Everybody Needs A Place To Rest

Fourteen years ago my daughter Madeleine died. The past few years I’ve shared the same writings with you, over and over. I’ve actually altered, edited, and tweaked those words until they have become nothing more to me then the script of her life and ultimately her death.

Today, I looked for and found fresh words to share.  I’m not trying to convince anyone that I’m a better person because I had her in my life. Today I’m just sad. Sad and tired.

I’ll confess I’ve been in a writing slump since November 7 because on that day Travis turned 21 and his twin sister Madeleine didn’t.  And as much as I’d love to pretend that I don’t cry about it any more I can’t stop crying today and that has never happened to me before. I’m crying way too early. I never cry until January 6.

I decided I want to move past this self-induced mourning. So rather than wait until Wednesday, which is the actual anniversary of Madeleine’s death, I am publishing my raw thoughts today, two days early.  I’m feeling them now, so I’m showing them now and I’ll be ready to move on again.

This is my first picture of her.

And this is the last.

And you already know she has a twin brother, Travis.

What you don’t know is that all Travis asked for on his 21st birthday was to receive something that was special from Madeleine that he could have as a keepsake. I gave him the bear she was holding in the first picture.  I meant to keep it forever, but I was surprised how ready I was to let it go.

And what I didn’t know is that on his 21st birthday his drink request was two shots of Jameson. He drank one and left the other sit on the bar that night in her honor.

I’ve got tears again, but these are tears of pride. I’ve spent years studying my daughter’s tiny hand casually draped over the teddy bear.  Now I stare at the  strong adult hand of her brother holding the very same toy. I remember the day I found out I was having twins. I stopped at the hospital gift shop and made my first “twin” purchase. Two teddy bears at $6.99 each made the pair of babies a reality. Reality hit hard when I buried one of the teddy bears with Madeleine, reality came full circle when I was able to hand the remaining bear to Travis.

I’m starting to forget some of the details of the Saturday she died. I’m not sure what kind of weather we had, I know we had glistening, swirling snow on the day she was buried … it was almost magical. But on the day she died, I really don’t remember.

Surprisingly, I do remember slivers from songs I heard on the radio to and from the funeral home while I finalized  arrangements.

Tell me why are we
So blind to see.
That the ones we hurt
Are you and me?

She said I have to go home
‘Cause I’m real tired you see

I ain’t got many friends left to talk to
No one’s around when I’m in trouble

I saw you first
Don’t that give me the right
To move around in your heart
Everyone was looking
But I saw you first

Everybody needs a place to rest
Everybody wants to have a home
Don’t make no difference what nobody says
Aint nobody like to be alone

Let her cry, if the tears fall down like rain
Let her sing, if it eases all her pain
Let her go, let her walk right out on me
And if the sun comes up tomorrow
Let her be, let her be.

Don’t go chasing waterfalls
Please stick to the rivers and the lakes that you’re used to
I know that you’re gonna have it your way or nothing at all
But I think you’re moving too fast

And I’ve got the predictability of  “this” because it happens every year. Without fail I begin the slide downhill on November 7th and without realizing it, this year I have become abundantly anxious to propel myself as far into the new year as humanly possible, or at least well past January 6.

As a non-fiction author I avoid using poetic license. As a humorist, I seldom embellish to stress the obvious. Writers are allowed to use poetic license to heighten the effect of their work. It wasn’t until this afternoon that I realized I could also use my poetic license to intentionally deviate from all normally applicable rules or practices by bumping ahead the pages of time. Therefore, I am officially moving on with my life two days earlier than usual.

I’m done writing for today. I’m publishing this because I’m ready and through my tears I am smiling.

Madeleine did amazing things in seven years but even more amazing than that, she’s been gone twice as long as she was ever here and I’m still reveling in the ripple effect from her pond. I’m standing strong and tall and I’m ready to grow forward two days early.

Sleep in heavenly peace, Madeleine. Sleep in heavenly peace.

Christmas Mourning

Part One, A Regular Madeleine Monday

I knew Christmas would always be a rough time. Holidays are tough when you lose someone you love. Even if the your great uncle twice removed was reincarnation of Scrooge himself, you could still raise a glass in toast “To Great Uncle Bif, may you rest in peace knowing that you don’t have to spend money where your sitting right now!”

When you lose a child, life must go on for the rest of the family for the rest of eternity. It isn’t easy. It just is what it is. Christmas of 1996 was different than any of us expected.

Now here’s the deal.  I am a “piler” which is much different than a “hoarder.”  I make little piles through the house of stuff that I need to put away. I know what is in each pile at any given time. I don’t put anything away until I can put it away until I can put it away the right way.

I’ve got piles in my office and piles on my kitchen counter.Maybe there is one in the dining room, too.  However you can open my file cabinets and you will find color-coordinated machine generated labels with every product manual you could want in perfect, logical alphabetical order. Sure, my desk top looks like a cluttered mess but to me it is just stuff I haven’t put away properly.

Towels are folded a certain way and it must be while they are still warm from the dryer so they crease easier. Dishclothes have the same story. Someday I’ll snap a picture of my rag drawer for you. Oooh, envy.

I’m not any different with the Christmas decorations. Hallmark ornaments go in tiny baggies along with the original box. I don’t put them back in the box because (heaven forbid!) I may cause that box to wrinkle and depreciate in value (eBay alert! eBay alert!). Breakable ornaments are wrapped in tissue paper and then put in a plastic baggie. Bigger items are wrapped repeatedly in platsic grocery bags and put in labeled totes. The amount of effort the elves put forth to help Santa’s magic happen … well, that’s the way I pack away Christmas. What can I say, those quirks are my quirks and they aren’t going to go away.

The Friday after Thanksgiving of 1996 had me hauling my Christmas boxes down from the attic and organizing them in the proper order as I got ready to decorate the tree.  I cannot remember anything unusual about my presence of mind up until that point. Another year, another tree. Same old, same old.

I opened the RubberMaid tote that contained the lights. Hold it, the lights weren’t in their individual ziploc bags. Alright, I was mildly pissed. I decided I was going to skip the lights. After all, it was a lot of work to put them up. It wouldn’t be the first time I skipped lights.

I grabbed my Tupperware container of ornament hooks and reached for the first bin of ornaments. I popped open the lid and it the contents of the container just blew my mind and every emotion I had stuffed inside of me for the past three hundred and thirty some days came flooding back to me. All the ornaments were jumbled together in this one bin. They still had the hooks attached! This was, in my mind, a catastrophe. I was blinded by my emotions. Literally, blinded. I couldn’t see. I couldn’t stop crying. I wasn’t crying about the fate of the ornaments. This was the shove I needed so I could finally cry, sob, even tantrum.

Until I opened that tote I accepted Madeleine’s fate, her undiagnosed degenerative neuro-muscular disorder. I accepted our loss, I knew it was coming.Me. Pro-active and not re-active. That’s me.

And now I was reacting to this newly opened RubberMaid tote by crying? I never cry.

I remember the gut wrenching feelings that came over me. Gut wrenching. We’ve all used the term, who hasn’t? But I felt it, I literally felt my gut wrench. Never in my life had I experienced this sadness or woe. This type of grief doesn’t come in waves, it is a tsunami of emotions and I was drowning fast.

That was the first Christmas that we had a naked tree. No lights, no ornaments, just a naked tree.

The cardboard holiday storage boxes and green and red plastic totes sat in the hall untouched until the kids went back to school the first week in January. I carried the boxes up to the attic and locked the door, I didn’t return to the attic until the following year.

Each Christmas I grew a little bit stronger and did a little bit more, but I still dreaded every moment of it. We did the same stuff every year, traditions must be upheld because after all life goes on. Oh, and did I mention each year I got a little bit bitchier? I dreaded anything and everything that had to do with that damn tree. I was fine with the cooking, the baking, the shopping, the wrapping. In fact, the shopping helped more than I could have ever imagined.

With two boys remaining, I missed the “pinkness” that goes with a daughter. Although Madeleine was disabled beyond the point of playing with dolls I didn’t realized I had been “ripped off” by her not needing the toys and trinkets that go along with little girls until she was no longer here. So I bought. And I bought. And I bought.

And I sat at home and studied everything in great detail. The painted on eyes of The Little Mermaid, the plastic smell of baby dolls, and the jeweled crowns. After scrutinizing these girlie girl items, I returned most of the stuff I had bought and the rest I donated to Safe Harbor, a shelter for domestically abused families in our area.

I was healing. If I could just move past this sticky situation with the damn tree.

By this point I had become a foster parent and our Christmases were no longer traditional. In fact, our holidays became downright unconventional. I preferred to foster children that were going to be long term placements. For three consecutive years, our Christmas pictures each featured a new infant or toddler that stayed with us on their journey to their forever home.

Our families size changed constantly and our traditions changed just as fast, too. Some of the children we had with us didn’t use stockings at Christmas, they used shoes because, well … that was their families tradition. When I went upstairs to bed that night, our upstairs hallway was full of shoes, easily twenty-five pairs and maye even more. My children and the children living with us at the time thought if one pair of shoes brought treats, why not put out ALL of your shoes and see what kind of loot will be produced.

Incidentally, the year of the “shoe incident” was also the year I made some of my greatest strides in my life. I abandoned the tradition of a real tree. If I really wanted to live in the here and now I had to let go of pieces of my past. For me, that big ol’ tree decorated with oodles of ornaments from years gone by was more than I could handle.

I’ve never re-opened the totes. I have them, I’ve moved them twice. Someday I’ll open them. Or then again, maybe not. We still have a tree, but it is artificial and I decorate it alone. The lights are white and sparse. The ornaments are red and there are a ton of them. I spend a full day on the tree, shaping the branches.

I tried to compromise, I tried to put other ornaments on the tree but I couldn’t handle it. Sometimes I feel selfish that theornaments my kids made in school end up taped to their bedroom doors and not out in the living room. I still struggle with my emotions I am proud that I can look forward to putting up a tree.

To be continued tomorrow.

A Regular Madeleine Monday

And on the twelfth day of Christmas my true love gave to me …

You know the words, we all do. I am sure it was a classic back in the day when maids were milkin’ but now the repetitive droning on and on and on of that song is enough to make me crazy. In fact, it wasn’t too long ago that I dreaded Christmas altogether. The stockings, the knick knacks, the garland, the lights, the ornaments.

My daughter Madeleine died twelve days after after Christmas of 1995. She was pronounced dead shortly after midnight early on a Saturday morning. It is hard for me to remember that it was a Saturday because we spent the greater part of Friday knowing that she was going to die soon.  My mind has put a Friday feeling to the memory more than a Saturday.

Madeleine was born a few minutes before six in the morning on November 7, 1988, and died a few minutes after midnight on January 6, 1996. This year she would have been twenty-one.

Madeleine’s first Christmas. I had a different husband, a seven year old son, and six week old twins. A hectic holiday, yet medically uneventful.

The Christmas of 1989 bore no resemblance to the preceding year. Madeleine had twenty-four hour per day nursing care, she had gastro-intestinal tube and was fed and medicated every two hours. She had a tracheotomy tube, and by the following Christmas oxygen had been added to the mix. It’s funny what details I remember, I don’t know what I had for breakfast yesterday but I know on the day the first oxygen tank was delivered to our home she was on .25 liters per minute and on the day the tank was removed from our home she had been on 6.5 liters per minute.

We had a great crew of nurses, generous with their time, talent, and treasures. After all, there were three eight hour shifts a day, a revolving door of nurses. Our dogs knew when shift change was going to occur and they start to watch out the front windows for the nurse’s vehicle to arrive. They became family.

I had never been a fan of real Christmas trees. They’ll dry out and drop needles and drip sap on the carpet, they’re a fire hazard, they’ll bring in bugs … I had more excuses than you can imagine. I was pro-artificial tree and stubborn. One night in early December our third shift nurse, quiet as a mouse, brought a real tree through the front door and set it up in the living room. I swear the tree was as tall as it was wide, easily six feet in both directions.

And I could smell the tree the moment I opened my bedroom door. It looked prettier than it smelled. I became a pro-fresh Christmas tree lover that year. I refused to put any lights on the tree because of my fear of fire, but we had our first real tree.

Most of the ornaments that filled the tree were Madeleine-related. I was pregnant when I got married in March, twins arrived in November. In addition to a brigade of ornaments that come along with my then seven year old, we had twin ornaments and matching boy/girl ornaments. Everyone gave Madeleine ornaments for Christmas. I mean everyone, even the mailman. Name an ornament, we had it. Crayola, Disney, Marvel, Precious Moments, Hallmark, Coca-Cola, Barbie, seriously you name it we had it.

One year Madeleine was in Milwaukee’s Children’s Hospital over December 5th, which is the evening St. Nick came. I stayed at the Ronald McDonald house across the street. When I opened the door of my room, there were two stockings hung from the doorknob. They were full of Cracker Jacks, fruit, candy canes, gum and ornaments. I stuffed the Cracker Jacks and gum into my giant purse and took the shuttle to the hospital only to find MORE ornaments surrounding her hospital bed.

And for as long as we had Madeleine, we had real trees stuffed with ornaments. Oh, eventually I became brave enough to add lights but I kept a fire extinguisher on the coffee table just in case of spontaneous combustion.

And twelve days after the Christmas of 1995 Madeleine died. She had chronic lung problems and we knew her illness was degenerative. The way I like to tell the story is that she had a regular Madeleine Monday. I love how that sounds, Madeleine Monday.  Anyway, she was gone by Saturday. Her body was exhausted and her renal system was already starting to fail. She was ready to go. Her lungs were compromised from years of scarring, they didn’t have the elasticity necessary for effective respiration. We were all exhausted.

Friends and neighbors brought food. Our front doorbell never stopped ringing. Hugs, tears, memories, coffee, cookies, everything became one big blur. And somewhere in the midst of all this Madeleine’s last Christmas tree was dismantled. Ornaments were taken off, lights were removed, the tree was dragged out and tossed in someone’s pick up truck, the living room was vacuumed, Christmas was over and I was, as usual, grateful for all the assistance.

To have your family count decrease takes some adjusting. Madeleine had been home bound for so many years that not many people knew we even had a daughter at home. I used to always recite a sentence in my head when we were out to eat at a restaurant. The waitress would say “table for four?” and I’d repeat “table for four, family of five” inside my head. Even when she wasn’t with me, she was with me. And now she wasn’t with me except for the rhymes in my head.

I think one of the worst things about losing a child is still having more children left. I mean, you just have to keep going because you’ve got more kids that still need you. So maybe it is one of those bittersweet things where the worst thing is also the best thing.

I muddled through life. I grew and got stronger. It didn’t happen over night, but I learned how to cope. I had two healthy active boys, life had to keep going.

***

A Regular Madeleine Monday, is a continued here at Christmas Mourning

I know this is a tough read for some. If you would like more background on Madeleine, I’ve posted most of it at based on a true story … at MilwaukeeMoms.com, more specifically entitled:

How I Became A Wife, A Mother and Divorced

And Then There Was The Time I Had Twins

On A More Serious Note

And If You Were Here I Would Kiss You

Her Funeral

These essays have all been posted previously posted here. Today’s content is also available at both sites.