I've learned a lot about the setbacks and 'relapses' that come with grief both from learning about it in school and working with a counselor who has been through the same thing. It's amazing how society seems to give people one year to grieve and then they assume that things are back to normal - but now that you're in the middle of it, five years seems like five days. This year, I think that the best way to describe my feeling is homesick. That doesn't make a lot of sense, because no amount of money in the world could get me to go back to the summer of 2012..the toughest summer of my life. I wouldn't say that I want to go back to high school, before she did, either. So much has happened since then and I wouldn't take it back. The time that most fits the homesick category is probably my last two years at K-State, where I felt like my grief was minimal, and had a great group of friends and really just felt like I had it all under control - but I'd still be missing my time at Creighton that, stressful as it may be, is allowing me to work towards a goal I've had since I was 14. Maybe I'm homesick for a little bit of each of those places today - but not too much of any one of them.
Most days (with the exception of this semester as the stress has been insanely high) I make it without thinking about that horrific day in May much at all. I think about Brenna when I hear the girl in my class who has a contagious laugh just like she did, or I think about her when I see the movie Tangled, or I think about my last conversation with her when we talk about medical intervention in the hospital - how she was arguing (legitimately) that marijuana should be used during labor, and although she was serious, the rest of us were laughing so hard the tears were rolling. How I wish I could bottle those things up and keep them forever.
This year is the first year that on Brenna's birthday I have not been able to go home at least within a few days, to take her flowers. Her voice still remains in my head during seventh grade P.E., where she strutted across the gym floor, yelling out "Life is a fashion show, and the world is my runway." I vowed to myself and her that I would, as long as I lived, be sure that her grave lived up to her sense of style and her bright, warm personality. It is hard to know that this year, it is simply by the path of life that I am farther away than I've ever been - and it is substantially harder to be in Omaha today than I ever dreamed it would be. How dare I continue to move on with my life when she will never have that opportunity? I can remember the yellow bracelet I made for her funeral, and how I swore to myself I would never take it off, but six months later, I had to cut it off in order to play intramural volleyball at K-State, and I cried right there in the middle of the rec center. I vowed that the WWBD would never be washed off my car, but it came off, a little less than a year later. When I moved to Creighton, some of the stuff that had been with me that was hers or reminded me of her didn't come. All of the things I promised to do, see, and be for Brenna in her absence have faded into my memory - right along with the details that gave me nightmares for years to come. How dare I forget the good with the bad? How dare I not be able to separate them out for someone who did so much for me?
Wednesday night, I went to go hang out with Emma, the little girl that I dance with and her family. After her bath, she was snuggled up into her Little Mermaid jammies, curled up on my lap, watching Mickey Mouse on her iPad. There's something about a freshly bathed, snuggly, tired little girl that just cures what ails you. (Not to mention her ten month old brother clapping and babbling on the floor, taking the occasional try at stealing her iPad, and then losing interest) True to form, on one of her commercials, a Tangled ad came on. I love the movie Tangled, but the scene with the sky lanterns still gets to me - remembering the sight, smell, and emotions that I had the night my high school community released them in honor of my friend, and, just at dusk, hundreds of lanterns filled the sky - and as usual, she was still lighting up the lives of those around her. That Tangled commercial was like her way of reminding me - I KNOW you can do this. It feels wrong for me to be stressed about school because she never had the opportunity... but yet here I am. I want so desperately for that to be in my control - to constantly be able to feel joy that I have been given so many privileges that she was denied by someone else's decision - but this time of grief is a weird combination of carrying on with life and also wanting to never move on, ever.
In the car last night I heard a song by MercyMe, my absolute favorite Christian band, called Homesick. The song talks about the feeling that you have knowing that someone you love is in Heaven. I had not yet heard something that describes the specific type of pain that comes this long (almost 5 years) after someone dies - the initial shock, trauma, and sadness is gone.. but you still feel empty sometimes. You can go days, weeks, even, without noticing. And then all it takes is one thing - a baby sleeping in your lap, the sound of birds on the first really nice spring day, or a Kansas State football game - and it all comes rushing back. And you feel guilty for those weeks and months when you did well. You're trying to enjoy, but not to compromise on all the promises that you swore on at her funeral. This song talks about the famous line everyone tells you after someone dies - that that person is 'in a better place'. It doesn't matter how true that is, that line usually makes me want to punch someone directly in the eyeball.
Another line in that song by MercyMe is that "In Christ there are no goodbyes" and I find that statement somehow profound, obvious, and so comforting. Anyone who grew up in the church could have answered that, right? Of course there are no goodbyes. That's what keeps you going when someone you love dies - it may be a long see you later, but it's a see you later. But when you get caught up in this process, you mostly end up grieving the goodbye - or lack thereof. Most of my memories from those five days in May between Brenna's death and her funeral are blurry and don't make any sense - but it's hard to grieve the fact that you never got to say goodbye, and it's hard to grieve something that never happened - her college years, her marriage, her years as a kindergarten teacher. Everyone tells you so many ways about how to grieve the loss of a person, but no one tells you how to grieve the loss of their life. It's hard to grieve something that wasn't.
Now, I grieve as I hit new stages in life and grieve what she didn't have. She never made it to college, never got to be a teacher, never got to go to grad school of any kind, meet people from all over the world like I did at K-State, or play college sports like she planned. This past year, I've learned about about grieving all over again when life starts to get tough or change. I know that it will get better - it always does - but sometimes the hole just feels more raw. This morning I felt angry when I had been working on this blog all week and couldn't seem to wrap it's ends up. I still don't feel like I did it, but I'm using it anyway. It seems to be a perfect analogy with how my heart feels today. Something just seems off this year, and it doesn't seem to be fixable, but maybe with time it will wrap itself up.
I would give anything in the whole wide world to go visit heaven. I used to sit in class at K-State and think about how, if i can go to the office hours for my professor, I should be able to attend visiting hours in heaven. Not permanently and not even for a long time. Just to stop by... look in the window, maybe. To see who she's met. What she's doing. How the food is, even. Are the streets paved in gold or candy like I had imagined as a child? (don't ask me why my view of heaven seems to be something out of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) Is it my teenage view of heaven, where I would have happily accepted comfy couches, soft blankets, and hanging out with my friends? Or is it my grad school vision, where all I ask is a world where the grading scale isn't so steep, and maybe a full night's sleep once a week or so. I know this vision will change as I grow older - maybe one new qualification I would add is that everyone I love is finally in the same place again. Occasionally, Brenna will show up in a dream of mine, and that can be a bright spot for my entire week. It does wonders just to see her, to know she's ok, to have even the tiniest bit of that awful, awful term 'closure.'
One of my favorite quotes says it best - "You will never truly be at home again because part of your heart will always be somewhere else. That is the price you pay for the richness of knowing and loving people in more than one place." And this explains it perfectly - it is almost like, as you get older, loving people and things you have visited gets harder - when you would think it wouldn't be that way at all. When I think about the fact that I have friends in Nicaragua and Hong Kong, and that I may never make it back to those countries, it is somehow both sad and fulfilling to think that a little chunk of my heart is resting peacefully in a classroom in Asia teaching bible school, and that another chunk is in a small village in Nicaragua, eating lunch with the kids and playing soccer with them. But, ten, thirty, fifty years from now - if I wanted to visit those countries again, I could. But there is no train, plane, or even a boat to heaven - I have to just be really, really patient.
Birthdays, in my opinion, are much harder than death days. The hardest part about days like today are the articles that pop up on Facebook that have nothing do with her close family or friends - the things that bring her up as a court case and not a person. Things advocating for the death penalty, which even she herself would never have wished on anyone. Today I think of all the things that 23 year olds do that she never had the privilege of doing. On May 25, I think about the horrifying scene of that day, but the day ended in Jesus himself escorting her to the gates of heaven - that day can't be all bad.
There will always be parts of me (at least I think) that struggle with these specific two days of the year - but there will always be parts of me that love a little harder, deeper, and wider, because I experienced an extreme loss of an amazing friend, and through which I learned more about the court system, the evil of the world, and everything about this world that just doesn't work right or make any sense. I think those parts of me that I learned from her and from the situation grow every year - minuscule as they may seem sometimes. Despite pain, sadness, and a lot of confusion that the last five years have brought, this situation has shown me that tragedy can transform into something exponentially better. Getting through these days will, eventually, get easier because even 100 years from now, her legacy is something that will carry on. Maybe not directly, because of the thoughts and actions of those that knew her and knew of her. The best thing about the gift of life, I guess, is that it never stops giving. As usual, with her photo that went famous on Facebook just three months after she died of a quote she had left in our high school..you just have to 'take lots of pictures and enjoy this time, but just remember - the best is yet to come."
