I’m not great with anniversaries, birthdays and the like. When I say I’m not great, what that means is that I have an incredible memory for what can be difficult days in the annual calendar. Days like my sister’s birthday. “Forever 48,” I wrote on her birthday Facebook post this year. I can’t help it — I have to acknowledge her birthday. Always have and likely always will. She would have turned 55 on Jan. 16 and that is my life gauge. I can still feel incredibly resentful that she never got to celebrate her 50th birthday, which would certainly have been the biggest party in the universe. I party on for her.
In years past, I have tried to “deal with” her birthday in random ways like buying myself presents that she might have bought for me, or enjoyed the heck out of herself (like a cream macrame bag from Zara one year that I knew she would just love!), I have made pilgrimages — for want of a better term — to beautiful places, like Mum’s beach at Moss Landing where I can talk to the planet and the airs above my head, as if she’s listening. Who knows — maybe she is. Grief is forever the price of love.
This year I felt very down in the dumps because I hadn’t planned anything for her birthday. We were on a different sort of difficult trip when it was time for Rosie’s birthday — a trip to Oregon to see my mother-in-law who will be exiting the world in the near future. End-of-life journeys can be taxing, stressful, emotional and beautiful all wrapped into one. Dementia, mixed with Parkinson’s and old age can make for quite the life-ending combination. The first day she recognized me. The second day she asked me, “Who are you?” Her big smile at the sight of my daughter’s entrance was heartwarming. “It’s me, grandma,” my daughter said. “I know,” she responded with a glint in her eye. When my husband walked in the door, she held out her little arms for a big hug. Not having been much of a hugger in earlier days, that made us all a bit teary. I remembered that you only regret the things you don’t do in life, the trips you don’t make. Regardless of the eight-plus hour drive it took to get up there, we wouldn’t have missed it for the world.
But still I had done nothing for Rosie’s birthday — not even repair and repaint the Rosie boat memorial in my Secret Garden that I had been threatening to do for months. What kind of sister am I? I was exhausted when we arrived home from our road trip on Rosie’s actual birthday, and I took off for my bath — a place where I often find solace during dark winter nights and difficult days. I picked up a book I had found in a charity shop — looked like an easy read, a good British writer, nothing special. I had candles around my bath and bubbles inside it. It was time for a big relaxation, a release of tension and emotion in my own private space. I picked up the book (“Daughters-in-law” by Joanna Trollope) … “No wading birds or reed beds or vast, cloud-piled skies. How lovely it would be if they were all in Suffolk now …” The book was based in and around my hometown on the Suffolk coast, a place that Rosie and I grew up in and dearly loved so much so we had planned on buying a place there together in adulthood. I had got her a present after all, and she had found one for me! I chuckled with such delight and threw off the cloak of life stress I had been carrying on my shoulders.
I told my old friend about it. “Your bond with Rosie is as strong as ever, her spirit all around you. We have to think that we were lucky to have loved/been loved rather than let grief bury us so that we can only dwell on the absence. I totally remember you doing that with the presents and how you felt that Rosie would very much approve. You knew even then to carve positives from loss, and to see her always in beautiful things around you. Lovely Rosie, always near.”
By coincidence — or clearly not — I am re-doing my Rosie book (“The Rosebud & Her Brilliant Adventures”). Realizing that it was time to re-print some copies, I remembered that people had told me my efforts to recreate Rosie’s voice in the script through a specific font, though charming, actually made it rather hard to read. I took these constructive criticisms on board and the next edition will be much easier on all of you, I promise!
I revisited the last passages of the book recently — the Grief Chronicles, for want of a better description — where other voices coined their own versions of grief in a universal sharing forum:
I created this place, at the end of my book, as a forum for grief and love — because the two cannot be separated; a place where we could gather from all over the planet and share our feelings about our own losses, our empty spaces at the table, our shared angers, our lovely memories, our loves and more. Thank you all for showing up to the buffet. —Lu
Rosie always loved butterflies … “Yeah, but they live for such a short time!” I told her. “They do,” she replied. “That’s why the quality is always much more important than the quantity.” She used that line a lot during her short 48 years on this planet, especially towards the end. As I was surrounded this morning by white butterflies everywhere I went, all flibber-gittering around, dizzy with the quality of perhaps what was going to be their last day on the planet, I was reminded of our butterfly discussion and how much we used to laugh together, sometimes until we were dizzy, just like the butterflies.
here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart with me (i carry it in my heart)
—ee cummings
(Also Rosie’s big sis, me)
