Darla's Mom

Just before the pandemic shut down the schools we had made a trip to the Chumash village museum. Darla built a little Chumash town with applesauce and things but then it died when the cats came and Darla ate the rest of the applesauce.

Today we rebuild because it is the last week of school and it’s basically now or never. She is using peanut butter cookie dough and spaghetti.

Not exactly historically accurate, but fun!

Loss and Sorrow are old friends of mine. I suspect you know them too. They are always around at gatherings and whisper to us as we fall slowly to sleep.

When they speak it is never frivolous nonsense. Their soft voice rumbles, tumbles and thunders into conversation and transforms the world.

Loss and Sorrow have deep pockets where they hold our soft and delicate memories. When they sit with us, those memories are gently displayed and placed into our trembling hands to hold and examine.

Their whisper of death is a storm in the world now. Sorrow comes sliding in tears and pooling between our toes, around ankles, rising in currents and rivulets to our knees and slowing us so much that every move is like swimming in molasses.  The tide will recede though some of us are deeper in the water than others. Some will never be fully dry again, nor will they want to be.

Tears are holy water, this pain of loss is a gift. We have loved, we have lived and we have laughed while among those who caused our hearts to sing songs of unimaginable joy. The silence is deafening , broken only by sniffles and cries where laughter had been hours and days before. And so we tolerate the pain. We observe the ritual of grief. We share the memories.

We celebrate the uninvited Sorrow and remember what Loss has taken from us.

We can’t open the door to life, our mothers must do that for us. We do not know who will open the door out and back to Heaven or how long the door will remain locked to us. When someone we love cracks open the door of Heaven and slips out beyond our reach it feels like we have died also. The pain is a reminder that we remain.

So Chase, my most wanted and dearly loved cousin; my loud chef, and sweet man – I will grieve your passing. I will love on your family and pray extra hard. Do not rest in peace. Dance and sing and tell all the angels about your girls. Find Grandpa and tell him how hard you tried to have a daughter born in his honor on his birthday. Drink and eat and cook while you endure the very long wait for your loved ones to find you again.

And I thank God for your life and for being the occasional visitor therein as I sit and remember you with my friends, Sorrow and Loss.

I don’t know…. The quarentine has gotten to her . She made Lemonade with fresh lemons and dug out this dress from preschool.

Finding new ways to spend Quarentine days…

I keep forgetting to turn on the zoom so today Alicia texted me to remind me. Yay!

We connected the zoom to our TV. Do you think it’s big enough?

I hope you don’t get Covid-19.
If you do catch it,
I hope you are asymptomatic.
If you have symptoms, I hope they are mild.
If they are severe, I hope you are not miserable.
If they are severe:
I hope you survive.
If you do survive I hope you don’t have Post ICU trauma (a real form of PTSD)
If you survive I hope you don’t have long term lung problems or long term neurological problems (which is the source of the lack of taste symptom), or heart issues : all documented in some post severe COVID patients.

I don’t know what the other long term after effects are, nobody does.

So please, play it safe – as inconvenient and lonely as that might be.

Love when she knows how to Zoom better than I do, and use my paintings as a background