To the daughter I do not have:

I’ve spent my whole adult life kicking around the idea of even having you.

I tuck your name away in notes and test it out loud when I’m alone.

It’s my grandma’s mother’s name, the grandma whose words are inked into my arm.

You’d fall in line behind bold, unapologetic matriarchs who have all been stronger than me.

And if generational trauma is real, I’m sorry.

I make checklists of things I would teach you:

The many ways to say thank you

The many instances to say fuck you

How to be heard in the loudest rooms

How to be soft in the safest ones

How to build boundaries before they're needed

How to fall in love with a hundred hobbies at once

(I wouldn’t know how to teach you to stick to one)

(You’d learn diligence from your father)

We’ve never met, you’ve never existed, and you may never will,

but I constantly look for reasons you should.

I find them in my mother and the women who came before her.

I was raised by a strong woman who was raised by a strong woman who was raised by a strong woman who was raised by a strong woman...

This world is filled with people who would try to dull you, men who wouldn’t know how to treat you, spaces that aren’t meant for you, circumstances that would hurt you. For a long time I thought it'd be best to spare you from it all — one less little girl unpeeling ugly pieces of reality inside of her family's stories, one less woman who has to be strong.

But I keep writing so that by chance someday you do exist, you'll know strength isn't all that hard, and it isn't all that bad. It's in your blood.

For Empaths

I know the pain of the world weighs heavy on you. I know you’re thinking of the young boy you happened upon last week, sleeping alone in an unlocked car. I know you can’t shake the thought of every lost puppy or child or soul, each of them looking for home. I know you wish they could all follow breadcrumbs straight to you. When your mind wanders, it finds destruction in countries that are oceans away. Worlds you've never seen and likely never will. It lingers there until you must pull yourself back to reality — well, your reality. Because it’s all reality, isn’t it? And isn’t that terrible?

Then joy comes. It startles you as you're gazing into the eyes of your friend’s baby. It finds you mid-laugh, the kind of laugh that instinctively jerks your head backwards. It spreads throughout your entire body at the touch of a loved one's hand, at the last page of a good book, at the sight of a fluffy little dog. Joy even once found you at a funeral as you scanned the room of grievers. It whispered in your ear, ‘Wow... to be loved this deeply even in death.’

Don’t worry if it doesn’t make any sense. How could you be happy in a world like this? How couldn’t you be happy?

Joy isn't a luxury. Let it find you. Don’t question why it’s there or where it came from even though you spent most of yesterday weeping. Open yourself up, let joy in, and leave the door open. Air out the damp and stuffy space where you store angst and anger about realities you cannot change. I know you call it empathy, but empathy always makes room for joy.

Jesus, another year

Why am I this lucky? Why am I this sad? I'm not the type to cry on my birthday. I'm the type to stare at myself in the mirror and pinch my skin and try to catch my reflection through peripheral vision to see if I can recognize myself as a teenager, as a child, as whoever I was a year ago. I'm the type to think: Ok, we've been given another year. What did I do to deserve this?

I remember turning thirteen. I was the last of my friends to become a teenager and it was a pretty big deal to me (I always wished I was older). We moved states that year and contrary to how you may think a thirteen year old girl would handle a cross-country move, I loved it. I enjoyed starting new. Touring potential homes with my family and walking the halls of my new school are fond memories. I liked making new friends and it never broke my heart to leave somewhere behind. I still don't attach much sentiment to the homes I've had throughout my life, just the people.

I remember turning sixteen; I waited an entire year to get my license. I hated driving. (I still do.) I had hair extensions and bangs and for a brief stint of that year, a black bob. I painted and decoupaged my bedroom walls with pages torn from old art encyclopedias. I hardly left my room and my parents didn't mind, as long as I was being creative in there.

I don't remember turning eighteen.

I remember turning twenty-three because it was the first year in a long time that nobody died. And every year since, I've taken a tally of who's left and thank the universe that they're still here. My stark awareness of the mortality of everyone I love tends to butt its head into every single one of my birthdays. I've heard time moves faster once you have children. And people wonder why I'm in no hurry to become a mother...

Ok, we've been given another year. What shall I do with it?

Lingering

I now understand why it took my parents 30 minutes after church to finally put on their coats and say goodbye to their friends, why they’d linger in the doorway after they’d already told me goodnight. Oh, 12-year-old Amy, linger with them. Eat at the table. Let the food get cold in the name of good conversation. What’s the hurry to say goodnight?

One day you’ll be 21 and you’ll speak to a loved one for the very last time. You’ll replay that conversation for the rest of your life, wishing you’d lingered, wishing you’d waited a few moments longer to say goodbye.

Then you’ll start loving people in a way that never occurred to you as a child. You’ll watch your best friend walk down the aisle and you'll be so happy you can feel the memory burning into your brain in real time. You'll want to pause the wedding so you can collect more details. You’ll get lunch with a friend who’s going through a hard time, and as you warm up in your car after saying goodbye, you watch her hustle across the parking lot in the cold. Her hair blowing in her face, her eyes tired, her hands fumbling through her purse, and she's so beautiful and strong. You’ll want to get out of the car to hug her and tell her again: I’m here for you, I love you.

Then your dad will be on a roadtrip, or your husband will be on an airplane, or your sister will be out drinking with friends and your brain can’t stop swirling with the thought of something terrible happening. Like a scab you’re not supposed to pick but you can’t help it and suddenly the worst case scenario is playing out in your head and you can’t stop the hemorrhaging. They'll get home safely and during your next conversation you'll take in every syllable of every word they say.

12-year-old Amy, you will often think about all the moments you missed because you were in such a hurry to get home, to get to your room, to get out of the house, to get older… you’ll wish you let people hold your hand. You’ll realize the days are actually so short, but people are so lovely. One more round, ten more minutes, I don’t have to leave quite yet, I love you, you know that? And then you’ll linger when it’s time to say goodbye.

Existentialism

A few weeks ago, I sat up all night petrified that I was going to die by morning. My frantic thoughts and baseless fears compounded on top of each other and by the time I peeled back all the layers of adrenaline, morning had come and I hadn’t died. I didn’t even know panic attacks could manifest that way.

This isn’t my first existential crisis. That wasn’t the first time I’ve grieved versions of myself that slipped out of me without permission. But it was the first time in a long time that my emotional experience metastasized into a physical one, and I spent the last couple of weeks trying to unravel what the hell was happening to me.

I used to be better at pretending. I could fit in anywhere with just about anyone. I could pour myself into somebody until I was empty and find a way to refill for them overnight. I used to have a recurring dream about a burning house, and even though I knew it was empty and about to collapse, I kept running back inside.

I blinked and years have elapsed. I have dreams in which I can sense someone stalking me from miles away. I can hear them enter my home, I can see my bedroom door creak open, and for the life of me, I cannot move. It takes weeks to recover from pouring myself into somebody, and not only can I no longer pretend to be anyone, I don’t even know how to be me sometimes.

There’s a loneliness to moving through life's phases that hardly anyone openly admits. Time moves so fast but the days are so long. How is everyone making such big decisions? What happened to the girl who could do anything? I find comfort in knowing I’ve changed, but my brain tricks me into believing it’s for the worse.

I’ve read that finding joy in the little things is key in overcoming a stint of existentialism. I enjoy the ambient sound of the morning news, the way my dog’s paws smell after a bath, a chilly morning draped in fog, and a red wine so dry it sucks the moisture out of my mouth. I stopped pretending to care about sports and I’ve started saying “no, thanks” to food, plans, or opportunities I know I wouldn’t enjoy. I’ve let go of my crippling, irrational fear of things that I now find beautiful: whales, heights, sharing my bed. When I lie wide awake, untangling anxiety while my husband sleeps next to me, I count his breaths instead of sheep.

None of these little things meant anything to me five or six years ago. So many idiosyncratic parts of who I am have only just developed. How wonderful is that?

You asked what life will look like in ten years...

We’ve had more careers than sexual partners (alright, that’s a bit of an exaggeration) but I’m still not sure we’re in the right place. Your body shuts down at the taste of shellfish, but it’s forgotten all the places he hurt us. We left, by the way. You’ll get to that part soon.

You’ll visit seven countries within four years but won’t come close to learning the languages we swore we'd know by now. You’ll cry sometimes over nothing, but there’s a little angel with four legs who’s been around for a while and she helps. You will move every single year until “home” is an abstract term you’ll assign to whoever you feel most yourself with.

Sometimes your hands won’t feel like they’re yours — they’ve lived too many lives. They’ll communicate with the Deaf, they’ll write a thousand pieces of work, they’ll knead homemade dough and feed people we love, they'll develop early onset carpel tunnel. They’ll grow more vascular, with knuckles like mom’s. They’ll hold rejection letters, books, babies, bouquets, wedding rings, warm hands, cold hands, and a couple sets of dead hands. You’ll look at your palms and try to remember all the interpretations about our deep-set broken lines. It’s probably best we forgot.

I slip into dissociative moments when I can’t believe I’m you and that we made it here. I think you'll like what I've done with us.

Thoughts-dump about death

It’s Sunday, I’m sitting in bed and I’m thinking about death. Every so often I get hit, and I mean hit, with grief so deep that it feels like I can’t inhale enough oxygen with every breath. How is it that my life has just moved on? Time has relentlessly tossed me through love and pain and grief and laughter and guttural sobs and just when I think I’ve come up for air long enough to breathe properly, I’m drug underwater again.

A lot of the time, everything feels mundane. Like I’m stuck between two distinct phases of life. Today it feels like life is running at one hundred miles per hour and I’ve just realized that I’ve been running for awhile and I’m exhausted. How long have I been running like this? I don’t even remember what I was like before loss. Did I worry this much? Were my intrusive thoughts this dark? Did I smile differently? Were my emotions this intense?

I love a lot of dead people. That’s the thought that knocked the wind out of me this morning. I love them deeply and they’re dead and they don’t feel it anymore. I think about them all the time. I miss them all the time and they probably have no idea. Why’d my life get to unfold further without them in it? Fuck, Sam was seventeen years old. My grandma died from a surgery she didn’t even need. Her heart gave up before it had to. Sometimes it feels like my heart is giving up, too. I don’t want to die, but I wish I could be wherever she is. I can still feel her warmth. I can still smell her hair. She was a foot and a half shorter than me, and when we hugged, I would bury my nose in her hair and inhale. Perhaps that was the last time I really breathed.

Grief has a funny way of making me talk to myself. I used to have Sam’s obituary hung on my kitchen wall. I would glance over at him while I cooked. I would ask him where he is and if he’s happy and if it hurts to die and if he knows we still talk about him. I have my grandma’s handwriting tattooed on my arm. I think back to the first time I read her “I love you now and always” signature and how trivial it seemed at the time, but now it’s part of my body. How many “I love you’s” did I hear and forget to engrave into my memories? Why didn’t I love them this hard when they were here? I guess I did. But I obsess over the hours I spent not calling them just to say it. I obsess over the minutes I could’ve spent lingering in their doorways, having one more conversation before I go, taking in the presence of their beating hearts.

I was laying on my grandma’s chest when hers stopped beating. She was scared and I was sobbing and it wasn’t a beautiful ending. She was in the room the day I was brought into this world, and I wonder if she felt the same intensity as I felt in the room the day she left it. Sam died alone in a car. I wonder if he was scared. I wish I could’ve held him, too. I wish I could tell him it was so cold and dark one night that you could almost see the northern lights from the end of the dock and he would have loved to have seen it. Maybe he did. I want to tell my grandma that I’m writing again. She tried convincing me for years to tell my stories, but I didn’t feel inspired until loss opened up a hole where my feelings now pour from. I don’t remember feeling much growing up, but now it’s all I ever do. 

Grief has changed me in many ways. It has made me more cynical. It’s made me funnier, actually. It’s made me love differently … it’s made me love better. I don’t know if heaven is real, but I think wherever my dead relatives are, they’re loving me back through the intense emotions that now constantly explode inside my body.

Grief, that little masochist

Grief doesn’t care what’s on your to-do list. She doesn’t care if you’ve got a busy morning ahead of you. She doesn’t care if it’s your birthday or Christmas morning. In fact, she prefers to visit during the holidays, that little masochist.

She’s come to obliterate your workday, spoil your dinner, run your shower till the hot water’s gone, curl up next to you in bed, and whisper into your ear as many things as she can remember about people you loved.

She's not as pretty as people said she'd be. They said she'd look like love but she looks more like irreverence. She strokes your head while you cry and then shames you for it. Oh come on, don’t be a baby. This isn't our first time.

She watches you distract yourself with books and shows and shallow conversations, and once you think you’ve gotten rid of her, she’s waiting at the foot of your bed. I’m back from the dead again, she says, and I’ve brought along more memories.

And you have to hear her out. And you have to say thank you afterwards. It’s all you’ve got left.

Pulling Strings

I'm always impressed when people say they can recall conversations and events as far back to when they were toddlers. I can remember all the birthdays of people who made even the slightest appearance in my life. I can recall my old girl scout troop number as well as the names of everyone in it. I can even recite the lyrics of the cheers I used to chant from the sidelines of football games in middle school. But I still feel as though there are years missing. So much of my life feels like vague events tied together by vivid flashbacks. Some of these images are burned into my skull like a thick, wax seal, holding in feelings that are too heavy to roam freely throughout my body. The rest pop up like strings: Pull here to remember.

I am young, no idea how young or what time of the year it is, and I am in my aunt’s basement in Ohio. My whole family is downstairs waiting out a tornado. The adults seem calm. It’s obvious that they knew everything was going to be okay. I’m playing it cool on the outside but on the inside I am petrified that we are all about to die.

I am fifteen and I’m working as a barista — my first real job. I’ve just made a cappuccino for an intimidating older man. He takes one sip, looks at me, tosses the full cup in the trash, splashing foamy milk all over the wall, and wordlessly walks out the door. He may as well have punched me.

I am still fifteen and I am at my dad’s office just outside of town. We are watching a set of four tornados touch down in the distance, miles away from us and what appears to be right above where our house sits in town. My mom is at home with Sam and my grandma. Scott is trying to call her but the phone lines have already been sucked up into the storm.

I am sixteen now, on the phone with my parents who are a little over an hour out of town. They need to come home right now. There's an ambulance coming. Scott is laying on the floor, convulsing, drenched in sweat. They get back just in time for his final Grand Mal seizure of the evening. I have my brother’s eyes and my dad’s eyes at the forefront of this memory: one set rolling back into his head, the other welling with tears.

I am eighteen and I’ve just woken up in a stranger’s bed, naked with a rolling headache. A toilet flushes from the other side of the bathroom door and I don’t wait to see who emerges. I’ve already gotten clothed enough to flee the house I didn't recognize, running barefoot down a street I’ve never seen.

I am nineteen and sitting on a paper sheet under buzzing, flourescent lights, worried my parents will be able to see my medical records. I'm not ready to explain that the "nice boy" I brought home for the holidays isn't very nice at all.

I am twenty, then twenty one, then twenty two, then twenty three answering a familiar phone call that is going to obliterate another little chunk of my heart. My recollections of each time I learned someone I love has died are so clear that I could write an entire book series on those sets of 60-second phone calls.

I get these clear, fleeting flashbacks that I replay in my head like a catchy song before they disappear again. Of course I have memories of the fresh air that was breathed into my body when I finally, truly fell in love or the sound of my grandma saying “Amy, look-ey here” whenever she’d place a tricky puzzle piece. Of course my temporal lobe isn’t this damp, musty room where I go to brood, but it seems like my ability to hold onto my most disturbing sensations is the strongest of all. I can’t stop pushing the buttons that force me to re-feel these things over and over again.

Bad memories sprout up like strings that are too tempting not to pull… and pull and pull and pull and pull until my brain is scattered into pieces. I braid the strings together and lay them out in the form of writing so that I can bare to look at them. There are so many now, but I like the way they weave together. Every year they're less tempting to pull.

The Many Faces of Empathy

I used to laugh louder. I would throw my head back and cackle at a joke I’d heard twenty times with not a thought about the sound of my laugh, my double chin or if I was being annoying.

Everything used to move me; the same hummingbirds gathering in my grandma’s garden every morning, an old man sitting in a park with no book, no phone and no companion, just his thoughts and the view in front of him… the news of somebody I’d never even met passing away, the sight of two people reuniting after a long time apart, the sound of a string quartet, the touch of an old, wrinkled hand or the taste of angel food cake covered in strawberries. These could all at one point in my life cover my body in goosebumps. I read once, “you cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness” and it reminded me that around the time all of my difficult experiences stopped feeling nearly as painful, nothing moved me anymore either.

Now every once in a while, I read a line in a book that stops me in my tracks and I reread it until the words stop looking like real words. When I listen to someone as they tell me something tragic, I search their eyes for whether or not their own story still moves them, if their words still feel like real words.

Jokes eventually get less funny. Alone time in the park eventually gets boring. Hummingbirds (and the old woman who put sugar in their feeders) eventually die. And words eventually stop looking like real words when you reread them too many times. I didn’t notice that cynicism had moved into my body until its bags were unpacked and suddenly I was pretending to cry at funerals so I looked as sad as everybody else. We’re all going to die, I’d think to myself, Why do we keep crying over and over again about death? I grieved loved ones by curling inside of myself, wilting into journals and outwardly not feeling anything at all. I didn’t notice I was protecting myself from happiness until my friends started asking permission to hug me and people looked at me with an expression that screamed, Are you even sad?

Something I’ve grown to appreciate now is that people know I won’t cry with them, yet they still come to me for comforting words. Despite the fact that the act of hugging sometimes makes my skin crawl, people love me enough to want to embrace me. I laugh with my husband like I’ve never laughed before because my dark sense of humor amuses him. I’m not actually that cynical at all. I’m just vulnerable differently.  

We don’t have to show empathy or be moved in the same way as anybody else. 

You’re Never the Same after Someone You Love Dies

You’re never the same after somebody you love dies. Almost like how you’re not the same person as you were before your first big love. Something deep within you changes. And when that love wandered off, it might’ve taken a bit of your innocence with it. But death… well death takes a lot more than your innocence. 

You’re never fully happy again after somebody you love dies, which is really sad for kids who experience loss when they’re young. It sounds extreme but it’s true. Of course you’ll experience happiness, belly laughs and those moments when you’re like, ‘Yes! This feeling, this is what being alive should feel like!’ And perhaps for a second you don’t remember that anything ever hurt you. That first big love never wandered off. That person is still alive.

Eventually you snap out of it. You’ll reflect on that moment of ecstasy and think, ‘God, the only thing that could have made that moment better is them. They should have been there for it.’ 

Memories of your first love fade with time, but grief comes back around for every holiday, every birthday, every milestone. You’re in a room full of laughter but you’ve not laughed as openly as you did before they died. You’re cracking jokes but you’re not as effortlessly funny as they were. You’re reading a book that someone recommended and it fucking sucks. It’s so poorly written that it’s comical and the person you lost would have never recommended such a shitty book. You’re saying “I do,” and of course you’re present for that moment but later on you’re in the bathroom, holding your wedding dress while you pee, alone with your thoughts and you get whacked again by grief. The only thing that could have made that moment better is them.

Nothing is the same after somebody you love dies, in fact everything is just a little bit worse. But you have to keep going. You have to tell jokes even if you’re not as funny. You have to laugh even if their impeccably-timed wit is nowhere in the room. You have to keep reading, even if it’s the same book over and over again because at least you know it’s not shitty. You get married and you cry tears of joy because you found a love that won’t wander off with any more pieces of you and even though the person you lost wasn’t there, it is still the best day of your life.

Maybe you have a baby someday. You grow a healthy human with your favorite person but even then, you’ll look into her big, beautiful blue eyes that have hardly seen anything and in your happy moment, the light still flickers. Because fuck, that person really should have been here to see this.

Years down the road you do the mental math and realize you’ve grieved them longer than you knew them. How is it possible that you’ve been half sad, half happy for so much of your life? 

On my especially sad days, I look around for other sad people. They’re everywhere if you look for them. There’s so much loss. So many of us are half sad, half happy at all times. It’s important to try and lead with the happy half and to show compassion to the people who can’t. 

That spark from your youth, ignited by blissful ignorance and the belief that you’re immortal, that spark is never coming back. There’s a shadow lurking behind joy and it’s waiting for its cue to interrupt. You can try to teach it manners, explain to it when and where it’s welcome, if it’s welcome at all. But grief doesn’t fade away the same as memories do.

You’re never the same after somebody you love dies. You’re softer. Or sometimes harder. You’re sadder. Sadder all the time compared to before. But that half sad thing, that whack of grief on your wedding night, the lurking shadow that has a habit of letting itself in without permission, that’s love too. It’s a pretty bleak form of love, but it’s the only kind you have left between you and that person who really should still be here.