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