Author: Sheila Quirke

Posted on

Taylor Swift and Other What Ifs

What if my daughter Donna had survived her cancer?

I don’t ask this question often, but at birthdays, when the days are long and the calendar turns to July, I can’t help but think about the what ifs. This year they are consuming. This year, on Monday, actually, Donna would turn ten.

What if Donna were still living?  What would a ten year old Donna look like?  Be like? Act like? What if Donna had survived?

Tonight and tomorrow night, Taylor Swift is playing sold out stadium shows at Chicago’s Soldier Field.  Ten year old girls and their 45 year old mothers both like Taylor Swift. Would we have made a girls’ weekend out of it and celebrated double digits at the concert, maybe splurging on a downtown hotel?

Taylor Swift

If Donna had survived, she would be in the thick of tweendom.  She didn’t, and instead I am changing the diapers of a not quite two year old boy — my second son, Donna’s second brother.  I sometimes wonder what the challenges would be of raising a girl.  I know the parenting issues are different for girls and boys.  And a tween?  All I know about that is what I read in blogs.

Would I have a girl with sass and eye rolls asking to wear too short shorts?  Would I have a nerd totally into steam punk?  Would I have a ballerina pining for point shoes?

I don’t know.  No one knows.

I sometimes allow myself to go down the rabbit hole of what ifs.  I don’t indulge these what ifs often, as they are brutal and painful and in the end, not very beneficial to anyone.  But these past few days, the what ifs have been hard to stop.

What school would Donna be in?  She was so very bright, so smart.  Would she, like her younger brother, have tested into a “good” Chicago public school?  Would they be at the same school?  I took pen to paper a few months ago (and was so sad it required pen and paper) to figure out what grade Donna would be in.  If she were alive, she would be starting the 5th grade this fall.

What would Donna’s friends be like?  Would there be sleepovers?  Drama sessions? Do ten years olds have phones these days?  Do they text?  Have the mean girls asserted themselves yet?  Surely Donna wouldn’t be a mean girl, would she?

Would she have liked Frozen, asking for Princess gowns and all things pink?  Would we have seen Inside Out together?  Would she have cried like I did?  I’ve seen it twice now and both times the tears rolled freely when Joy finds herself lost in the Memory Dump, frantically realizing that she is surrounded by discarded memories that are fading and disintegrating as she helplessly watches.  Poof, there goes another.

I cried so very much at that part of the movie, just as Joy did, because that is how I feel about Donna — my too few memories of her are fading and disintegrating as I helplessly stand by.  What can I do?  Time passes, it moves forward, without Donna. Poof, there goes another.  The memories fade with nothing to replenish them.  Poof.

I am a weepy, leaky mess this weekend.  I’ve stopped trying to make it anything different.  I miss you, girl.  I miss mothering you.  I miss teaching you and learning from you.

What if you had survived your cancer, but were left with scars, internal and external? What if the treatment had changed the things that made you so much you?  What if you could not talk or could not walk?  What if you felt self-conscious and awkward about not developing like other girls your age because of what the chemo did to you? What if you hated being a cancer kid and all the things that go along with that?  What if other kids made fun of you because you looked or acted differently?

Would I embarrass you now?  Would now be the time where pulling away from me and your Dad was developmentally appropriate?  Would you have long hair?  Would you let me braid it?  Would you still have curls?  Would you hate them if you did?

So many questions, girl.  So much to think about and sit with.  So much time and space without you.  The days are long when you grieve, but never so much more than in July.

I miss you, girl.  I’ll meet you there, okay?

**********

A special fundraising page for St. Baldrick’s has been set up to recognize Donna on her tenth birthday, Monday, July 20th.  Please consider being part of $10 for Ten, and donating to honor the memory of Donna while helping to raise funds for childhood cancer research.  You can find the page HERE.  

Posted on

Dividing Dad

I am the youngest of four siblings.  The baby. Three girls and a boy.  I have never written too much at all about family dynamics because it’s not solely my story to tell. As with any family, there are many stories to tell, but I don’t have exclusive ownership of them, so I simply don’t tell.  Maybe someday when I am old and gray. Right now, I am just middle-aged and gray, so the telling still feels premature.

A few years ago I asked my Dad if I could write about what it was like to grow up with a father who experienced depression.  Not the blues, mind you, but depression.  Hard core intractable not getting out of bed for weeks (months?) depression.  I am fairly settled that if I ever write a memoir, the title I keep coming back to is, “The Depressive’s Daughter.”  It has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?

A candid I took in Ireland on a trip my Dad and I took there together a few months before my wedding. He was so much in his element there.
A candid I shot in Ireland on a trip my Dad and I took there together a few months before my wedding. He was so much in his element there.

Anyway.  Clear as could be, my Dad said, “No.  I wouldn’t want that.  After I die you could.”  Well, my Dad died almost three months ago.  With his blessing, it is now my story to tell.  I don’t think I’m up for that task yet, though.  Not today.  Not tomorrow. Maybe someday.  Maybe never.

There are so many tasks when a parent dies. More so when your last parent dies.  We are in the thick of that right now.  Paying bills, closing up a condo, sorting through what our 81 year old father carried with him through his life.

Talk about depressing.

My two older sisters did the lion’s share of the work.  I needed that.  As POA for my Dad, I have been on high gear since his decline started in November.  Now, as executor, I am overwhelmed with the legalities involved with closing someone’s estate. The task of sorting through a small condo full of stuff was too daunting to even imagine.  I will forever be grateful to have been relieved of that task.

I am grateful this task is done, despite how final and brutal and crushingly sad it is to parse out your parents’ lifetimes and your own childhood all in one fell swoop.  We done good, the four of us, and I think our Mom and Dad would be proud.  

Nearing the end of the sorting (Did I mention my Dad was also a hoarder?  True story. He blamed growing up in the depression for his tendency to not release a single sheet of paper that ever crossed his path.), it was time for all four of us siblings to do something I have dreaded — dividing up Dad.

When my Mom died ten years ago my Dad pushed hard to sell their rural retirement home and downsize into a city apartment within ten months of her death.  Very methodically he supervised the dismantling of his home, with anything of value — either sentimental or economic — to be placed in the living room.

When we began the process of dividing things back then, it had the air of Christmas to it. We were that maudlin family who for years would talk and joke about what we wanted when our folks kicked the bucket.  It was a rare thing for all of us to be together not on a holiday.  But there we sat, cross legged on the living room carpet, waiting our turn to pick what we wanted to be ours.

My Dad devised a system of 1-2-3-4-4-3-2-1. The oldest picked first, leading to the youngest, then we went in reverse, with the youngest making an immediate second pick, leading back to the oldest.  Being the youngest, I got to pick two things at a time.

The process was as joyful as it was excrutiating. I remember it got heated a time or two. Dammit!, you would think, as someone else picked something that was next on your wish list. And because we’re all Irish sentimentalists, the old copper kitchen canisters from 1958 had more value than a set of Waterford candlesticks.  My Dad kept all of my Mom’s jewelry, except for a few pieces (I got the choker of pearls!).  I think he was not yet ready to part with it.

My Mom’s jewelry lived in an empty can of cocktail peanuts for years before my Dad requested we all sit down and divvy up those treasures.

With our Dad gone, we only had ourselves to rely on during this last process of division.  I was grateful to see my nephew was there, thinking his presence would keep us all honest.  Surely we would all avoid the drama and act like adults if someone was there who only knew us as adults, and not as the children we felt like.

My Dad had held on to most of our big family treasures after my Mom’s death.  Her oil paintings (she painted before and after her first couple of kids were born), a very finely calligraphed papal blessing of their wedding, Irish landscapes my Dad used to import during his years traveling back and forth to his parent’s homeland, a snub nosed Smith & Wesson, ephemera of a lifetime working in transportation and their mid-century marriage.

Some of my loot -- Waterford crystal my folks loved, a Marshall Field's candy dish, the Virgin Mary that lived on my Dad's dresser from 1958 until he died, a Connamara marble ashtray. All just things, but things that call up my folks.
Some of my loot — Waterford crystal my folks loved, a Marshall Field’s candy dish, the Virgin Mary that lived on my Dad’s dresser from 1958 until he died, a Connamara marble ashtray, a cheap blue bird my Mom loved. All just things, but things that call up my folks and my childhood simultaneously.

So now it’s done.  Dad is divided, equally, we all hope.  My oldest sister, doing as oldest siblings do, brokered a stalemate and helped us all avoid ugly conflict around all four of us wanting the two to three most prized possessions.  Thank you, brother and sisters, for all of us keeping it civil and drama free!

I am grateful this task is done, despite how final and brutal and crushingly sad it is to parse out your parents lifetimes and your own childhood all in one fell swoop.  We done good, the four of us, and I think our Mom and Dad would be proud.

But so much of my energy was just spent getting through the division of Dad that I didn’t really allow myself to feel too much of it in the moment.  Now is the time for feeling.  As a light a candle in their treasured crystal hurricane lamp engraved for their 25th anniversary in 1983 that will now sit on a credenza that used to rest in their bedroom, I will think of my Mom and Dad often, with love and fondness and a little hole, which will never be filled in.

Posted on

Sandpiper Days

Have you ever noticed a group of sandpipers playing in the waves on the beach?  They are amazing little creatures, kind of bouncy and hyper and sweet.  I could watch them for hours.

The first time I realized that little toddlers resemble sandpipers was in Mexico in February 2010.  Our Donna had died just four months earlier and we packed up some swim suits and her surviving baby brother, now a 14 month old toddler, and headed south.

It was a healing vacation.  We all napped every day and there was no wifi, so books and magazines and cards were our entertainment.  And the ocean, with its waves and its vast nature, just took us in and held us close and whispered in our ears how sorry it was that our girl was gone.  The salt of our tears blended with the ocean.

There was joy, too.  And gratitude.  We had our boy.  He needed us, just as Donna had. That trip was an awakening for me in many ways.  An introduction, again, to our son, who for so many months had gotten our leftovers.

Fourteen months is just at the cusp of those sandpiper days.  He didn’t like the ocean so much, our boy, so he stayed up on the beach and occasionally, though not often, flirted with the waves.  He bopped up and down just as the sandpipers were doing. Immediately I saw the connection between my boy and the birds.  It was adorable and filling and healing in a different way.

We left Mexico, as all vacations end someday, but those sandpipers stayed with us, bopping up and down our long hallway in our boy’s steps.  For months while in that stage, I called him “my little sandpiper.”  His energy and joy and swiftness and sweetness matched those ocean birds in every way.

But just as vacations end, so does the toddler stage.  Our little sandpiper grew up and those days were forgotten, remembered occasionally when we would visit them at the local zoo.

Now, though, we are in the midst of another sandpiper phase.  I love it.  I love all of it. Well, most of it.  Strangely, our new little sandpiper kind of shape shifts at diaper changing time into a bucking bronco.  But, for the most part, these days are sweet, full of that light, bouncy, joyful energy a young toddler brings to your life.

It is a gift, these sandpiper days.  I treasure them.

Actual sandpipers do not carry small green cars on the beach.
Actual sandpipers do not carry small green cars on the beach.