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
“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.
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
Olivia made cookies for Ronald MacDonald House.
Izania spread the kindness by asking friends to perform random acts of kindness for her birthday
Isobel paid for three other year 3 children to do a math workshop with her birthday money.
Wendy gave some home baking to a neighbour who wasn’t well.
Kiri put scented soaps into random lockers at the gym with a little note. Continue reading
On the 4th of April I woke up, as I thought I would (or maybe willed myself to do) at 3.40am, the time Zoe was born in 2006.
Many grieving parents say that it’s often not the specials days themselves – birthdays, anniversaries, Mothers Day, Christmas – that are hard, it’s the days leading up to them and the anticipation of them. I’d had a rough few days. I couldn’t concentrate and just wanted all the swirling thoughts in my head to go away. I was having trouble keeping the momentum for The Angel Zoe Kindness Project going when I just wanted to hide away in my bed instead and not speak to anyone. For the first time I felt I was not coping and started considering grief counselling. Continue reading
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.
I’ve been asking myself the question this week – “When is something I do part of The Angel Zoe Kindness Project, and when is it just something anyone with any sense of compassion and humanity would do?”
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
Retro Girl & the Chemo Kid 