[Excerpted from 57-Fridays: Losing Our Daughter, Finding Our Way by Myra Sack Ó Monkfish Book Publishing Company 2024]
I spend most hours of most days sitting in Havi’s rocking chair. Her aunts string two long rows of photos, clipped onto a piece of brown twine, on the wall and I sit looking at them. They show her smiling, sleeping, laughing, cuddling — and each one is more compelling than the next. It is easy to lose myself in these photos as I try desperately to remember the sounds, smells and feelings from each pictured moment. Havi’s room is safe and peaceful. I fill jars with her Aveeno soap, Dreft detergent, fancy hotel shampoos and calendula lotion so that her room smells like her. With the shade open, it is warm and bright and alive in a way that feels so much like Havi’s spirit. I am not sure what I believe yet about where she is, but I could feel her in here.
Oh, but of course, it isn’t the same as having her with me. It doesn’t even come close. I had no idea how much I’d ache for her body against mine, how every cell in my body is programmed to hold her, feed her, walk with her, bathe her, cuddle and sleep with her. Without her, my body feels empty, confused, neglected, disoriented. My movements feel unnatural. I forget which way to turn when I walk out of my room; my arms ache without her in them; I wonder how I’ll sing her to sleep without her warm body against my chest; I cross and uncross my legs at the kitchen table, trying to remember how to sit without her between my knees. I outline her hair and her face in the air with my fingers. When I close my eyes tightly, I can almost feel her. But almost has never felt so big. The presence of her absence1 fills the spaces where she used to be; the presence of her absence, that is what we live with now.
“It’s so big, isn’t it? The presence of her absence,” Dr. Jo says to us the first time we speak to her after Havi dies. “As soon as I heard your voices, I could feel it all the way across the country.” She is right. Havi’s absence is everywhere. And I hate it. I hate what her absence represents. The permanence. How quiet and dull her absence feels, compared to the real her. I hate that we are robbed of any future with her and that we somehow have to adjust to her absence. I don’t want to adjust to it. I only want her back.
That first week after Havi dies, I run one afternoon through the arboretum — the nearby 281-acre public park with thousands of plants and dozens of trails to explore. I stay on the trails that are mostly hidden from the walking paths. I don’t want to see other people, especially people who don’t know Havi. Strangers. They feel unsympathetic and cold and represent to me the world moving on without Havi in it. It starts to snow. Instinctively, I stick my tongue out to try and catch a flake, and I smile. Havi loved to do that. She pulls me out of my bitterness and self-pity, and brings a smile to my face.
Later that day, when I return from my run, I shower and then sit in Havi’s room to write. I am on my third journal now. Writing allows me to connect, visit, integrate Havi into my days. It keeps her in the front row of my life. Where she belongs. And I want to write for Kaia, too. So that maybe one day she will read all about this crazy, tragic and beautiful time of our lives. Only if she wants.
We minimize the importance of continuing bonds in American culture, I think in part because it makes us feel too deeply, and in doing so, it throws into question our very being.
I am reading a lot, too, trying to make sense of what I feel and believe. I read only what Dr. Jo recommends on her website’s reading list, and anything that Charlie and Blyth suggest. Francis Weller’s Wild Edge of Sorrow, John O’Donohue’s Bless the Space Between Us and Mitch Albom’s Tuesdays with Morrie. I read one and then turn to another of the three, over and over. That combination of grief literature, poetry and memoir helps me understand my grief, and gives me language for my feelings. Language enables me to educate others on real-life grief. This is empowering.
I make a blueberry smoothie every morning. I like hearing the familiar sound of the blender, and I like how it makes me feel like I am still taking care of Havi, nourishing her somehow. We minimize the importance of continuing bonds in American culture, I think in part because it makes us feel too deeply, and in doing so, it throws into question our very being. But without such rituals, we risk losing connection to those we can’t see anymore. And I am not going to do that — not with my daughter. So I make her a blueberry smoothie just as I had when she was still with us, only a few weeks earlier, and I trust that I am not crazy for doing it.
Kaia doesn’t sleep well that first week after Havi dies, and Matt and I are exhausted from staying up with her. She is missing Havi, too, yearning for her big sister without the language to express it. She plays in Havi’s room, crawls onto her rocking chair and stares at Havi’s photos for long stretches of time. My heart breaks watching Kaia grieving with us, and I trust that missing Havi is far healthier than minimizing Havi’s passing. Or pretending her away.
So we decide that, at least for the time being, we will keep Havi alive in the only ways we can: through placing photographs of her throughout the house, enjoying blueberry smoothies and muffins every morning, displaying bouquets of purple flowers, listening to Havi’s favorite music and keeping up our weekly Shabbirthday ritual. These powerful reminders become a lesson to us that we rely on every day: Symbols, colors and meaningful physical manifestations of the people we’ve lost help us send our love for them out into the world. They serve as a reminder that they existed, they still exist, their energy cannot be destroyed.
