This photo popped up in my messages yesterday. Is there anything more lovely than a long legged foal? Perhaps only the reason it was sent to me. Continue reading
childhood cancer
Random thoughts on cancer, meaning and happiness Part II
“Hope is not optimism, nor is it conviction that something will go well. Rather it is the certainty that something has meaning…regardless of its outcome.” Vaclav Havel
From where I stand now, I feel I can truly say that life (for me anyway) is not about happiness, at least not in the ways it’s most commonly perceived to exist. Rather it is about finding peace and meaning. That doesn’t mean that I don’t feel any joy or happiness, but that I find those things through the meaning I attach to my life and experiences. Continue reading
The friendship seat #1000speak
It still haunts me to know that being bullied was a feature of the last few months of my daughter’s life, that in the beginning it wasn’t handled very well and that I failed her in this.
Early in her second year at school, around the time she turned 6, Zoe told me that some older girls were seeking her out every day at lunchtime to tease her, particularly about the way she spoke. Zoe had some speech issues relating to nerve damage either from her cancer or the radiation treatment. She had undergone surgery to her palette before the school year started and along with speech therapy, this was greatly improving the situation, but it was enough to single her out as a victim in the eyes of these girls (I want to say bullies, but that label seems to make them less human than they really are).
I took her in to school early one morning to catch her teacher before others started arriving and explained to the teacher what had been happening. Her teacher’s first response was “Well, I hate to tell you Zoe, but some people just aren’t very nice.” She went on to say that the next time it happened, Zoe should find the teacher on duty and point out who the girls were. While I was a little shocked at the comment, I felt there was a plan of action. And as a busy working solo mum, I didn’t want to rock the boat and be “one of those” parents. I assumed the school had it’s way of dealing with these things.
Dx (diagnosis)
I’ve been feeling stressed, restless, not sleeping, my metabolism running on overdrive. I was thinking it’s my job, which is exciting but stressful at the moment. Or maybe it’s the glimmer of something new on the horizon that would require a leap of faith and trust from me. Maybe it’s partly those things, but for some reason it’s taken me a while (as it always does, as if it doesn’t come round annually) to figure out it’s the time of the year.
The sweet nostalgia of summer heat fading into the crisper mornings of autumn, the end of long golden evenings, the last of the summer flowers and monarch butterflies, the feijoas ripening on the tree. The weeks leading up to Zoe’s birthday. The weeks when in 2009, just before her third birthday, we were waiting for a diagnosis.
Compassion is hereditary #1000speak
You know that saying – “Insanity is hereditary, you get if from your kids”?
Well, I think I inherited compassion from my daughter.
Until recently it was widely believed (in Western cultures anyway) that babies were born innately selfish, that it was our moral duty as parents to turn them from self obsessed little savages into beings fit for human society, through training them with reward and punishment. It seemed to make sense – after all, newborns are famously demanding in getting their own needs met no matter how exhausted their parents. Continue reading
Marked
Bereaved parents are a kind of reluctant tribe, the one that no-one wanted to join, and some of us have chosen to mark ourselves as such.
The reasons we do it vary and each mark has a different meaning for those who choose it, but many of our motivations and the symbols we use are similar.
I felt after my daughter Zoe’s cancer diagnosis at age three as if I had become become both transparent and luminescent, as if my interior life was so visible that my story could be read on the surface of my skin. I felt that when we left the house strangers would know our story at a glance, that we were visibly marked by cancer. Of course Zoe was visibly marked, though she seemed not too worried by her battle scars (she called the scar from her mic-key button her “other belly button”).
I felt the same after Zoe’s death at age six, that people would know I was a bereaved mother from the grief, pain, love and despair written on my skin. That the wound of having my child ripped from my life must have left a scar. And that felt right, that I should in fact be physically marked from surviving this. Continue reading
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
The deal with cancer
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
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.
This little moment breaks my heart in so many ways.
Continue reading
Continue reading
Making room for grief
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 