grief

The deal with cancer

Kiri 6 Comments

It’s a funny thing about humans, we seem to think we can make a deal with life, with God, with cancer, with death. If this, then that. But damn cancer keeps not keeping its end of the bargain.

While Zoe was still on treatment in 2009, my Dad was diagnosed with prostate cancer. You know, the cancer that’s not supposed to actually kill you. Except his was aggressive and already metastasised when they found it, just six months after previous tests found nothing. So in the year after Zoe’s treatment finished, we did another round with cancer and this time we lost.
Dad told my Mum that he was ok with dying, as long as Zoe lived. That was his bargain and it did feel like we had somehow made an exchange – no matter how illogical, it felt like logic of the heart.  Continue reading →

Phone Calls from Heaven

Kiri 2 Comments
Today a friend posted about her young daughter, who they have known for a while will not be in this world for long, telling her that she was tired and wanted to go to Heaven. She told her mum it will be ok, she will be able to play with her pets that have died and will call her mum from there. She even used her toy cell phone to call the man in Heaven to arrange this.
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This little moment breaks my heart in so many ways.
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Feijoa Harvest

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The first feijoa just fell off our tree. When Zoe was two, the autumn before we moved to this house and it was empty, I would bring her here to eat the feijoas in the sun on the front steps. Feijoa harvesting (and figuring out what to do with all the feijoas) has been an autumn ritual since then. we created many feijoa cakes, feijoa muffins, feijoa, ginger and apple crumbles and feijoa chutney together. The year she was having chemo I even noted in this blog post that she was living on feijoas and hot chocolate.
In a year of firsts without her, some catch you by surprise. This one is hard too.

That was a couple of days harvest in April 2011. Here’s the link to the recipe for the chutney we made last year. I chose it so we didn’t have to peel all the feijoas.

Making room for grief

Kiri 2 Comments

Photo: Mistral Photography

I started the Angel Zoe Kindness Project after Zoe’s Dad and a couple friends asked me what I was doing for her birthday.
Zoe’s Dad and I talked about the balloon release being the weekend after her birthday so that friends and family can join in, but when he asked me what I was doing on her actual birthday, I was at a loss.
I’ve been trying very hard to turn her death into something positive, to make it mean something. What I haven’t been doing, I realise, is making room for grief. Continue reading →

Held up by love

Kiri 2 Comments
 
This is a picture of my day today.
 
Some days, I wonder if am inhumanly numb. I go to work, I go to the gym, I go to social events, I laugh, I enjoy myself. I even told someone I hadn’t seen in a long time that Zoe had died and was more sorry for how mortified she would be for asking after a dead child than I was upset at telling her.
Other days it seems tears are very close to the surface and always at inconvenient times, so I fight them, some days just for moments, some days all day.
Some days there is no escaping it and I spend hours lost in grief.

Continue reading →