All in a Week: Life and Death

All in a Week: Life and Death

(ETA: This was written flying to Kenya on Friday, December 4, 2015. I realize I have broken every blogging rule by composing a small essay.)

I used to blog.

I was by no means a “blogger”, that is not a word I would have used to describe my little travel writings or myself. But nonetheless, I used to chronicle my (mis)adventures of my world travels to share with others. It started out simply, just emails to friends and family that Kristina and I knew during our first backpacking trip to Europe. Those emails became much more popular than I could have ever imagined, being forwarded to people I didn’t even know. It later morphed into a blog (this thing here), which as basic as it is, served as a placeholder for me to share my experiences with those who were interested in coming along for the ride. But mostly, it was for me. I have spent a lot of the last decade of my life abroad, being exposed to things and places and people that have been radically different from anything I have ever encountered, and writing these blogs has given me a mechanism to process these experiences and connect with those at home. Sometimes it was funny; it was often fucking insane, and sometimes it was hard.  The blogs have also given me a fun written record of memories and details that would have been otherwise lost with the erosion of time.

Over the past two years, many people have asked about my blog. “Why don’t you blog anymore?” “I miss your blog!” and etc. They always surprised and flattered me, but I would always respond with something along the lines of,  “Oh, it is so much work.” Or, “Oh, it is so hard to blog while I am working abroad, with the poor Internet strength, intermittent electricity,” blah blah blah, bullshit. But really, none of that was true.

If you have never read anything I’ve written, and take a quick cursory look through my blog, you will see that the last entry was from over two years ago. It isn’t that I haven’t traveled or had insane fucking crazy experiences since then, in fact, it is the opposite.

My last blog entry was over two years ago, (October 2013) and was from my first time to Kenya, and my very first “blog” email (10 years ago!!) was during a literally life-altering backpacking trip to Europe when I was 20. It is ironic that I am writing this now, because I am currently making an almost identical journey to the one I did to Europe back in 2005; flying from Texas (in this case Dallas, and not Houston) to London, except this time I will be traveling onward to Kenya. I remember Kristina and I thought that the flight would never end; it seemed at times we had entered a new level of hell, in disbelief that we could still possibly be on the damn airplane. But with the passage of time, and more travel experience, a hop to London has become a quick trip for me. The 15-16 hour hauls on the other hand, followed by an additional flight, are the real depths of hell. Reflecting on this experience while I make my way to London serves as an interesting comparison for how much I have changed as a person, and as a traveler in the last ten years, in every conceivable way. This trip also marks my 8^th trip to Kenya.

Which brings me to my last blog entry: October 2013. What am I trying to get at here? Why the long absence? Well, what the vast majority of people reading those Kenyan blog entries from October 2013 didn’t know at the time was that my Mom had just very recently been diagnosed with ALS, a terminal condition. My trip to Kenya for work was already planned, and after a few flight changes, I ended up getting on that plane to Kenya less than two weeks later. Those two weeks, and really the following few months, are an utter fog for me. I got on the plane less than two weeks out from the moment that will forever demarcate my life, as my sister and I call it: Before ALS and After ALS. To add to the mix, my Grandpa died days before I got on the plane to Kenya. In many ways, it was an excruciating journey for me, in every conceivable way. I didn’t know what the future held, I was scared out of my fucking mind, and I was sad. Sad doesn’t really articulate the feeling I had, it was a deep level of anguish, anger, fear, and grief.

Grief.

Grief for what would come, and what would come after, and what I, and all of my family, would inevitably lose. At that point being just weeks into the diagnosis, we knew very little, except that ALS is an incredibly unpredictable disease. The day when the neurologist told me my Mom’s diagnosis (I was alone and the first to know), I immediately asked him, “How long?” He said, 1-3 years. It was like taking a bullet. In that moment, a part of me died, and was so irrevocably changed, and I will never get it back. I walked away as another person entirely: Kimberly After ALS. We now know that those statistics were slightly outdated, and that the prognosis from diagnosis is around 3-5 years.

So, I went to Kenya. I was in a haze of confusion and grief and barely functioning. I look back on those first few weeks, and am unclear how I functioned as an adult human; it was almost as if I was in an amnesiac state. How did I get here? What the fuck is happening? Why to my Mom? Why to me?

I was 27.

But, I blogged. Everyone expected me to blog my adventures while traveling, so in part to maintain and hold onto that last bit of my innocent Before ALS former life, I blogged about my impressions and experiences in Kenya. Very, very few people knew about the diagnosis at that time. I struggled writing the blogs I did, they didn’t feel authentic or true to what I was actually experiencing. Here I was, doing all of this cool shit and writing about it, when really, I was in utter emotional turmoil. My life was upside down and I didn’t know which way was up, but I couldn’t write about that in my blog. So instead, I wrote about elephants. And getting stranded at the airport, and all of the other crazy shit that happened on that trip. All of it was true, but what I didn’t write about was that I wasn’t really experiencing much of it, I was just floating through it, and couldn’t write about what was actually going on. We didn’t officially announce to the world about my Mom’s diagnosis until Thanksgiving, about 5 weeks after we received the diagnosis.

My first day in Kenya, on the encouragement of an incredibly supportive colleague to whom I will be eternally grateful, Julia, I went to an elephant orphanage rather than actually working. It is for baby elephants whose mothers have died due to poaching, illness, or some other reason. They raise them and then release them back into the wild when old enough. It was sad. It was fucking sad. But it was also extremely cute and sweet, and it buoyed me in a way I didn’t anticipate. I cried watching these baby elephants; I kept thinking, they are surviving, without their Mamas. All while knowing in the forefront of my mind about what my future would inevitably entail, and far too fucking soon than is fair. It offered me a catharsis I didn’t know I needed.

After writing a few blogs during that trip to Kenya, I just couldn’t bring myself to “fake it” on the blog anymore. My blogs have always been very real and uncensored, but I didn’t feel like I could be fully real, nor was I even ready to face everything. In the intervening two years since those last posts, I haven’t been able to bring myself to blog until now. I have changed. I am not the same person as I was then, not necessarily for the worse, just different. I have struggled to bridge some of my “Before ALS life” with my current life. I have also struggled to blog because my work brings me into contact with situations that aren’t really “bloggable.” I’ve seen things that I didn’t know how to put into words, and didn’t know how to convey to the people (however few) who read my blog what it was that I was experiencing. I also didn’t want to trivialize these people’s and women’s experiences, pretending that I understood, or be part of a “poverty porn” rhetoric. I also struggled immensely with feeling simultaneously grateful for my Mom being diagnosed with ALS in the United States, while also feeling guilty because so many people around the world have such deeper levels of pervasive suffering. My first trip to India for work in January 2015 hit me hard emotionally with some of the experiences I had there, and exacerbated a stage I had entered of, everything fucking sucks, there is so much suffering in the world, so much hard and sad shit, it is just not fair. So I closed myself off from this blog. I never wrote about my crazy and incredibly scary adventure to the Taj Mahal I had, or puking all over India, or anything else; they all seemed trivial and meaningless in the grand scheme of things.

I have had other amazing fun, non-work trips since then, including the, “Year of Travel” with my Mom and other family members. In 12 months, we went to Disneyworld, Europe (Italy, Greece), Hawaii (Kauai and Oahu), Disneyland, and New Orleans. I didn’t blog a single word. I thought about it, but I couldn’t bring myself to actually do it. Why? I may never know for sure. In some ways, I knew I would love and appreciate the memories later, being able to read about the granular details of a an amazing meal on the cliffs of Santorini while watching the sun go down, or a crazy drive through Tuscany, or that time Michael checked his bag to the wrong destination, or figuring out how the fuck to get luggage and a wheelchair through Venice or up to an 8^th floor without an elevator. I was also afraid to record some of these experiences out of fear that it would also bring me face to face with a reality I wasn’t quite ready to confront. I realize now that it doesn’t matter that I don’t have blogs or written accounts of these adventures. Because I will always have them, just for me. And maybe that is why I didn’t write them down, because I needed them to grieve and to accept, to remember, to hold them close to my heart, selfishly not sharing them with anyone else, and to remain present in those moments.

Fast forward to today: I sit in seat 52H; traveling from Dallas to London, and later will be flying onto Nairobi. I began this journey much like I did my first trip to Kenya two years ago; in pain, mourning, grief-stricken, confused. I am also coincidentally making a return trip to the baby elephant orphanage.

Why did I decide to put words to paper again? Because I realized this is a catharsis I need; even if no one ever reads it. Or maybe someone will read it who will get some help or solace from my writing who are experiencing similar situations. There are very few people who understand what it means to lose a parent at such a young age, at a time when you have so many significant life milestones yet to experience. I can count on one hand the individuals in my life who can really understand what it means, or what it means to love someone with a prolonged terminal illness. Since my Mom’s diagnosis, I have sought out every written account of loss, anticipatory grief, ALS, Mother Loss, death, grieving, etc. that I can find to help me make some sense of my experiences. Maybe these words here will reach someone who is also in this small, stupid, fucking shitty club of which I am now a member.

The past week of my life has been one of the hardest weeks of my life to date, eclipsed by very few other weeks. Since my Mom’s diagnosis, the holidays have become a time for me that include a lot of anticipatory anxiety, I fear about being present, stretching the moments, making them last, making sure my Mom is ok. This Thanksgiving was hard in ways I couldn’t anticipate, but don’t feel like I can go into detail about here. I also found out that day that one of the golden retrievers that my sister used to have with her ex, had cancer. My beloved Sadie.

When I heard the news it was like the wind was knocked out of me. In part because I have very little emotional reserves to take on new grief at this current stage in my life. And also, because I loved that dog in ways that most people probably can’t, or won’t, ever understand. The dogs (Sadie and Sam) ultimately went to live with their Dad. I maintained a connection and relationship with the Puppos as I lovingly refer to them as, in the intervening years. I even still have photos of them up in my house. Those dogs, particularly Sadie, brought me through some of the worst moments of my life in the first 5 years of their lives. I was never raised with dogs, but they introduced me to a type of pure, unadulterated, incredible love that I didn’t know I lacked. They made me realize I had a dog-shaped hole in my heart.

I reeled for a few days after the events surrounding Thanksgiving, including hearing about my beloved Sadie Mae, my “Macers”. I thought, I have to go see her; I need to go see her. But, I had a trip to Kenya to prepare for, and one of my best friends, Kristina, was about to have a baby any second. I thought there would be more time. We always think we will have more time.

In the intervening days, I, “threw my back out,” whatever the hell that means. I couldn’t move, walk, or do anything without excruciating pain. I was completely incapacitated. The levels of stress I was experiencing physically manifested in my back. Cris, my boyfriend, forced me to go to urgent care and quite literally physically got me there. They fixed me up with some injections and lovely narcotics, thankfully, because just a few hours later (Monday), Kristina would go into labor with her second baby. Cris has to drive me to Tacoma to get to the hospital, thanks Valium, and Cris!

For some context for those of you who do not know, I am a Doula (an emotional labor support person) and have seen a lot of babies come into this World (40-50) through my year as a Doula at a Community Health Center, supporting friends through their labors, and through my current job, where I have seen many babies born in facilities where we work. But it never gets old for me; every birth is different and amazing in its own way. I love birth. I am passionate about women and babies, maternity care, maternal health, and supporting women through such a momentous and life-altering time in their lives. I was very thankful Kristina wanted me there. While I wasn’t much use due to my back, I was there as I watched this perfect little life come into this world. Babies make everything better. They remind you of the beauty of life; of life and of death. Just as people come into this world, someone else departs.

The unique part of this birth for me was that it would be the first birth I would attend After ALS (other than the birth of my nephew, which I missed…but that’s another story…). I knew going in that it might be difficult for me. Her birth ended up being wonderful and without complications, and I was so happy to have been included in such a special and important life moment. I was able to photograph the birth so that they (and someday, Reese) are able to relive such an emotionally intense and wonderful day. While it was in some ways difficult for me, seeing Kristina’s mom participate in the birth and wondering what my future births might or might not look like, it was mostly just joyful and full of love. It was another reminder of the many small and large ways in which my life has irrevocably changed.

Two days later (Thursday), I received a text from Mike saying that Sadie was going to be put down that day due to the cancer taking over her body and her suffering. I immediately broke into tears. Heaving, hard, heavy sobs.

I was crying for Saders, and for reason I wasn’t even quite sure. I was a wreck all morning. I wanted so badly to go and see her one last time and say goodbye to this beloved animal who had changed my life in so many unexpected and wonderful ways I am still unable to articulate. I went back and forth. I wasn’t sure that it was fair to intrude into their grief. My sister encouraged me to reach out and ask; I did, and immediately Mike said that I could of course come say goodbye to Sadie. I broke down again, from a mixture of relief and dread. I also broke down because this tidal wave of grief was bigger than Sadie.

How was I going to do this? How was I going to say goodbye to her? I wanted more time. I thought I would have more time. Don’t we all? Don’t we always think we will have more time? We always want more time.

I went a few hours later. I was extremely anxious that she and Sammy (her brother, who I also love dearly) might not remember me. It had been a few years since I had seen them last due to complicated life circumstances. As soon as I walked in, I knew Sammy remembered me. He immediately licked me and kissed my face over and over and wouldn’t leave me alone. My heart both burst with love and also broke into a million pieces. After spending some time loving on Sammy, I went over to Sadie. She was lying on her bed, mostly sedate, with labored breathing. As I crouched down and said, “Hi Sadie Mae, I missed you so much” she opened her eyes, and wagged her tail. I knew that was a huge effort for her physically; I also knew in that moment that she still remembered me. I laid over her and buried my face in her scruff and cried. I told her how much I loved her, how much she meant to me, how much I would miss her, what a good girl she has been, that it will all be over soon and that it is going to be ok.

Sadie’s ears were always my favorite part of her. Super soft, with a layer of curly hair over her straight, soft golden fur. In times of turmoil, or just when I wanted to love her, I would touch her ears. In the hour I spent with her, I spent most of my time touching her ears, stroking her forehead and between her eyes, scratching her back a few times and touching her tail, holding her paws, that still had tufts of hair sticking out between her pads. I was trying my hardest in a brief instance to take in all of her before she was gone, taking a mental snapshot of her. I sat there and thought, how do I say goodbye? How do I let her go? I knew she was suffering and it was the right decision, but it doesn’t lessen the grief and sense of impending loss. I wanted more time; for her to sit on my lap, as she always had when she thought she was a tiny lap dog, or to attempt to run with her for her to only be naughty and lurch forward to chase whatever caught her attention. I wasn’t sure how I was going to physically leave her, knowing I would never see her again.  This may be hard for people to understand, the depth of love I have for Sadie. She wasn’t my dog, after all. But they were in my life for many, many years; they were my surrogate Doggalogs. My sister said to me later that day, with the exception of her Dad, I might have loved her more than anyone else in the world. In the past few years not seeing them was a struggle; I thought about them constantly, I still have pictures of them on my fridge.

I took photos of her during my last hour with her. I wanted to capture her spirit as she was, and focused on her features that I loved the most. Going through those photos later was an incredibly difficult task for me to do, but I’ve found that photography is an important outlet for me and is very healing. On some of our most difficult and emotionally charged days (good and bad, births, weddings, deaths) so much happens and people rarely remember most of it. Even on bad and sad days, it is empowering to look back and think, “I survived that, I made it through.” And on the good days, it is wonderful to look back and say, “I forgot about that!” or “ I don’t even remember that!!”

Sadie’s last few hours of course brought up a tidal wave of grief for the future for me and my family, for the unknown, for what may come, for the unknown that will come, and for the all consuming grief and loss that I can’t quite predict.

It got me to thinking: How do we let anyone, whether it be a dog, friend, or family member, know how much they mean to us? How do we let them know how pivotal their love and relationship have been to the core and foundation of who we are? How do we physically let someone go, making the decision that it is time? One last kiss, one last pet, hug, squeeze, nuzzle. We will ALWAYS want one more. Mike’s wife graciously offered to let me stay until the end when the vet came to the house to put her down, and while I will always appreciate that and it meant so much to me, I knew I had to go. I would always want more time. Always. There would never be enough time. I had to come to a place, literally wedged and crouched on the floor between their Christmas tree and my beloved Macer Mae, that it was time for me to say goodbye. I had to be confident that she knew I loved her, and that I loved her deeply and purely, and hope that my brief presence during her last few hours on earth, brought her some comfort and peace. When I got up, she lifted her head and looked at me; who knows if it was for me, but I went back, gave her an additional nuzzle, hug, and kiss, and whispered that I would always love her, that she meant more to me and brought me more pure joy than she will ever know, and that it would be over soon, and that I will never, ever, forget her.

I will always miss her.

I left and was a mess the rest of the night. I had to leave for Kenya the next morning. I immediately went to my sister’s house, because I knew she understood my grief. Sometimes all you need is for someone to just sit and say; I know. This is hard. This fucking sucks and is shitty. This is a fissure that will never heal. Sometimes you don’t need, or even want to hear that it will get easier, that it is part of some grand plan, but just that it is fucking hard and unfair. Our conversations of course wandered to the present set of grief we experience on a daily basis with our Mom having a terminal illness.

I told her that I wasn’t sure that I had the capacity to take on any additional grief or sadness at this moment. The past 7 days had been a roller coaster of emotions; within one week, I watched a new life come into this world, and said goodbye to my favorite and beloved doggie friend, Sadie.

Later that night, I realized that I, and all of us, do have the ability to take on more grief, whether we want to or not. Just when I think I am at my limit and at rock bottom, I can reach new depths of sadness and grief, because grief is like love. Love is a sponge. It is ever increasing and expanding and knows no limits. Grief is love. Deep grief, is deep love. Just as love can continually expand, so can grief, because it means we loved someone deeply to our absolute core.

Grief is the price of love and life; there would be no grief without love.

I woke up the next morning at an ungodly hour for my flight. My first thoughts waking were, “I am mother fucking tired.” Immediately proceeded by, “she is gone.” This caused me to erupt into another set of heaving sobs and tears. I shortly thereafter found my shirt from the day before, smelled it, touched her soft golden hairs left behind, and held it close to my heart and face.

And I cried. I cried for Sadie. I cried for me. I cried for this unknown future that both my family and me are facing. Sadie’s death has tapped into a reservoir of grief I am living with on an ongoing basis that I didn’t realize was bubbling up so close to the surface. It is hard to be confronted by death when someone who is so beloved to you is living with a progressive terminal illness.

But, we all are terminal. We always think there is more time. There will always be more or enough time, of this we are sure. But there might not be, and we have to accept that. There will never be enough time.

I was talking to a new and very dear friend of mine Jessica, whom I work with, while at the airport. She also travels extensively. We both take the opportunity, while hurling ourselves across the planet in a metal tube with 350 other humans, to decompress, cry, process, accept, heal, and grieve whatever it is that we need to at that moment. I told her that in my mind I have an imaginary bubble around me, and the other 350 passengers on the plane can’t actually see me epically losing my shit, that they can’t see the pile of snotty Kleenexes spilling off my tray table onto the floor. I at least try to have the courtesy to wait until the lights are off, ha! Traveling with me is FUN! So this is what I did on my trip to London: epically lost my shit, used up way too many Kleenexes and wrote my heart out.

I don’t know when I will blog next. Maybe it will be about me getting stuck in the middle of nowhere BFE Kenya, or maybe it will be about my process with grief. I think this blog will evolve with me. While yes, many of my entries will still continue to be “trivial” in the grand scheme of things, I have come to learn and appreciate so much in the last two years that life is lived along the spectrum, during the earth shatteringly difficult times, as well as the hilarious, laugh until we cry and over the top ridiculous times. The later will help get me through the former. Just like my life the past seven days, from welcoming and loving a sweet baby girl into this world, to saying goodbye to my sweet and loved Sadie girl. That is life, we live mostly in the in-between, but we have to remember the edges of life too.  

This entry has been long, and rambling, and I probably waxed poetically about things no one else cares about. But I realize that these blogs, this processing, is vital to my survival. Some will read this and think it is too personal; why the need to share it publically? I don’t know, it probably is. But that is what this blog has always been. I also felt like I couldn’t pick up two years later without crossing the bridge I have been on and explaining some of my story. I didn't feel like I would ever be able to blog again if I wasn’t able to be real, so here it is. If you haven’t read my ramblings before, you will see that they are uncensored, unabashedly real, and often unspell checked. I have intentionally never edited the blogs I wrote my first summer in Europe, while I was hastily hammering out as much as I could on a computer with a French keyboard, not taking the time to spellcheck because I was spending five Euros an hour to be on that damn computer (remember those days?!), and because I was too poor to put in more Euros and take the time to spellcheck or figure out how to change the spellcheck to English. I could edit them now, make them a little more coherent and eloquent, and remove some F-bombs; but then what is the point? They would no longer be me, nor would they represent who I was at that moment in my life.

This trip also is the very last trip I will take with my first passport. The first stamp was from London Gatwick, from my European backpacking trip. I have had pages added overtime, and it is now nearly full even with the additional pages. It is full of visas and stamps from amazing places; representing my time living in other places, and my crazy and wonderful and life changing adventures in nearly 35 countries. It is weathered, and a bit beaten and is definitely showing its age. But, it also represents so much of the journey I have been on in the past 10 years. I am who I am today, presently hurling myself towards Kenya, because of that first summer in Europe, realizing that the world is a big fucking, magical and wonderful, and also tragic place, and that I must see as much of it as I can, in as much time as I am given.

While this entry represents a significant departure from my original travel musings, it is also a representation of that fact that I am a different person than I was then. I have lost a sense of innocence that I will never get back. Sometimes I wonder; would I want that innocence back? I often think, no, I am who I am; the good, the bad, and the ugly from all of my experiences.

I saw a quote a few days ago that deeply resonated with me, “Every next level of your life will demand a different you.” Not good, not bad, just different.

Deep grief has taught me so much about deep love, living, dying, and time.

Much love to you all. <3