I Swear, I Lived

If I do not laugh, I wither.

Oh, I am so starting to understand this about myself: when my day, or my week is a low one without obvious reason, I can trace it to laughter. Or lack of it.

I ask myself whether I have laughed, or whether I have heard much laughter, during that window of time.

When the answer is, “No. No I have not,” that usually explains it.

Further, I understand this: I don’t actually need to be laughing to feel the rush of endorphins laughter brings; hearing the laughter of others makes me feel really good. And, as a side benefit, makes me laugh, too.

For example, it has never angered me to be awakened at night when my children are laughing together. It makes me giggle, and I usually get back to sleep.

All my greatest experiences in life have included laughter. Even exceptional experiences, if devoid of laughter, failed to leave behind the imprint that makes possible a lifelong recollection.

I just saw a video of One Republic’s I Lived. It is full of imagery of those who live large, who run after adventure and seize every available moment to “go and do.” And it was moving, yet difficult to watch without crying. Because until recently, I’ve done nothing deliberately to experience the world, and I felt I had missed out on decades of living.

But no, that isn’t the truth.

My living…my authentic, “I swear, I lived” is to be able to look behind me and see all the memories and experiences that were tied to laughter — laughing with someone, or enjoying the laughter I heard — and live them again by giggling about them anew.

©Aja Hart, 5.31.2016

Grief and Solace

One of my friends has a sister who has been given less than two months to live. Tonight, she calls me at work just before I leave for the day and asks me to meet her for a beer because she really needs to be with friends. Of course, I will. She’s going through some big stuff. She invites our friend Aly as well, so the three of us meet at a local pub to wait for Kel’s husband.

We’re talking about death (her sister is still alive), and preparing for funerals and stuff, and burials vs cremation, and I’m just speaking matter-of-factly about my own experience with my daughter’s cemetery plot, and my mom’s cremation…blah, blah, blah… and my desires for my remains, and Aly and Kel just start crying.

Kel tells me from time to time that my ability to speak of the deaths of my daughter and my mother inspire her. I think sometimes, though, I should be careful how and when I speak of such things. I was fortunate to experience resolution to my daughter’s abrupt ending to life, but these friends I sit with cannot conceive my loss, nor than they comprehend how I communicate about it. They both have children. Neither can imagine outliving one of their own.

Finally, Aly says, “Wait, Riál is buried here in Olympia?” And I say, “Yeah, of course she is.”

So she asks me to take her to Riál’s grave because she has a thing about cemeteries (go figure), and she CANNOT. STOP. CRYING. And I’m sitting there at Riál’s headstone, feeling bad for her, but not crying at all myself.

And there I am, feeling sad for her….sadness?…..

I guess I don’t know whether Aly and Kel are grieving MY loss, or a loss they hope never to experience. Either way, I feel like the way I openly communicate about my journey may create an undue burden on people who are uncomfortable about this.

I dropped Aly off at her apartment, and she’s pissed at “God” for the injustice of infant death, and all I can say is that you either accept stuff like this, or let it rob you of your time here.

I chose the former.

Is that denial, or am I in a place of solace?

I feel like it’s solace. And I like that. Solace feels nice. Organic. Fully accepted and imbibed, like a mama elephant who grieved the loss of her baby back when it was relevant, fresh and new, who is now back in the savannah doing what must be done in the day-to-day. Forgotten? No. But life goes on.

It is what we do.

It is what we MUST do.

©Aja Hart, April 7, 2015

Strength Enough

I’ve experienced strength enough to say, “No more.”

Strength enough to go it alone….fully alone.

Strength enough to take risks that include wearing the hats of two parents in many respects — all so my sons and my daughters receive what they can while I’m still alive to do all I can…

…and strength enough to make sacrifices of time that no mother really wants to make (but must make), while finding that her children have been equally strong in understanding the need for such sacrifices.

Yet today I find myself anxious.

I feel….vulnerable. Less strong. Full of feelings that remind me I need to be more than a provider, more than a mother, more than a manager. That by design, I need to be more than just those…

Do I possess strength enough to see that need as part of my design?

©Aja Hart, 2014

Sucky Life Lessons

Now that our two oldest children (who happen to be daughters) are 18 and 16, I know now more than I ever have that some sucky life lessons I learned in my teens and beyond never seem relevant to one’s offspring.

No matter how captivatingly charming, stunningly beautiful, insanely intelligent…if you don’t settle it in your heart that because we live in a world where mistakes are the norm and not the exception…you will get hurt.

And it sucks. Because that is the nature of heartache.

‘Saji, it only sucks for awhile. Once the pain finds its peaceful resolution, I know that you will allow the pain to grow your “growing edges” and not unravel your character. That’s how awesome you are. I’m proud of you, mija. 🙂

My children are awesome human beings. I believe all humans are awesome….which gives me an idea for tomorrow’s post……

© Aja Lopez, 2011

You've Got Questions…

Speaking for myself, I don’t mind being asked about my tattoos.

I don’t even mind when people draw conclusions about me when they see my tattoos because I was once that person…

…yes, that person who secretly assumed the worst about anyone who would “defile” their skin with such permanence. That was me.

Being “inked” has opened doors that may not otherwise have been opened, specifically with regard to conversations with people who know that most tattoos have a story behind them, and they wanted to know mine.

A heavily-inked 20-something girl who also had a few piercings stopped me at Target one evening to ask about the dragonflies tattooed on my back. “Those represent my six children,” I told her.

Then she asked, “Why is one different from the other five?” She referred to the one that has a date tattooed under it.

“That tattoo represents my fifth child and memorializes her; she died in 2000 at the age of 10 weeks,” I said.

She wanted to know more about Riál, about her illness, her hospitalization and her death. Then she began to tell me how one of her twin daughters had died earlier this year at the age of 11 months.

“I’m still so angry and in so much pain about her dying,” she said. “How do you get past that?”

Thank you for a wide open door to tell her my story. I told her honestly that during the seven weeks I spent with her at Children’s hospital, I didn’t think I could hear anymore news about “turns for the worse” and actually requested to be put into a room and knocked out until she was better.

I told her that my personal faith in God was tested. I felt weak. I had shaken my fist at God between periods of hope and faith that she would fully recover.

I told her I felt God was failing me when my prayers for Riál went unanswered, and that it wasn’t until I finally prayed, “Father, if healing Riál — making her “whole” — means having her with You, then I’m okay with that.” And after a great day where things were improving, she died in her sleep that night.

How merciful for God to wait until I could accept things as they were before taking her home to heaven.

And I told her that I finally found that my faith was real…that I could still love the giver of life who didn’t preserve my daughter’s life on earth.

The “inked” crowd is more receptive to me now that I’m not the stereotypical silent tattoo-condemning Christian they’ve encountered so many times before…like I said, that used to be me.

Though I don’t quite understand what vibe I put out that makes people think I am unapproachable or that I have it all together, being “inked” means I get more opportunities to share my life experiences and my faith in a non-condemning way.

© Alexa Lopez, 2009

 

A Hand To Hold

I love that he knows I’m here for him. My 5…almost 6-year-old son knows it even if he doesn’t realize he knows it.

Anytime we walk together — across a parking lot, in the mall, to his class at school, around the lake — I only have to open my hand as we walk and he automatically reaches for mine. It’s as though he senses when my hand is reaching for his…to guide his steps, to keep him from danger, or just to feel his hand in mine.

I want my relationship with God to be like that. I want always to be aware of His presence and reach for His hand, to always sense He is here to help me along. I want to remember to reach for Him when I fear or when I sense danger, or when I’m lonely. Or when I am hurt. Or when I am lost. Or when chaos seeks to govern my consciousness.

But I forget. Time and again, I forget….and yet, once I snap out of my mental meanderings, I do not need to run after Jesus, catch up to Him. He is not ahead of me; He is still beside me, still reaching for my hand…waiting patiently for me to reach for His…

He can't NOT smile, this one.

Our 5-year-old fell at recess last week, severely scraping his face on the pavement. The school nurse called to tell me about it and said he was okay. When I picked him up after school, his brown eyes became pools of tears that refused to fall until his blink forced them to, and after a long hug, he was good to go. It looked painful. I wished I had been there to hold him when it happened, to be the immediate source of comfort he automatically sought.

Oh, those human limitations! I am thankful beyond expression that God uses our children to teach me so much.

My humble prayer is that, though our children may outgrow the need to reach for my hand, they will instinctively reach for the capable hands of Him who does all things well.

© Alexa Lopez, 2009

Just What I Needed

The NICU paged me during the time when they were to be running an EEG on my baby girl. They needed me back in her room.

I entered the room to loud cries. “Mrs. Lopez, is there any way you can calm her down without nursing her right now while we apply these electrodes to her head?” 

“She’s not hungry; she’s angry,” I said. Her “feed me” cry was very different. I leaned over the side of the NICU crib, touched her hand and placed my right cheek on hers, and whispered, “It’s okay, Riál. Mommy’s here.” I left my cheek there and kept whispering to her so she could feel me near. Her crying stopped immediately and she fell asleep, and the hospital got its EEG.

That was one of many bright mommy moments during a dark, uncertain time in Seattle’s Children’s Hospital…that my suffering four-week-old found comfort in my touch and my whisper, and that I knew what she needed at that moment.

About six weeks after she passed into glory, our two-year-old son somehow managed to lean just right (or just wrong, depending how you see it) on our piano bench, which then slid from under him and landed on his big toe, splitting it wide open. It bled so much and we feared it may be broken. At 8:30 on a Tuesday night, we had no choice but to take him to the emergency room.

Once we crossed the threshold of the ER entrance I found sorrow rushing at me. This was where we brought Riál three-and-a-half months earlier, the first day of our eight week journey through Citrobacter Freundii’s effects on our newborn’s brain.

Those walls inside the ER…inside the examination room where we awaited a doctor…oh, it was just too soon to go back there, but I held it together for our son who was in need of a calming presence; I kept reminding myself that this ER visit wasn’t about me confronting the great sadness that started there and ended in Children’s Hospital NICU.

I held Abe on my lap and just hugged him close, speaking words of comfort and praying silently for the strength to keep it together for his sake. The funeral home had just placed the headstone we had ordered for Riál and we saw it for the first time that day — and now, to be at this ER again…

Abe suddenly turned around on my lap to face me, then gently placed his cheek on mine and kept it there — for his comfort, I’m sure, but he couldn’t have known how profoundly beautiful it was, how perfectly this random act ministered to my aching heart. Somehow he was tuned-in to my anguish and returned to me the comfort I gave his sister. This was his divine appointment that day: to pass along a message that my Lord knew would give me what I needed.

I found renewed clarity in my soul as Abe and I awaited the doctor’s report: no broken toe and no stitches necessary (no kidding!). We were so outta there!

© Alexa Lopez, 2009

 

Hot Breakfast

One thing…one fantastic memory from my childhood…is that I could always depend on my mother to be up before us ~~ humming in the kitchen, no less ~~  preparing a hot breakfast before we left for school. She has always been an early riser.

She didn’t always cook oatmeal, but I did eat enough oatmeal as a kid to gag on the first bite of it as an adult.

Comparing oneself to others may be counter-productive in life, but that understanding never stopped me from listening to that voice in the back of my mind that said, “You really should cook a hot breakfast for your kids before they go to school. Your mom did it for you every morning!”

Well, all of our kids have vastly different tastes ~~ one detests eggs, one won’t eat sausage, another isn’t fond of pancakes and still another won’t eat French Toast (what’s that about? Who doesn’t eat French Toast?) ~~ and since I refuse to be a “short order cook” in an already bustling home, I simply haven’t been making the effort to cook breakfast on school mornings. I hate the feeling of failure in that.

Also, I really like being a night owl, and I’m up so late most nights that it is all I can do to keep my eyes open long enough to see my kids safely board the school bus before I climb back into bed and sleep way later than any mother should. Man, that’s some good sleep, too.

Enter my husband, whose solution has changed the dynamic of our household mornings and helped me feel like I’m a real mom. 🙂 One evening two weeks ago I expressed to him how I would love to do for our kids what my mom did for us ~~~ preparing breakfast each school morning ~~~ but I just wasn’t willing to contend with them (we’re on a time schedule, here, kids!) about what I was cooking, about whether they liked it.

Richard’s solution: each night I tell them what I’m preparing the next morning, and they decide whether they’ll have it, or whether they’ll choose one of two “everyday” options: cold cereal, or oatmeal. Problem solved!

Guess what? Mornings are full of giggling over breakfast.

Guess what else? No matter how hard I try, I can’t fall back to sleep after making breakfast for the kids, so I’m more productive.

And you know what else? I actually like oatmeal again. It’s my favorite breakfast.

© Alexa Lopez, 2008

 

Fearing Too Much

I hate admitting that I fear anything. But I do fear.

I like change sometimes, but some, I fear more. Even when every part of me knows that a particular change would have a wonderfully positive impact upon all involved, it’s that “realm of the unknown” thing that gets me…the “what ifs.” I HATE the “what ifs.”

It’s funny, too, that I write about fear because there is this adventurer within me who watched Storm Chasers tonight on The Discovery Channel in sheer amazement when these guys turned back from within an eerie green storm — can you say “Tornadoes are almost certain”??? — because they lost contact with Josh, their “eyes” on the radar. They were already in the middle of it! Me? I would have been thinking, “I ain’t turning back now. I’m in this. If I die doing it, I’m doing what I love.” They turned back. I was shocked.

Yeah, I know. I wasn’t there…yada yada. I would totally chase tornadoes or fly into the eye of a hurricane or skydive. You wouldn’t have to ask me twice if I weren’t a wife and mother; those who know me know I’m not kidding.

I am scared, I confess, for the education of one of our sons who is incredibly bright but whose learning style does not fit the mold of the traditional public school system. I am frustrated that he is slipping through the cracks because of immense class size. I am angry that the whole thing discourages him so.

Our son is more important to me than my fears of the unknown, so it’s a no-brainer that I will do what I must to ensure I do my son right.

I must remember with renewed confidence that blind corners hide the best surprises. 🙂

Oh, Lord, help my unbelief!

© 2008 Alexa Lopez

Dust to Dust

The cloudless blue sky and glowing sun on the day of Riál’s death was unusual for this region in mid-November.  I was grateful that the darkness in my heart about out-living my infant daughter was contrasted by beauty of the sun shining all over the cemetery.

The day in September before Riál manifested symptoms of an illness that three days later would be diagnosed as a Citrobacter Freundii bacterial infection, I noticed that her hands were so very cold. She was swaddled, yet not warm. I sat on my bed beside the window and let the sun shine on her…warm her…and I talked to her about the beautiful blue hydrangea bush outside that window. We sat there a long time.

I hadn’t realized that day how significant the sun’s warmth and blue hydrangeas would be in my connection to my baby girl…

The kind gentleman at Oddfellows cemetery showed us some available burial plots. He suggested burying her near the statue of Jesus since we were Christian, but my heart didn’t like the location. “How about in Babyland?” He asked. I didn’t like that either…it was too wide open. He patiently walked with us as we surveyed the available plots. Thank goodness it was dry and sunny.

“Well, there’s one over there, under that Willow tree,” he said. My heart leaped. “That’s it!” I thought to myself without having seen it yet.

We walked to the enormous tree. The late afternoon sun was placed perfectly in the sky for me to know that was her spot, and why: the plot was under a Weeping Willow tree (how fitting), but the way the cemetery is oriented, that plot is always in the the sun as it traverses the sky from sunrise to sunset. It is never shaded by tree branches.

“She was always so cold,” I spoke to myself, flashing back to a day in October at Children’s Hospital when she returned to her room after a bone marrow biopsy procedure with a body temperature of 94.6. We kept heat lamps over her for four hours before her temperature returned to normal. We would later learn that rather than developing a fever from infection, she was hypothermic…she was too ill for her body to maintain a normal body temperature.

The day of her funeral was stereotypically dreary and pouring down rain. I don’t think more rain fell than tears were shed that day.

~ ~ ~ ~

It snowed the next February…another uncommon event for the Puget Sound lowlands…and I wanted to go see how beautiful the cemetery looked under a blanket of white. I was stunned to see that the willow branches had kept snow from falling on Riál’s plot.

Rial’s baby brother’s shadow, May 2007

© 2008 Alexa Lopez