Cathy Day's principles of Literary Citizenship

This is such great advice! via Cathy Day's principles of Literary Citizenship

Advice for When Your Child Dies of An Overdose

1. Don’t look for what you could have done differently, though of course this will be your mind’s number one occupation now. Find and practice a trick to refocus yourself – perhaps breathing deeply in, then out. If you can stop searching for how you could have saved your child for more than a minute at a time, consider yourself ahead.
2. Make self-care your #1 job. Daily yoga will make you stretch your body once a day, which is better than nothing. Make better-than-nothing your new aspirational standard.
3. Ask for what you need. Your friends and family will never be more willing than they are right now to help you. Don’t feel guilty asking. Whether you ask or not, they’ll all stop waiting on you in a few weeks or months, so you may as well get some needs met now.
4. Believe any signs that suggest your child is contacting you from the great beyond. No matter what faith you possessed or didn’t before, now is the time for a full suspension of disbelief. Lights flickering? That’s your child. Cardinal outside your window? Thank your child for visiting. Who cares if it’s real? Refer back to better-than-nothing.
5. Let yourself cry, out loud with messy tears, anywhere and everywhere. Tell strangers your child died; show them his picture. This will help others keep their own petty problems in perspective – or, sometimes, it will help you connect with someone else who’s been there.
6. Write to your child’s friends, thanking them disproportionately for any role they played in your child’s happiness. These people are the last ones who will ever remember your child with you, and you’ll want to keep in touch with them.
7. Bury your face in your child’s old shirts searching for his scent. Keep tucked away any clothes that still smell of him. (Thank his girlfriend for leaving you a bottle of his cologne for desperate moments.) Go through his journals, emails, Facebook and Messenger apps and save every word he ever wrote. These are the last words he’ll ever write; maybe someday you’ll feel strong enough to read through them. Make photo and word scrapbooks of his life. Refer back to #1.
8. Keep a grief journal and read books and websites about grief. It helps to see how many others have suffered this and other terrible losses and survived. Avoid websites of hopeless misery where other mothers swear it never gets better. It does. Really.
9. Forgive yourself for your brain fog, your shakiness, your forgetfulness, your vomiting, your panic attacks, your flashes of rage at innocent bystanders. Let yourself use marijuana as medicine – alcohol, too, if you can be moderate and not get maudlin on it. Don’t worry about if you’ll always be this much of a mess. You won’t be, but you don’t need to figure out a schedule for your recovery now.
10. Eventually, start reading a bit about Post-Traumatic Growth. Your child’s death has changed you forever. Someday you’ll get to decide if that change made you more bitter and shrunken or more compassionate and open-hearted... But don’t rush it; you will need to be bitter and shrunken for a while before you get to the growth that’s being forced upon you.
11. Punch in the face anyone who tells you that “everything happens for a reason,” “you’ll be with them soon,” “God has a plan but we don’t get to know what it is,” or “your child is in a better place now.” If you don’t approve of violence, just tell those who say these things that they must be sad their child is still alive instead of in that better place they’re so excited about.
12. If your child left behind a child, don’t contemplate your grandchildren with terror in your heart. Remember your grandchild is an individual not cursed to repeat your child’s fate. Don’t waste your grandchildren’s lives worrying they’re doomed. Remember how much of the last years of your child’s life you wasted, overcome as you were by terror and despair, and do your best to enjoy each precious moment with each precious loved one left alive in your life.

#addiction #overdose #overdosedeath #believe #grief #grievingmother #lostson #copingwithgrief #copingwithloss #mysonisdead #advice #adviceforgrievers

Another Year in the Books

Here is a shot of Kyle on Santa's lap when he was 4 and of his daughter, Maggie, when she was.

Here's Maggie surrounded by her immediate family in South Hadley:

I see that it's been nearly a year since I posted here, and reading through my blog made me want to take a moment to report on how much better I'm feeling. This year, in which I was able to be at home not working for an income, helping my family settle in and eventually turning to writing full-time, was a true gift -- but I was often so busy living it that I didn't make time to write about it, so here's a run-down:

Amber and Maggie moved here from Southern California in late December of 2017 and now have their own apartment in our town. My daughter Jamie moved here from Oregon and found an apartment in Northampton. And my mother seems finally settled in her third apartment, this one in South Hadley.  There have been some adjustment pains, as you might imagine, but overall I think we are doing beautifully well.

Over the summer, spurred on by my daughter asking what I was doing with my life, I started submitting my poetry in earnest. This has been a disheartening process, but I've had some successes. Three of the 27 places to which I submitted accepted my poetry for publication, and one of the places I applied for a fellowship gave me one, so I got to spend a week in December doing nothing but writing. I worked on memoir poems and scrapbooks of my mothering life and then came home, where I haven't written a word until now.  But I'm getting back to it now, and that's what matters.

A POEM FOR MY 52ND BIRTHDAY

A POEM FOR MY 52^ND BIRTHDAY
The only year I will ever be twice the age
of both my children, the living and the dead

What in your life is calling you,
when all the noise is silenced,
the meetings adjourned,
the lists laid aside,
and the wild iris blooms
by itself in the dark forest.
What still pulls on your soul?
-- Rumi

Today I am 52 --
I have spun around the sun
as many times
as there are weeks in each year
and twice as many as my son,
who loved spinning until
he fell down, ever will.

The Mayans marked eras in calendar
rounds of 52 years, each year’s end
opening a portal to the underworld.
I’ve eagerly straddled that divide,
but in math, 52’s an untouchable
number, never the sum of its divisors,
so today I was forced to choose

To start my next era, to embrace
having survived as many years
as there are playing cards in a deck,
laps in the British Grand Prix,
white keys on the piano, upper
and lowercase letters in our alphabet, and
pickups in a game that brings you to your knees.

52 is the atomic number of tellurium,
a rare, shimmering crystal elementally
more precious than platinum.
Discovering my worth at 52,
I’ve gotten rid of the jokers
so I can play with a full deck
the hand I’ve been dealt.

Here among the living, I will be double
my daughter’s age for just this one year,
old enough to know such coincidences
won’t come twice,
we’ll only get so many invitations to the table,
so many chances to turn a bad deal
into a hand we can play. At 52, I’m all in.