Absent presence

Sometimes when it’s my turn to write here, I feel like I have nothing left to say. It’s been eleven and a half years of missing her. What is there left to say after all that time? And then knowing there are still so many years to come, I wonder what I will ever have new to say about grief, about loving and losing my second daughter, my middle child.

I know that eleven years ago, I could never have imagined a day like today. A normal day, more or less. Exploring the city with two rapidly growing kids — one a full-blown teenager and one who’s just hit double digits. Checking out the local mural festival. Stopping in for a drink and snacks at one of the trendy breweries. Searching for doughnuts and finding they’re all sold out. Not really thinking about grief, or Anja, at all. There are other things consuming us right now: cancer and chemo; forest fires and drought; the looming school year; the ever-increasing cost of groceries and gas. Sometimes I’ll stop myself and wonder: when did I last think of her? When did I last cry for her? I can’t even answer the second question.

Eleven years ago I could never have imagined not crying every day, not falling asleep each night with the onesie I picked out for her under my pillow, not feeling — acutely — her absence in every moment. I could not have imagined how life would go on without her.

And yet, she is also always here.

One of the murals we saw today was of a head and shoulders, painted in bright rainbow swathes, but unfinished, with a patch of bare white at the top of the skull. We walked up and down the alley, pausing at different murals that caught our eyes. I stood in front of this one for a while, thinking about the colours and about how right now, as I anticipate another round of chemo at the end of the week, I feel a black heaviness in my chest and neck, and a red heat of anxiety and anger rising at the thought of the upcoming difficult days, the way these last long days of summer are spoiled for all of us. I tried to imagine the red heat cooling off, a soothing yellow green in the comfort of quiet afternoons in the garden, healing, and then the bright blue of the ocean when I feel better again, the freedom of water and the cold shock of it on my bald head.

It was only a few hours later, flipping through photos on my phone, that I thought more about the white patch. The always present absence of her. The past trauma that is never actually past but subsides a little in the face of present traumas, and also of present joys. The way she will be with me in the chemo room on Friday, and with me in the garden as I rest, and with me in the ocean as I wash it all off me. The unfinished story of her, always waiting to be filled in, but always also a part of every other story.

I used to worry about the days somewhere far in the future when I might not think of her every hour, or even every day. I used to think that when those days arrived it would mean I had failed her, had forgotten her, had left her trapped in some kind of terrible limbo, neglected, lost for real. It’s not like that, though, and I wish I could’ve known that all those years ago.

Someone probably told me.

I know I didn’t believe them.

Are there any old-timers out there who are amazed, as I am, at having made it this far? Who could never have imagined, in those early days, making it two years, or five, or ten, or twenty? What would you want to tell your early-grieving self or anyone else who is new here and cannot imagine the future?