So far I have kept almost everything belonging to Zoe. I may not always. But when I go to her room with the intention of clearing out just a few things, I get lost in memories and end up putting everything away again. Continue reading
loss
365 days without you
Zoe. One year since you left your poor, tired, cancer-ravaged body behind. We never wanted you to leave but we knew you needed to be released from this. I remember not being ready when they took your body away and feeling at peace when they brought you back home. In your woven willow casket, dressed in your favourite party dress and well worn sparkly shoes, surrounded by tokens for your journey you looked just as beautiful as ever to me; my sleeping beauty. Continue reading
Holding hands and holding on
“Have you ever really held the hand of someone you love? Not just in passing, a loose link between you – but truly clasped, with the pulses of your wrists beating together and your fingers mapping the knuckles and nails like a cartographer learning a country by heart?”
― Jodi Picoult, Salem Falls
I am finding words hard at the moment, so I have borrowed the ones above. For six years I learned the map of Zoe’s hands, and now it is a territory forever imprinted on my heart.
When she passed away, Lisa from Features Forever made a mold of her hands and yesterday the stone casts of them arrived in the middle of a rainstorm, a small parcel on my doorstep.
Feijoa Harvest
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.
Held up by love
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.
Retro Girl & the Chemo Kid 