grief

The return of Charlie Cat (or on belonging)

Kiri 24 Comments

Can one shaggy fickle moggy show you where you belong?

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We didn’t adopt Charlie Cat, he adopted us, soon after we moved to our new house in 2008, the year before Zoe’s cancer diagnosis. We’d moved from a townhouse in the inner city to a single level house with a safe little garden Zoe could play in. No more lugging washing up two flights of stairs along with a strong willed toddler, or driving to where she could walk on the grass.  It was a house that matched my dream of how family life should be, in a neighbourhood of other families, close to the zoo, playgrounds and the beach. There was even a walking school bus to the local primary school and a feijoa tree in the garden.

The week we moved here, I walked with then 2 year old Zoe to the supermarket around the corner. She stopped at virtually every house along the way. “Look, a house, a fence. Look another house, another fence.” With the right house, I felt sure we would become that perfect family, give Zoe a quintessential Kiwi childhood and that our marriage problems would become a distant memory. The addition of a household pet seemed like the icing on the cake. It felt like a sign that he had chosen us. Continue reading →

Marked

Kiri 5 Comments

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

Kiri 2 Comments
Tattoo - I carry your heaert (I carry it in my heart)

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

Kiri 4 Comments

“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.

Continue reading →

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.
Continue reading →

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 →