Tag: loss

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Acorns in Cancerville

Yesterday marked six years since we moved to Cancerville, when our Donna was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive brain tumor, papillary meningioma. I write the name of the bastard because it is so neglected in the cancer world that there is no treatment for it.  I like to call it out by name.

Yesterday was quite a different day than March 23, 2007.  On that day, I awoke in a huge hospital room at Children’s Memorial in Chicago.  There were six beds total in the room and it was on a respiratory floor.  We were there because we had been hastily admitted the night before and it was the only bed available.  Donna woke about 5 AM and vomited.  I cleaned her up and sometime later was changing her diaper.  I said to her what we always said during that routine, “Change your diaper, change your life!” It was one of our bits.  She repeated it back to me, as she always did, but her words were slurred.  Something was wrong.  Terribly, terribly wrong.

Within moments, Donna crashed.  Unresponsive.  Just a little sack of potatoes in my terrorized arms.  I called out for help, I rang the nurses.  I called out for help again.  The other parents in the room, all bleary and scared, looked at me without words.  Their fearful eyes spoke volumes, though.

Within a couple of minutes a PICU doc was in the room.  Dr. Kane was his name.  He told me to follow them and I did.  We ran through the halls.  Or did we?  I honestly can’t remember.  I also can’t remember when Mary Tyler Dad got there.  I called him at home after Donna vomited and we lived about 20 minutes away.  I do, though, firmly remember him at my side when we learned from Dr. Kane just a few minutes later that Donna was sick.  Very sick.  “There is a mass in your daughter’s head.”

That is the moment we moved to Cancerville.

Morton 4

To mark six years in this place is both remarkable and perfectly ordinary. Cancerville is where we live, where we will continue to live.  Like our zip code, it just is what it is.  We have changed neighborhoods in Cancerville in the six years we have lived here.  That first day six years ago we moved to a sub-division called Diagnosis Estates.  Today we live in Grieving Heights, the least desirable sub-division.

But yesterday was a very different day than March 23, 2007.  The sun was shining.  The air was cold, but the warmth of the sun was so welcome after this long winter.  Mary Tyler Son had dance class.  His class meets in the Donna Quirke Hornik Studio, renamed after her death.  He doesn’t have the same relationship to dance that his sister did.  It’s been a noble experiment. No doubt he will opt for soccer or karate next year.  I will miss the weekly walks to dance class, a sweet connection to Donna.

After class we headed to Honda of Lisle to accept one of those awesome cartoon sized big checks.  $500 for Donna’s Good Things, the charity we started during Donna’s vigil.  We had won their February charity contest. Lots and lots and lots of folks voted for our charity to win the prize (Thank you!). $500 will fund a scholarship at Performing Arts Limited for a year, including recital costume.  One more child dancing.  That was a real pleasure.

Well it turns out the dealership is right down the road from the Morton Arboretum.  After lunch, we drove over, with the thought that it would be good to get outside and let the boy get his ya yas out.  We were greeted with the acorns that flank the entry into the grounds.  Then more acorns.  And more. Mary Tyler Son ran and jumped and climbed and crawled.  The sun felt warmer, the air felt clean.  The cold seemed to melt away along with the piles of snow everywhere.  Drip, drip, drip.

Morton 3

This was a much better day than six years ago, despite Donna’s absence.

There is something to be said for acceptance and integration.  There is something to be said for “going to the joy,” which is what a dear and wise friend who herself knows great loss encouraged us to do.  While the sadness of losing Donna will never leave us, it has not prevented us from living.  Feeling the sun on an early Spring day, appreciating a boy growing bigger than his sister ever was, seeing the simple beauty of an acorn.

Acorns have great meaning for me.  This wasn’t always so, but on Donna’s 5th birthday, the first birthday after her death, two of her little playmates each gifted me with an envelope of acorns.  These two little girls, both four at the time, found the acorns and told their moms to give them to me.  One of these little beauties was emphatic in telling her mom that the acorns were for me to remember Donna.  Her mom tried to explain that I would remember Donna always even without acorns, but the girl was clear — I needed those acorns to remember Donna.  Case closed.

On that fifth birthday we got friends together at Candlelite Chicago, a local place we celebrated often with Donna.  I was miserable.  Why on earth did we think having a pizza party on Donna’s birthday was a good idea?  I put a smile on and got through it.  The two envelopes were given to me at the party, but I didn’t open them until just before bed.  Two envelopes with acorns in them.  One from Evanston, one from Michigan.  What were the chances of that?

Oh a whim, I Googled “acorn symbolism.”  Within moments, I was a ball of messy tears.  It felt that Donna was speaking to us personally, though her friends.  The most commonly accepted meanings of acorns include:

  • potential
  • strength
  • power
  • protection
  • luck
  • immortality
  • life

I know that it is so easy to see what you want to see, feel what you want to feel, but in that moment, I believe with complete confidence that Donna was communicating to us.  She wanted us to be strong, to live life, to feel blessed and protected.  And I did.  And I do.

Morton 2

When I see acorns now, I feel Donna. They remind me that she was here, that she, like an acorn, was small, but mighty.  “From little acorns do mighty oaks grow.”  This quote is common and has been around for centuries.  No one has correctly attributed it.  Donna was our little acorn.  Donna’s Good Things is the oak that we are nurturing that it might grow big and strong and mighty, taking the potential of one small acorn and realizing it in a tree that brings continued life.  Oak trees grow, even in Cancerville.

So, yes, yesterday was a meaningful day for our family.  Six years in Cancerville.  But there was Donna, in all the acorns.  She was in other places, too.

She was in her brother’s smile and joy as he climbed the rope bridges.

Morton 7

She was in the sun that shone so brightly.

Morton 1

She was in our love and happiness.

Morton 6

 

Acorns and Donna are everywhere . . .

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Angels and Automatics: Lessons from Newtown

I haven’t stopped thinking about Newtown and all that was lost thirty-two days ago.  For a moment, America was shocked.  We shed collective tears for all those young lives lost.  We felt our vulnerability and it hurt.  It hurt like hell.  But like most metaphorical wounds, it healed, or has at least scabbed over.  We’ve gotten back to routines.  We drop our kids off in the morning at school and maybe are not worrying so much about what awaits them.  The rhetoric has become political.  Is the problem mental health?  Is it school security?  Is it gun control?  Most of us are comfortable letting the politicians and Facebook zealots figure it out.

What hasn’t gone back to normal are the lives of those families who lost a child.  They are thirty-two days into the ‘grief process’ that will never end.  The whole idea of a grief process has always annoyed me, even when I worked as a hospice bereavement counselor.  By definition, a process is linear, predictable, methodical.  Grief is none of those things.  Grief is the bucking horse that will not be tamed.  Grief is a wild ride that is at times bearable and at other times terrifying.  Three years into the greatest grief of my life, I’ve grown accustomed to it’s nature, but it is still a powerful beast that at times throws me off completely.

Yesterday an article came across my Facebook feed and I was surprised to read its headline, “Noah Pozner’s Mom Describes Newtown Victim’s Body, And Why We Should All Listen.”  I had never seen a story about the Newtown tragedy such as this headline suggested.  There are some things that are just not discussed, right?  Those twenty children are precious, they are “angels,” and angels don’t have parents talking about their mortal wounds in media interviews.  Right?

Wrong.

Noah Pozner is no angel.  He is a boy who senselessly and tragically died because a rifle was aimed at his face and then ten other places on his little body.  Veronique Pozner, Noah’s mother, wanted the governor of Connecticut to see her boy, her beautiful boy, as he was after the shootings.  She invited Governor Dannel Malloy to view Noah’s open casket.  In her interview with Naomi Zeveloff of the Jewish Daily Forward, Veronique Pozner captures something in words that I have thought often myself, though never so eloquently, “I just want people to know the ugliness of it so we don’t talk about it abstractly, like these little angels just went to heaven. No. They were butchered. They were brutalized. And that is what haunts me at night.”

I so understand her need for others to bear witness to the brutality of her son’s death.

After Donna died, there was a period where it made me terribly angry to hear her referred to as an angel.  During her shiva, people would use the expression with me and I would bite my tongue, knowing full well that my friends and family meant no harm whatsoever.  But I drew the line with our chaplain.  This dear colleague who knew Donna personally and listened to me struggle with my fear during her years of treatment used the dreaded “angel” in her comments for the burial service that I got to hear ahead of time.  I asked her to remove the word.  She completely understood and did so easily.

I know that there are many, many other grieving parents who feel the exact opposite of me.  Thinking of their child as an angel above brings them comfort and solace.  I would never wish to jeopardize that for them.  But for me, and possibly for Veronique Pozner, the term angel brings us no comfort when applied to our children buried in the ground.  And in drawing this comparison I do not mean to draw comparisons to our losses.  Noah Pozner and Donna died for very, very different reasons.  I would say apple and oranges, but that is much too benign a comparison.

When people refer to the Newtown shooting victims as angels, I think that speaks more to their needs than the needs of the families that survive.  If God above needed angels, did he need to transport them in such a violent way?  Where is the logic in that?  It makes no sense to me.

My sense is that Veronique Pozner wants us to know and understand the brutality of that sunny day at Sandy Hook Elementary.  By sharing the details of her Noah’s death, graphic as they are, she is not exploiting her son.  She is opening our eyes.

Semi-automatic weapons are a serious business.  They are not clean shots.  They are meant and intended for destruction on a massive scale.  The body of a six year old, the bodies of twenty six and seven year olds, and the wounds they were left with being on the receiving end of a wall of bullets, tell the true story of semi-automatic weapons so widely available in America.  It is a bloody and graphic and uncomfortable story, but it is one that needs to be told.  And we need to listen.

I support Veronique Pozner and I bear witness to her loss.  May Noah rest in peace, along with Charlotte and Daniel and Olivia and Josephine and Ana and Dylan and Madeleine and Catherine and Chase and Jesse and James and Grace and Emilie and Jack and Caroline and Jessica and Avielle and Benjamin and Allison.

Kraft och omtanke to their families and the community of Newtown, Connecticut.

Correction:  A few readers have commented that my use of the term “automatic weapon” was incorrect, that the Newtown shooter, in fact, used a semi-automatic weapon.   The New York Times tells me that it was an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle.   I have corrected three items in this post — changed “shotgun” to “rifle” in the fifth paragraph and added “semi” in front of “automatic” in two instances in the eleventh paragraph.  For the record, I do not believe the mistakes are reflective of anything other than my gun ignorance.  The intent of this post is about witnessing violence and the cost of weapons in our culture.  Whether that violence was the result of an automatic weapon or semi-automatic rifle seems to me semantics and nothing else.  MTM.