Bunny is not a Phoenix

my daughter and i went out together, just the two of us, for supper last night. Olive Garden. it was nice. just the two of us. i wore my pendant as i always do when i leave the apartment. the waiter saw it and thought it was pretty. he then asked if anyone was joining us and my daughter said, "my husband is at night school." i touched my pendant and said, "my husband isn't here tonight."

we went out together because she works all weekend and knows how bad Tuesday was, and how bad Sunday will be. she’s upset that she cannot take off to be with me but that’s life. she works so hard and i put on a good face for her. “Sy Fy weekend horror movies, honey. sewing, quilting. i’ll be fine.”

but Sunday will be the last day of my personal week of this Powerful Omniscient One Year Milestone. i’m thinking of hosting it every year. i’ve learned things i knew and things i didn’t know. i’ve learned that i do not match anyone else’s journey.

i read and have been told that the anticipation of these milestones is sometimes far worse than getting through that day. my own year milestone for him, over him, whatever, has lived up to my imagination’s hype. instead of being worried over something that played out less than expected my mind was preparing me for what it knew my soul would feel.

it was rough. the echoes of that day, that week, the funeral on Valentine’s Day are in my head and try as i might, i cannot push them out. they are unconquerable right now so i’ve let them take over. maybe it’s supposed to be this way for me. maybe it's the healthiest way for me. i am such a sensitive person. i focused on sewing as i cried. i kept the television on with one ridiculous show after another, while i cried as i worked, but i was alone for the period of time when i most needed someone with me. some lives do not allow for what we need even if we try to make arrangements, but oh, what i would have given to have someone come sit with me. stay with me. hear me talk about him. he is such a lovely man.

i needed someone with me to talk to, to be with me, to talk about him to. i love him so very much. oh, God, it’s like a fire licking away at me. i burn with it. i love him and he’s not coming back. he’s gone and i break at the concept. how can i do this without him for another day much less another year?

i miss his touch. he was always touching me; my hand, the small of my back, my hair, my skin. he loved touching me and i loved being touched by him. my mother wasn’t affectionate. my first husband hated touching me. i think he’s a closet amoeba. if he could have reproduced alone, he would have. but my Dragon loved touching me and taught me that my body wasn’t abhorrent. he taught me how to make love and be loved.

snippets of songs run through my head whether the song pertains to my loss or not.

“give me a kiss before you leave and my imagination will feed my hungry heart. leave me one thing before we part, a kiss to build a dream on.” ~ Satchmo

“10,000 miles, my own true love, 10,000 miles or more. the rocks may melt an th seas may burn if i should not return.” ~ Mary Chapin Carpenter

“i’d rather be dreaming than living, living’s just too hard to do. it’s chances not choices, noises not voices, a day’s just a thing to get through, living’s just too hard to do.” ~ Loudon Wainwright

the night after my Dragon died, my children were with me. we were together sleeping in the same room. there was a radio in the next room, unplugged. never worked. we all woke to music. Sara McLachlan’s “Angel.” the exact part that was playing was the chorus.

“in the arms of the angels, fly away from here, from this dark cold hotel room and the endlessness that you fear. you are pulled from the wreckage of your silent reverie, you’re in the arms of the angel. may you find some comfort there.”

that’s the part that was playing when my son got it to stop. and by that i mean he set the radio in the middle of that room away from the wall because it still wasn’t plugged in. but it was the room where he died. it was the room of the door crashing open and the paramedics and police coming in to fail us both. we had all three heard it and we all wanted so much to believe it was a sign that he was "in the arms of the angels." i can’t listen to that song without sobbing.

i love him and i wish i could talk to him. i just want to see him once more. i want to see his eyes smile at me in love. i want to hold his hand and walk along the beach.

i want what that song says, ‘love will come and set me free.” ~ Brett Dennen

so as you can see i’m having a very rough time. for me, there has been no glimpss of sunlight. there has been no release from this since that moment his heart seized.

“cast me gently into morning for the night has been unkind. take me to a place so holy that i can wash this from my mind, the memory of choosing not to fight.” ~ Sarah McLachlan.

we drove away from the ocean after the funeral, after i put all the rocks and shells and sand dollars i’d collected back on the beach, right at twilight, at the water’s edge. i have all the ones he collected. only his. because I want only him.

we made it to New York before crashing at a motel. i have no idea what the desk clerk thought as i walked in carrying a black box of ashes and a folded American flag and a broken arrow. i don’t give a flying f*ck. it would have been dishonorable to leave the flag and the broken arrow and i was not leaving my Dragon alone in the truck. oh, God, the thought brings me to my knees. him alone in the dark. but he's not afraid of the dark and i love it because i can see Heaven better.

the next day when we saw the sign for the state line of where i am supposed to live now my daughter pointed out a cloud. the photo is below.

i had been crying thinking he would not know where i was when she pointed it out and said simply, “he knows, mom. he’s watching over you.” she went into this monolog about how he’s the Dragon and covert was his middle name and black was his favorite color. she said he knew where i was every moment he was alive and that it was a little scary how good he was at it. so of course he knows now that he’s really become a dragon and is flying about in Heaven.

so if you’re watching and listening, my love, i miss you. i love you. i want you. it will always be this way.

~~ the year has been hard. the anniversary has been awful. i’m his Beach Bunny, not some beautiful golden phoenix. i am not rising from the ashes, his ashes, “a new person with a new life filled with wonderful memories of his shining love to carry with me on my new adventure.” (someone actually wrote that and got it published.)

i’m not like anyone else. i’m like me. my life has been different than some. i had no loving childhood, no happy first 44 years of my life. my happy life didn’t start until i was 44 and my Dragon found me slinking from shadow to shadow trying to stay out of sight. i'm so very tired of living but living is all i'm left with. just living day to day. i’m doing what he and i talked about. Bunny will stay his bunny keeping his ashes close until i die. then our ashes can be blended and given to the ocean we both loved so very much.

as for Valentine’s Day? let it come. let it do it's worst. i’ve already drowned. i’ll look at the majesty of the rollers coming in from the bottom of the ocean.

February 9th ~ Bunny gets flowers

i wasn't going to post today since i feel so drained today. i said it all yesterday in anticipation of last night and today. but at a very weak moment, breaking from sewing for lunch, there was a knock on the door. there was a nice man with flowers. so beautiful. they smell so good. and i smiled. how can you not smile at flowers? so i set Bunny up and took her picture. i wanted to show them off as i did the flowers i received from Boo on my birthday.

thank you, Split Second Single Father, for the flowers. i love them. they helped and join all the comments and emails offering support. all of it, all of you are what are getting me through this because i have to be honest, i'm not very strong today. i'm suffering. so it's a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, munchos, and a glass of tea. then back to embroidery. comfort food and pouring my heart out into a Memory Quilt. and knowing all of you are out there and understanding what it feels like.

even though my heart and my words are all i can give, when you need me, they are all yours.

365

tonight at 11:30 pm, the memory will become the most vivid. at 12:03 am, his death will become one year old and the second year of the nightmare begins. the anguish i feel over his death is as acute today, and all this past weekend, as it was on this day one year ago. i know it will continue unabated until after Valentine’s Day, the day his funeral was held. i usually have something in mind when i sit to write but what do i write about a milestone i never thought would happen, that i didn’t want to have come to pass, and one that i want to end as fast as it can? grief is a solitary journey. what we each feel is as individual as our relationships are and as we are. what i may come up with may or may not be familiar to those ahead of me. my writing is unique to me. so here is my attempt to honor a man none of you knew.

his death certificate says 9 February 2009. when the funeral home gave it to me and i saw the date, i thought, “no, that’s wrong. it was the 8th.” then i remembered. he started dying on the 8^th. it was over on the 9^th. 12:03 am. it’s a small thing that means nothing to anyone but me. on the 8^th and the 9^th of every month i feel hollow, as if there is nothing inside me. no stomach, no brain, no lungs, and no heart. i barely eat. i can’t think. breathing is hard at times. and i cannot feel my heart do anything but miss the heart it used to beat beside.

i am told this will get better with the passing of time. i leave this alone as i do accept that there may be improvement in my feelings, but i will need to see when and by how much for myself. today, these are my thoughts and i will say unequivocally that i will never get over losing him. he will always be in my heart, on my mind, and his name will forever be on my lips. because i adore him. the candles have already been lit.

how long is a year? “short if you sing, but long if you sigh.” all i’ve done this year is survive 365 days without the only man i’ll ever love. i’ve cried every one of those days in one form or another be it great, heaving sobs or blinking back silent tears.

three hundred, sixty-five days i’ve had to live without his winsome ways. for all his strength and fierceness, he was also very charming. it’s the truth that he kept his promise of a daisy a day. if he couldn’t pick them or buy them, he’d take his finger and draw one on my inner wrist. i always liked those. sitting side-by-side, leaning into one another with our heads touching. he’d take my hand and start to draw. if i’m really tired and hurting for him, i rotate my hand and look at my empty wrist. sometimes my mind lets me see one there. dream world.

he deserves so much better than he got in his life. he deserves to have the world know what he did for his country. he deserves a huge memorial. but his life cannot be talked about openly. his sacrifices have to be inferred. not every death gets a big candlelight vigil with mourners lining the walls of the church. a lot of us simply get a night full of stars and oceans of tears shed from only a handful of people who will grieve forever such a loss.

not many knew of my Dragon whose hidden life was given over to patriotism for so long and with a great deal of silent honor. he died unexpectedly on the night of the full moon. there were no orators at his funeral. all the words spoken were the ones i wrote. there were few flowers. his funeral had a scattering of people who had known him and were willing to relinquish the morning of Valentine's Day. all were in shock. all came to me and clung to my arm and asked me “how,” “why,” “i can’t believe it,” and “he can’t be gone. he’s so strong and alive.” i could not speak so my daughter responded for me, "heart attack," "only God knows," "neither can we," and for the last, even her strength broke and her voice fell silent.

he got a folded flag, a broken arrow (he is half Sioux, half Russian) and his destroyed wife and her two equally devastated children. a horrible little, plastic, black box held the ashes of the Dragon. i found an urn that spoke to the life we had and the life we wanted. i put that black box far back into the closet. i will, however, never get rid of it.

“my husband died.” that doesn’t sound real even though i know it to be true. my Dragon’s body was too powerful and his spirit too enduring for me to think he could ever be conquered. i know he wasn't bullet proof, but the scars from being shot and stabbed repeatedly, all his years of combat sketched out on his body like a wild tattoo, lead me to believe that i would die long before he would. i’m weak. he’s strong. he’s the Dragon. Dragon’s live forever.

“he’s in Heaven.” that haunts me because i’d like to know. i am so lost without him and i cry as i pray that he is there and well and at peace. but that’s faith for you. it’s not for us to know. i have to admit i've had the “my God, my God, why have You forsaken me” moments. i do this when i feel vulnerable, when i’m hungry, and when i worry that after i finish the commissions i have that i will not get another one, and when i have to roll over and beg my ex for my stipend. but then i have these moments when i’m outside walking the dogs and i feel a sudden breeze. the sky is beautiful and i see an early moonrise, one where the moon and the sun look across at each other and i feel strongly that he just has to be there, on the moon, flying through the universe, up in Heaven.

“my Dragon has gone ahead.” that one will have to be the one that stands because it sounds like its part of a story and i’ve always liked stories. i like the ones that start with “once upon a time.”

Once upon a time there was a handsome, fierce Dragon who was looking for someone to love and someone to love him. he found a woman who lived in the shadows. it was true love from the start, “true” as in the definition culled from Shakespearean times. she found in his arms and heart a paradise on Earth that only Heaven could outshine. he found in her arms and heart a love so deep that his nickname became, no longer a curse, but a term of endearment. they found common respect, admiration, and a blazing joy so white hot that they had started to believe in “happily ever after.”

it was the night of the full moon. their kisses were soft. their embrace was serene and intimate. their “i love you’s” exchanged before closing their eyes to sleep were tender. legs were entwined and fingers were laced together when the Dragon started gasping for breath. the woman from the shadows sensed it before she heard his difficulty because one of her hands was on her Dragon’s chest. she flipped on the light and saw her husband choking for air. gut wrenching terror filled her as she called 911 and started, then saw she was failing at, CPR. she cried his name. she talked to him praying he heard her, “love, can you hear me? you’re gonna be fine. okay? you’re going to be fine. don’t be scared. please don’t be scared. they’re coming. hear it? they’re almost here. you’ll be fine. please be fine.” she knew what was happening to him. she was a realist. she said to him, to God, “don’t leave me.” the last thing she whispered to him was, “i love you.”

they made her leave the room while they worked on him. then she saw them putting him in the ambulance. the police drove her to the hospital because they said she was in shock. she waited alone in the ER for someone to tell her what was going on. it was only 10 minutes. at four minutes after midnight, they came. two nurses and a doctor were walking towards her as the woman from the shadows tried to back away.

her heart started screaming. not her lips. not her mind. her heart. she heard it in her head. she knew what was coming. but why no one heard her heart flying to pieces was beyond her understanding. God probably heard, but He was busy with something else. maybe He was taking the Dragon to Heaven.

she watched these three people whose job it would be to tell her tragic news. they shouldn’t be coming towards her though, not like this, not with those looks on their faces. she and her Dragon loved each other and love conquers all. right? in their respective lives, they’d already been through so much. they were going to get a happily ever after, weren’t they? if you’ve done good things all your life some of that good is supposed to come back around. right? they had never asked for anything but each other. they had never expected anything grand. all they wanted was each other. to them, that was the grandest thing in the universe. surely God was going to at least let them be together. the nurses and that doctor weren’t there for her. but she knew there was no one else in the waiting room.

the nurses had her sit down so the doctor could tell her how hard he’d worked but that it had been a lost cause. her husband probably wasn’t his first lost cause that night because there was a kind of detached sadness in his eyes. the woman from the shadows must have looked pretty bad because the doctor suddenly frowned as he reached over and took her pulse. one of the nurses went and got her water while the other helped her on with her coat. it was then that the Dragon’s wife realized she was violently shivering.

the doctor asked her if she had any questions and she had only one.

“i failed to save him. you failed. we both failed him. what is it i’m supposed to ask?”

the color drained from the doctor’s face and the woman guessed no one had asked put it quite that way before. either way he said no more to her. he just squeezed her hand and bowed out to let the nurses take over. her heart was still screaming but neither nurse acknowledged it. they also didn’t seem to notice when it stopped screaming and start to splinter into a thousand pieces. the Dragon’s wife was helped up out of her chair at the same time that she felt all the pieces of her heart being swirled up by the wind from the Dragon’s wings as he flew away from her.

they lead her to a room where they had laid her Dragon out with a crisp white sheet tucked tight across his chest. this was the second to last time she saw her Dragon. his large shoulders spread across the small gurney. his white and silver hair glinted under the lights in the silent room. he looked so handsome, as if he was only sleeping, but his chest was not moving. it did not rise and fall with his great, deep breath like it had each night under the protection of her single hand. she stroked his beautiful soft beard and sighed his name on a shudder of sobs. his body was present but the Dragon was gone. something had made him do what he’d promised her he’d never do. he’d left her.

the Dragon had gone ahead.

someone once said, “light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. no matter how fast light travels, if finds the darkness has gotten there first, and is waiting for it.” woman in shadows had lived in darkness for the whole of her life and had only just found the light. it had come from her Dragon. it had been in his eyes as he looked at her and in his heart, as he loved her. now that light was extinguished and she was thrust back into the dark, but it was unlike the one from before. this dark was going to be from a forever night where she had known the love of her Dragon, and had watched him be taken from her.

the last time she saw her Dragon, he was lying in state, as it were, in the funeral home awaiting her formal identification. her daughter and son were with her, but her son was having a hard time keeping his tears under control. he did not want to see a lifeless Dragon so it was her daughter that went with her down the stairs following the funeral home director to see him. woman in shadows was carefully watched as she made her way one step at a time. when he came into view she broke. there's no other word to explain what happened inside her. it wasn’t a nightmare. it was reality. her Dragon was gone. she kneeled on the floor beside him and sobbed into her hands. the overwhelming loss settled on her shoulders and prevented her from speaking for hours after that visit. her daughter cried. she talked to the Dragon, stroked his hand, and softly said goodbye. the funeral director quietly excused herself to give these two women their time alone. she had seen a lot of grief, all kinds, founded in all the variables of human emotion. this was genuine grief founded in a true and deep love that now must be transcended in the minds of the survivors. she could not help with that.

it has now been a year and in these intervening 365 days, the woman from the shadows has become odd. she was eccentric before but now, she has been called odd by a couple of people and she has acknowledged that it fits. she’s become a cloister. she has learned why some religious choose solitude for their life of prayers. she’s faithful in her daily devotions to God and in her talks to her Dragon. she’s learned that neither answer in a way she can understand. she’s also aware that her life has heartbreakingly played out exactly like it was predicted to her. “you’re worthless. you’ll end up as nothing. you’ll end up alone.”

mothers have a way of being irritatingly right sometimes.

all the woman from the shadows can do is accept. there is no negotiating a return from something like death. all she can do is close her eyes to the pain when it rises in intensity. all she can do is live the rest of her life and wait her turn. she sews all day every day except on the nights of the full moon. on those nights she is distracted. she knows what time moonrise is. she gets anxious until that shining orb touches her particular horizon, and then she sighs. sweet relief. he’s back, the Man in the Moon, her Dragon. she photographs him. she stares at him. she talks to him. he, too, doesn’t answer her.

her collection of full moon photographs is damning evidence of the time she’s spent pining for someone who is lost to her for the rest of her life. she looks at her photographs of her moon; she feels possessive of it, and feels like the night version of the water nymph, Clytie, who followed the sun across the sky and became the sunflower. the one photograph she stares at most is the one she calls “Dragon’s Moon.” it’s the moon of 8 February 2009.

she pines for him. she wishes she could hear his deep, rumbly voice again. she wishes that when she reaches out her arms to the darkness that his hands would grasp hers and he would pull her into his strong, warm embrace. she faces each day and tries to be “stronger.” she does exactly what she’s supposed to do. she’s very correct in all her ways. but remember, the woman from the shadows has become odd since the death of her Dragon. she’s very much alone and has gotten used to it. she’s been hurt along the way this year in part for not being good enough, for not “measuring up,” and for having become so odd.

days are hard for her as they are for most who grieve but it is also for one reason that others may not understand. the woman from the shadows, the Dragon’s wife, misses the darkness that reveals the Heavens to her. she misses the moon whatever it’s phase. see, the Dragon’s wife is in love with the night.

“When he shall die, take him and cut him out in little stars and he will make the face of Heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night and pay no worship to the garish sun.”

it hasn’t been 365 days. it’s been 365 nights.