Five Months

April 20, 2013

Dear Madie,
Time.... I remember on many walks us discussing how time was flying by, or counting hours or days like an awaited event would never happen... My relationship to time is warped in a way I couldn't have imagined. Where memories have become something that are clung to, treasured. Time ceases to have measured meaning.
Has it really only been five months ago that my heart stopped beating, my adrenal glands went into overdrive, and my world became fluid? It feels like a different existence, and yet I can recall with clarity ever nuance of the frames of time of Nov. 20,2012. I remember the morning with preciseness, every detail leading up to the officer at our door... The piano lesson I taught, the conversation I was having with MarShae, the room I was going to finish painting that day....
I remember the smell of cigarettes on the officer's breath, the things he said, the trauma of my world spinning uncontrollably around me. I remember Marshae holding me telling me it was alright when my head was screaming that I couldn't be awake that this couldn't be, because you were suppose to have just left that morning... how could you be lying in a morgue in the same place your grandparents had been take for their burial? A place hours away from your dorm that you had only been to as a baby? How could Taylor be near death on his way to Las Vegas. So much didn't add up... My brain couldn't process the implications of what this meant...
I remember each of the phone calls... first to your father, than your siblings, then to Sawyer's mother, then to Mitzi and Christa... In a warping of time I soon had people coming from everywhere... helping, crying, holding me up, following me around trying to get me to drink water, that got stuck in my throat... I remember talking to Bailee, then to Taylor... I remember talking to Rachelle, the decision for her to fly to Las Vegas to be with Taylor....I remember that Marielle was across the street playing and I didn't want her to come home cause I didn't want her world to collapse, I wanted her to have a few more hours of innocence... I remember Sterling and Kathy arriving and thinking this is the worst birthday ever...How could I bring a child into the world on the same day a child left the world? I remember Ryan and Klara arriving, and the grand kids playing, their world still innocent... Everything about being a mother was construed, altered, floating,...
I remember Sawyer arriving, of knowing that his entire world had also just collapsed around him...
I remember that I needed a shower but didn't want to shower, because it meant I wasn't dreaming... I remember that Thanksgiving and Christmas suddenly didn't matter... nothing had meaning...
Everything in the passage of time has been altered...New ground has to be established. this is by far the hardest part right now..I feel like I am trying to drive on roads that are covered in black ice... no traction, no stability, because everything is evolving..
This week as so much has happened, I again find myself unable to process time. Tommy Tunes, felt like yesterday we were there with you and MarShae... yet One Direction that we discovered at the same time last year seemed like forever ago... So many tragedies that I didn't follow because I could only think of the many lives that were in their own warping of time...
Now this morning I looked through some photos and found this picture of you, in "your" white dress, and it felt like the beautiful spring morning outside beckoning me to soak up the beauty of nature, to remember you are in the beauty around me, saying hello... Remember the lessons you have taught me as your mother both in life, and in death...Clinging to the things I know. I know I will be with you again. I know that God is our Heavenly Father and that you are with him now. I know that Jesus Christ is my personal savior and atoned for every tear, anguish of heart that I have and will go through... I know that he broke the bands of death and that even though I am in my Friday of time that the glorious Sunday will come, when we will be reunited, and joy will fill my heart...
Until then stay close, help us get through this, and know that I will always remember what a rose really stands for... "you" Timeless beauty in every way...