about that recently. One, someone asked me if I wasn't yet tired enough of the feast and famine cycle to break it yet. That the cycle is my own illusion. While there is something there, all I walked away with was guilt and shame because I'm not good enough or skilled enough or healed enough to break the cycle. The spiral of self blame. Not very helpful. 

The second was an idea presented that if I was truly doing my "right work" in this world, then my audience would be reached with least effort, they would get most value, and the offerings would be sought after. Again, I get it. But I walk away questioning my "right work," guilting and shaming myself for not being better, healed, able to "let go of loss" and embrace abundance. Self blame spiral. Not helpful. 

Then I had an amazing discussion with Jaime Ridler. We talked about permission and abundance and loss and love and being authentic AND professional, being true to yourself AND doing right work in the world. And there it was. 

A permissive and sacred space for whatever I was feeling as we approached your 11th birth and death day. 

An allowance for the fact that my motherhood got channeled into the activism work I do. 

The affirmation that my whole life became a peaceful protest whereby we demand permissive and sacred space for every individual. 

There is immense value there. The ideas are effortlessly conveyed when the person is my audience. I am breaking the cycle of guilt and shame foisted upon bereaved families. There just is no clear way in this commercial society to put that on the $.99 cent shelf or in the high-end spa sector. Your presence continues to show me that this experiment here is about LIVING A LIFE, not about making a living. 

Whatever the consequences. 

I cannot thank you enough for that. 

I can't believe you are still giving me gifts on your birthdays instead of the other way around. 

My small mortal body is still at odds with its mortality. Linear time is this facade of structure that mocks control and safety, but really is frightening because every moment passing is lost. Everything about linear time is grief and loss. 

Truly breaking the cycle is letting go of the small mortal body, and embracing the ever present BEing - just like you are still here. 

Breaking the cycle is letting go the fake sense of control/locus of linear time, and instead embracing the ALL time, the quantum fall off the cusp into conscious knowledge of how past present future all IS. 

It is a mind fuck to be sure. 

And yet here we are. Present, talking to Past, about Future. IS. 

You are simply bonded to everything I do, love. Just as your physical cells remain in my mortal body, so too are you woven with the Light Body. 

11 years. 
Yesterday. 
11 years from now. 

IS. 

And the crisp wind streams through the walls of the office. 

I miss you. 
You never left. 
I want to be more present with you. 

And the rain is ceaseless. 

xo. 
love, 
mum

OMG, I MISS YOU.

Kota, it seems I hardly ever write anymore. But with the holidaze in full gear just now, I woke up today and realized I miss you so very much. Seeing the lanky, swift growing 11 year olds makes me realize, I have no idea who you would be. It feels very lonely to realize that. 

At the same time, I'm having the most odd experiences recently. Beauty seems to steal me. A colorful painting, a stunning landscape in crisp air, holiday lights, the harsh streams of winter sun. I get lost seeing them. Your father is talking and turns and I'm 1,000 steps behind, having fallen into some pool of beauty or another. 

I often wish to live in that pool. I don't like coming back out of it to start walking again. It feels like you are there. 

I miss you much. 
Sending you love for the holidaze. 
xo 
Mom