Crossing the Threshold

If you've followed this blog regularly, you've undoubtedly noticed that I'm not writing much. I can't. It's not that I'm too busy. I wouldn't describe it as writer's block. I guess I'd call it griever's block.


A year ago, when we met and talked with some fellow survivors, they warned us that the second year was worse than the first. I didn't accept that at the time. I couldn't accept it. It was unimaginable that anything could be worse than what I was experiencing right then. That the hole could get even deeper and even darker was incomprehensible.


But now, a year after the warning was issued, I understand what they meant. I don't know if I'd call it worse, but it's every bit as bad. It's just a different bad.


For one thing, you don't feel better, but you feel a sense of obligation to be better - to be less needy, less fragile, less isolated. You're not where you'd like to be emotionally. You're reluctant to continue to lean on friends and family who have supported you. And you can't help but feel that they must be  tiring of the lopsided friend/family equation.


Even if you are lucky, as we have been, to have many wonderful people step in to support you, in the second year you come to terms with the fact that there are people who have permanently left your life because of what has happened. In the beginning you think maybe they just don't know what to say and it will get easier. But as time goes on you realize it's something else. They are afraid to be near you. It's as if you are surrounded by a puddle of grief and if they get too close, they risk being soaked with your hurt, sorrow and anger. It's safer for them just to avoid you.  In the second year, it becomes painfully clear that some people are choosing to keep their distance.


All through the first year you feel exhausted; like you've been running a marathon, but the finish line remains elusive. And then sometime at the start of the second year there is the horrible realization - there is no finish line. You'll be running for your life for the rest of your life. If the first year was marked by the shock and pain of sudden loss, it seems the second year will be marked by an acceptance of the unrelenting nature of grief.


I think I crossed the threshold into this new grief at the beginning of the school year without even realizing it.  The beginning of the school year was always an uplifting time in our family. It was exciting,  if a little a bittersweet,  to watch the girls start off  another year of growth and possibility. I was active at their schools, so the pace of my life would pick up in a way I found fun and rewarding. And Peter would meet a new class that he would bond with and mold. I viewed it as our unofficial new year and would look forward to everything the year would bring.


After Emma died the start of the school year lost that sense of renewal and possibility for me. 

I guess it was a desire to recover that old feeling of a fresh start that made Peter and I want to attend church for the service that celebrated the start of the church school year. We've not made it to church much in the last year. It has been too full of painful reminders. Emma was active in the church, singing with the Junior Choir, performing in the church musicals and pageants, serving as a Junior Deacon, and accompanying the choir on flute. I am so keenly aware of her absence when I am there. And the things I always liked best about our church are now what make it most difficult to be there. The sermons and celebrations we used to love now inevitably strike a painful chord.


Nonetheless, we ventured back to church on the second Sunday in September hoping for a fresh start and a renewed sense of peace and comfort from a place that had always provided that to us. As we left the house, I thought about grabbing some tissues. I had not made it through a church service without tears since Emma died, and since the start of September I hadn't even made it through a day without tears. But I stubbornly chose not to grab the tissues. I wanted this day to be different, new, and somehow I thought having tissues was setting myself up for failure.


The service started with two baptisms (POW!). The sermon was incredibly relevant, talking about crossing life's thresholds and finding possibility in life. It was what we wanted. It was what had brought us there that Sunday. But that message couldn't compete with the realization that becomes clearer to me every day - that I was pushed over a threshold a year ago into a life that I didn't choose, that I would never choose, and that there's no going back (SLAM!).


By the time the adorable church school kids paraded into the church at the end of the service, I was pretty much sobbing. Tears were streaming down my face and my nose was running like a faucet.  I couldn't imagine why I thought it was a good idea to deliberately not bring tissues. I was trapped in the middle of a pew, so there was no getting out to go to the bathroom. I picked up my purse and rifled through it, hoping for the miracle of tissues. We were in church, after all. Alas, there was no miracle and all I could find was a pair of socks that Sarah had thrown in my purse after trying on shoes the day before. By this time I was desperate, and much to Peter's horror and puzzlement, I took out a sock, wiped my tears, and blew my nose in it.


And just to prove that hope does spring eternal, I am recording this story with the hope that sometime in the future the veil of darkness will have lifted enough that the part of this story I most remember is blowing my nose in that stinky old sock.

Rocky Horror Connection - Finale

I realized after I published my last post that I didn't tell the ending to the story. After the show, my friend was backstage talking with some of the performers and she related the encounter she had had with Emma's friends, and they all remembered Emma, too. They remembered that she had come to their show the year before; that she had dressed up as Frankenfurter and posed for photos with them after the show; and they knew that she had died. When they saw her obituary in the newspaper, they knew that she was that girl that from the audience who, for some reason, they always remembered.

Rocky Horror Connection

A friend and former colleague told me this story and I thought I would share it. I worked with this friend about 20 years ago. She had met Emma when we first brought her home, but we had been out of touch for the last 15 years, so she had not seen Emma since she was a baby. About two months before Emma died we met for lunch in the town where we both now worked. It had been a very long time since we had seen each other and we did a lot of catching up. Emma was a junior in high school and we had just gotten back from college visiting, so we talked a lot about who Emma was, her love of music and what she was looking for in a school. Still, my friend would never had said she knew Emma.

After Emma died, my friend found the FaceBook tribute page that was made by some of Emma's friends. She read through the comments and scrolled through the pictures and she said that she felt that she came to know Emma just a little more through the memories people shared. But still, she would never have said that she knew Emma.


That's why what happened to her last fall was so amazing. She was helping out at a production of the Rocky Horror Picture Show at a local theater.  The theater was short-staffed and she had volunteered to help at the last minute. As she greeted patrons, a group of teenagers arrived in full Rocky Horror regalia. For some reason, they made her think of a picture she had seen of Emma on FaceBook several months before. In fact, the feeling was so strong she felt compelled to ask them if they knew Emma, even though she knew the question might seem very strange. "Do you guys happen to know Emma von Euler?" she asked. Big smiles broke across their faces. "Yes! That's why we're here! We're here for Emma. How did you know?" "I don't know," she said. "I just had a feeling."


I don't know about you, but I'm just amazed by that story. How did she know? Could it be that Emma left a mark so strong it is palpable? And how is it that Emma continues to connect people even after she's gone? These are the good questions, the comforting questions, I ask myself each day.