My timeline, minus the details:
July 1982- born the fourth of five children.
February 1998- buried my father. watched my mother begin the fight for her life, first emotionally, then physically.
August 2000- attend private college out of state.
March 2001- a visit home for the weekend results in a week long hospital stay with my mother. I decide to transfer to a local college, losing one parent was hard enough.
June 2001- I begin work in the special needs field. I meet my future husband and children.
August 2001- future husband, David, and I share a first kiss and the boat of acceptable behavior is forever rocked.
November 2001- David and I agree to marry.
March 2002- I am a wife and a mother to three young children. This is the most beautiful wedding gift.
March 2003- We welcome baby number four into our family.
February 2005- Baby number five arrives.
June 2005- the bottom falls out of our lives and hearts. We make the decision to move our “medically fragile” child into a residential facility so that he receives the education and care he deserves.
April 2006-the big move, our son moves into the care facility and our world is never the same.
November 2006- our boy is sick. We spend a month in the hospital, we leave with a breathing child, but not much else.
March 2007- baby girl number 4, child number 6 blessedly arrives.
November 2007- mother dies. After nearly 10 years of struggling to survive her grief and illness, the pain and shock of her passing leaves me devastated. Just days after burying my only surviving parent, we spend another near month in the hospital with our boy. It is deja vu at it’s finest.
December 2007- the boy will not make it. We hold him, watch him as he dies. For 17 days we watch in horror until he breathes his last. We scatter most of his ashes into he ocean on what would have been his eighth birthday.
January 2008- I began life once more as an outcast, the girl no one wants to be.
July 2008- suddenly, blessedly, I find a way through the grief storm. I can think again. Breathe again. Live again.
August 2008- pregnancy #4, child #7 is on the way. Grief and celebration battle within my soul as I mourn for one child and carry another.
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Dear Katie,
I have just spent a great deal of time reading through an incredible amount of your blog. For me to be able to do that is an amazing feat. I can not usually sit still that long. I began running in November of 2004, after losing my eleven year old daughter to brain cancer. I could relate to so much of what you wrote. One quote in particular resonates with me. That is “I am not afraid of death, but rather of the life before it.”
I admire your honesty, your rawness, your ability to “just be.” I thank you for sharing a bit of your soul with me today. I do have something specific I would like to ask you about, if I may. In one of your entries, you wrote about your mother’s reactions to losing your dad and how they affected you. You started with “I remembered what if felt like to not be enough…” Katie, I am so scared this is the impression that I am giving my remaining son. I have started a wordpress page documenting his latest struggles. The page is http://oliviasgrace.wordpress.com/ You will need a password to view the entries, with the exception of one that is public. If you care to email me, I would gladly give you the p/w. I understand you are deeply in the throes of your own grief, yet if you had anything left over to spare to enlighten me, you could perhaps teach me something that might have the ability for me to change the course of my son’s life. My email is won2xx@gmail.com
I have a caringbridge page for my daughter. I also thought it a bit uncanny that you have one child named Olivia and another whose middle name is Grace. My daughter’s name is Olivia Grace. Her Caringbridge page is at http://www.caringbrige.org/mi/oliviasgrace
In closing, I would appreciate knowing your email address if you feel up to entertaining some specific questions about how your mother’s reaction to grief effected you and what advice you would have to perhaps help me spare my son the same fate as you had “feeling that you were just not enough for her.” Although, I understand if you have your plate too full entertain any of my concerns. Either way, I wish you peace in your heart, someday, someway.
Godspeed, Wendy