Another Tuesday Night In April

Content warnings: hospitals/medical stuff (including needle mention), asthma/lung stuff, death, near-death experience. 

 

I spent most of Tuesday night/Wednesday morning in the hospital.

 

There's a lot to unpack here, and I'm mostly writing this to sort things out in my brain.

 

On Easter Sunday, we went to the in-laws' place for an Easter meal. This had been planned for a couple of weeks, so we dutifully woke up early to make the drive out. When we arrived, we found that 90% of the family had either had a cold within that past 48 hours or were actively in the throes of one. My husband's sister sounded like she'd been chain-smoking for centuries. If it wasn't for that, we may never have known. Nobody said a single word about being sick. Even the sister said at first that she'd just lost her voice yelling during a hectic card game the night before. Less than five minutes later, she was saying she caught it from her son.

 

Within hours, my husband was showing symptoms. He took it upon himself to sleep in the spare room to spare me. He had a very sore throat and complained of headache and joint pain -- just a regular, annoying cold.

 

Tuesday night, April 7th.

 

I was sitting at the kitchen table playing Core Keeper (I LOVE THIS GAME) and my husband was beside me at his desk, playing Valheim/Helldivers, depending which of our friends on the Discord call needed more help at the moment.

 

I started coughing more than usual around 7:30 or so and my immediate thought was 'oh no, I'm getting that cold too.' But the cough felt different than both my usual chronic cough and the cough I get when I have a cold. It was an abnormally dry, persistent cough that moved absolutely nothing, and it was happening after every. single. breath I took. Not intermittently, not every other breath, every single breath.

 

I noted that that was weird, but kept drinking my tea and kept playing the game. I took shallower breaths to try to avoid triggering the cough, and while that sort of helped, that also meant I was not getting as much oxygen. Focusing on the game became harder and harder, even though I tried to switch to more mindless in-game tasks like gardening. Finally I quit the game and rested my head on the table. Breathing was taking every ounce of my focus and I no longer had enough spare brainpower to hold up my head.

 

I slid to the floor and literally crawled to get my blue inhaler (maybe ten feet away, if that?). I laid on the ground for ten minutes trying to gather enough energy just to shake it. I managed one dose, at 9:30pm. My lungs were burning, like a chemical burn, like there was acid in my chest. I was trying to breathe slowly and calmly to avoid triggering a panic response on top of whatever was already happening.

 

The entire time I lay on that floor with the inhaler in my hand, I kept thinking of the girl who lived in the room next to mine in my freshman year of college. She was a bit of a writer too, energetic and empathetic, with that determined zest for life that many depression survivors have. I remembered reading the news stories that ran after she died of influenza in January 2020. Healthy to dead in eight hours. She had only been married for a few months. She had been so happy for those few months.

 

Was this what influenza felt like? Or was I just overreacting again?

 

My husband asked if I should go to the hospital. I said 'maybe,' and started packing a bag. Phone charger, extra sweaters, extra pair of warm socks, water bottle, my daily meds in case I wasn't home by morning.

 

Around this point, my chest muscles were becoming fatigued. After every exhalation my muscles were so exhausted that I didn't have the physical energy to trigger an inhalation. I would sit there in a fully exhaled state for a full 5-8 seconds before my automatic nervous system would kick in and force an inhalation. This was happening every breath. I considered calling an ambulance to transport me due to the fatigue, but the hospital was less than ten minutes away, and the decision to go to the hospital had given me enough adrenaline to stand. I drove myself.

 

By then it was 10:15. There were exactly three other cars in the entire parking lot. The place looked abandoned. I parked as close to the entrance as I legally could, shuffled very slowly to the door (wondering the entire time if I was overreacting by coming here), pressed the 'night call' button, and lurched through the automatic doors into a dark and completely deserted emergency room. A nurse appeared at a door to the side.

 

"Are you here as a patient?" she asked. I had no breath left to respond, so I just nodded. She beckoned me into the room behind her and got me registered and triaged, then led me straight into a room.

 

I fully expected them to do bloodwork and 'diagnose' me with anemia, the way every other doctor in the country has for sixteen years. But no needle appeared. The nurse listened to my chest in several places with a stethoscope, then the doctor came in and did the same thing. He quickly formed the opinion that I had a virus, and I feared I was going to be sent home to struggle, but I was not officially released. The doctor swabbed my nose for a COVID test, then left. After some interval of time (I was so focused on breathing that I didn't track how long), the nurse returned and deposited a pile of inhalers and a cup of water on my little side table.

 

It was then that I learned I was having a legitimate asthma attack.

 

She gave me a spacer and careful instructions on how many doses to take of each inhaler, then brought me a cup of applesauce with a Reactine and a Prednisone crushed and stirred into it (because I can't swallow pills). She returned yet again with a needle -- not for bloodwork, but to inject Toradol. I tried to argue that the pain wasn't that bad and probably a standard Advil would suffice, but I did not officially refuse so she went ahead and gave it to me.

I took all the inhalers as instructed, then got the medication slurry down (Prednisone tastes awful, even in applesauce).

 

Then... nothing, for a very long time. I drifted in and out of sleep, wrapped in all the sweaters I'd brought with me. The pain in my joints and my chest did ease up, a little.

 

Sometime around 1:00am, the nurse poked her head in to ask how I was feeling. I asked what exactly we were waiting for, and she said the doctor wanted to keep me for observation for a few hours.

 

That felt strangely validating. It meant they were actually worried about my condition and didn't feel safe just handing me a prescription and sending me back home. Content with their level of concern, I texted my husband an update and drifted back to sleep... no easy feat on such a hard bed.

 

Around 2am the nurse went off shift and was replaced. Shortly after, the doctor came in and gave me the option to stay the night or go home and rest there. As much as I wanted to ask to stay the night, the bed was so hard and the burning in my lungs had indeed gone away. He asked how far of a drive it was. I told him not even ten minutes. He asked if I felt safe to drive that far. I said yes (after all, I had driven to the hospital in far worse shape). He then gave me a run-down.

 

The COVID swab would not get back for testing until late the next day (there are no testing facilities in this region; all specimens are picked up daily and trucked in to the capital city some 3-4 hours away for actual testing). His educated guess was that I had a viral infection, so he prescribed three more days of Prednisone. This as-yet-unnamed infection had triggered an asthma attack, so he directed me to keep the inhalers I had already taken -- two puffs of one twice per day and two puffs of the other one every 4-6 hours as needed. They would contact me with the results of the test once they had it, if it was COVID or influenza, I might be asked to return for further treatment. (Personal aside: I don't think it's COVID, as I've had it twice already and both times it presented like strep throat. This does not line up at ALL with my experience this week. But maybe a different version would cause different symptoms?)

I packed my colourful collection of new inhalers and went home.

 

The next day (yesterday) I was tired but feeling surprisingly good, considering. I took all the inhalers as directed and filled my prescription. My boss had already found someone to cover all my shifts for the week and told me to focus on resting.

 

I thought a lot yesterday about my cousin. Playing with her siblings at the playground across the street one Tuesday evening at 7:30, dead in an ER bed by 10pm. Tuesday nights were tainted for years following that one. Tuesday nights in April were the worst of all. And here I was fighting the same monster that killed her eleven years less three weeks before.

 

The losses echo in my head. Eight hours to dead. Three hours to dead. Healthy to ER in three hours. It seems hours aren't really that long, and yet within each one hangs an entire life in suspension. When lungs hit a wall, they hit it hard and fast. Somehow Brittney lived like this every day for 22 whole years.

Today I feel measurably worse than yesterday. I've set a timer for the 4-hour inhaler and am taking it EXACTLY every four hours (not seeing if I can stretch it to five or six hours), but I'm not sure it's helping as much anymore. I am considering going back to the ER. The burning has not returned, and the cough is not quite every single breath yet, but my chest muscles are getting fatigued again and there is a distinct sense of pressure. At what point do you go to the hospital? How close was I to death on Tuesday night, really? Should I have gone sooner? How bad is too bad?

 

I don't feel that this will be my last post on here, however life is only dealt out to us in hourly doses and none of us really knows how many doses we have left.

 

If it is, thank you for being here. Remember me as a quiet courageous person who felt whole while writing and dancing, who loved her husband, her friends, and her family dearly, who could do nothing but rely on the scandalous grace of God (as she was not capable of earning His favour). Play some Daniel Amos or White Heart and dance for me. Maybe learn some choruses from the Nachmo Alphabet project.

 

If it is not, then I look forward to writing in this composition window again soon.

In the meantime:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMgFRTfeGYI

 

 

 

 

(Don't think I wasn't tempted to do a Rick Roll there.) 

The Drafts Of Yester-Decade

Recently I went way back into my blog drafts folder... and I mean way back. I often scroll back about 2-3 years, but this time I went all the way back to the very beginning, to the first couple of posts I wrote back in 2010 and never published... probably for the first time since I wrote them.

There was a lot of little stories of my life written there that I had forgotten about. And in a way those made me sad. I knew I was a brighter, happier person then, but reading these posts has put into sharp contrast just how much Brittney's and my cousin's deaths destroyed who I used to be... and who I wanted to be.

I still miss that person.

The other day I contacted an old college friend who I haven't spoken to since 2020, when I was banned by my in-laws from anything I used to do or to be. I've been getting tired of being locked in the prison of my own mind, and I'm starting to rebel. I've volunteered for a local theatre. I'm starting to listen to music again. I'm starting to text people back. I'm starting to read the Bible and watch church services again.

I want my life back.

That may never happen. In September, I sustained a back injury at work, and seven months later, it is causing more issues than it did the week it first happened.

I have not yet brought up the subject of future dance endeavours with my physiotherapist. They know I have a history of dance, but they haven't asked for details, and I haven't mentioned it. I haven't needed to -- there are still no dance opportunities here anyway.

I am a different person now than I was fourteen years ago, but I'm not convinced it's a good thing. Perhaps I made some decisions that looked stupid -- but honestly, I made those decisions from a place of deep trust, and I never felt more free and 'whole' than I did back when I was living out on a limb every day of my life.

The freedom and joy in those old posts are palpable, even after sitting on a dusty server somewhere for well over a decade. I have not felt that since before my uncle left my aunt in January 2015. I was 21 years old.

All these tragedies I never asked for ate up all the best years of my life. My body was a well-oiled machine, and my mind was sharp and quick. But it was all wasted as I spent those years drowning in an endless ocean of grief. Now the grief has dulled, but both my body and my mind are no longer what they were. I wasted all of that potential, all those years... on something that wasn't even my fault and was completely beyond my control. It's so unfair. It's so unfair.

I'll never be able to get those years back.

Honesty

3 April 2022, 5.37pm; 2 May 2022, 7.53pm.

I've always been a brutally honest person. This is probably one of the most obvious manifestations of my ADHD/autism and is definitely the neurodiverse trait that loses me the most friends/potential friends. I say exactly what I mean, not the social nicety beat-around-the-bush say-the-opposite-of-what-you-actually-mean code for what I mean.

This means, as someone with depression and an encyclopedia's worth of tragic backstory, I am VERY open and honest about depression and emotional pain. This led to my ex-church telling me God couldn't love me (this after telling me for eighteen years of my life that 'honesty is the best policy?' Make it make sense), as well as my program director deliberately sabotaging my Bachelor's degree -- I was 'too negative,' therefore he in his infinite wisdom decided I, as a deeply wounded and actively grieving person, was not worthy of holding a postsecondary degree and did everything in his power to make it so. While he did underestimate my stubbornness and sheer force of will, I would be lying if I said that he didn't erode my confidence.

The two nails in the coffin came from my now in-laws and one of my bridesmaids. In-law has decided to take offense with EVERYTHING I say. And I do mean everything. Anything I post online, handwrite, or say out loud is fair game. No matter what I say, they WILL find something 'wrong' with it. And their definition of 'wrong' is very different from the rest of the world's definition of 'wrong.' Oh, but they're never criticising... they're "only trying to help" and it's not their fault if I'm "too stubborn to let people help" me. If the definition of 'help' now means 'set fire to the Titanic on the way down,' then yes, they're doing a bang-up job.

The second one was someone who I thought was a very good friend. So much so that not only was she one of my bridesmaids in my very small wedding, my husband and I donated a fair amount of money to help with her medical expenses less than six months ago. Less than two months later, she blocked me with the excuse, 'my mental health is too fragile to deal with your problems.' So much for her assertion that she was always going to be there for me and that it was 'okay not to be okay.'

So I hid. I cut contact with literally everybody except my husband, my parents, my siblings, and one (1) friend. I essentially stopped using social media, and I kept work conversations strictly work-related. If nobody wanted to hear from the real me, they weren't going to. I even stopped talking to my in-laws except when absolutely necessary. It took almost thirty years, but I had finally gotten the message. I -- the true, authentic, real me -- was NOT wanted. Anywhere.

This worked for six months. I even stopped talking to the people who I hadn't actively cut off unless they talked to me first. I was just so tired of being rejected and guilt-tripped and bullied and abused just for being honest about myself and my experiences. I could feel my soul shriveling and dying, and I was quite literally praying every single day that God would just kill me. If I couldn't be honest, I didn't want to live anymore. I was actually dismayed when I realised that my sudden spells of vertigo were actually a concussion, not a malignant brain tumour as I had hoped.

Then it came out during an argument that I had been keeping how bad my mental health was from my husband. He was so upset he didn't speak to me for three days (as if that was going to make me want to die any less). Under threat of divorce, I promised that I would be honest, but warned him it wouldn't be pretty. He was so upset he agreed.

At this same time, I was actively working on an outline for Kyrie so I could maybe finally properly rewrite it. The ENTIRE plot of this story hinges on the main character's ruthless honesty. Turns out it's really hard to write about a brutally honest character when you can't be brutally honest yourself.

Then, I had the opportunity to sit in a zoom class with Dianne Walker -- the Dianne Walker, the Ella Fitzgerald of tap dance. And near the end she spent TWENTY MINUTES emphasizing how important it is for the tap dancer (really, the artist in general) to be honest, brutally honest, even if that's not the happiest place in the world.

When that class ended, I sat there and wrote in my journal for half an hour about how angry I was that I had let so many people beat the honesty -- beat the artist -- out of me. How angry I was at my in-laws especially for trying to run my thought life (funny how the 1984-style conspiracy theorists are the ones who are most concerned with controlling how people word things and how people are 'allowed' to think). Here is an excerpt from my initial reaction:

I spent five years of my life having the honesty gaslighted, shamed, and manipulated out of me at a ‘Christian’ performing arts college, of all places (after all, aren’t Christians supposed to be honest? isn’t art supposed to be honest?). My spirit suffered beyond what words can convey. It led to an eating disorder and a very troubled marriage. All I wanted was to die. If I could not be honest, then there was no other alternative. To live is to be honest. To share life with people is to be honest. All I ever wanted was to be honest and to share my life with honest people, in a spirit of giving, receiving, accomplishment, and growth. I knew as a young teen that honesty was paramount in art, but I let [college program director] and [church deacon] and [in-law] beat it out of me with their manipulation and vile, vicious words.

I used to say great art was beautiful, but now I say that great art is honest. My greatest art has come from honesty — not pain, specifically (though sometimes that is what I must be honest about), but honesty.

Sehnsucht, One More Time, Joy And Suffering, Kyrie, and, in a burgeoning way, Emotional Tourist all came from a raw and honest place and THOSE are my greatest accomplishments.

My creative output slowed not long after Brittney and my cousin died, and stopped entirely after M died. I thought it was the fact that they died that stopped the creativity, but now that I think about it, it wasn't the deaths themselves, it was how much I was bullied for openly grieving about their deaths that stopped it.

It's funny how people get so offended about grief. Not 'uncomfortable,' downright OFFENDED. I have had my career, my academic future, my friendships, and my marriage threatened by people who couldn't handle my honesty -- even if that includes honesty about grief or my mental illness. I don't understand that, because the very nature of honesty means you are honest at all times. 'Selective honesty' is not honesty -- that's manipulation.

Enough of that. I want to be an artist again. I want to live again, and to live is to be honest.

NaNoWriMo, Day 6

So I've ended up going with the sequel to 2253 -- the time-travel story. It's so weird writing this novel now. The main character was based off my friend Brittney, who died unexpectedly in 2015 at 22.

Brittney and I initially met at dance, but later reconnected and bonded over our shared loves of writing, photography, and technology. She was such an upbeat and caring person, and I miss her so, so much. She read the original rough draft of 2253 and really liked it. When I told her that the main character was based off of her, she was ecstatic. She had already told me that she really identified with that character, which I took as an honour and proof that I had succeded in my job as a writer.

2253 was written in 2010, five years before Brittney's death, ten years ago this month. I skimmed it the other day to remind myself of some of their personality traits (and some of the character names...), and it was like it had been written by a completely different person. And in a way, it was.

I was still in high school. I was at the apex of my fascination with computers and programming, and there's far more knowledge of that in 2253 than I currently have. Brittney and I were exchanging messages every single day so her voice was fresh in my head.

It's also interesting to note that the premise of the book was that the time-travelers get stuck in the year 2253 with a deadly respiratory virus on the loose. I literally used the words 'this is the next Spanish flu' in the novel. Even though this sequel is not about the virus, reading 2253 back a few days ago was a strange experience, given the current reality. (And I was rather gratified to see that I actually got quite a lot of details right about pandemic life, ten years before I'd live it myself.)

Writing the sequel now is so hard. Reading 2253 again the other day reminded me of so many things that I had forgotten about Brittney. She had been such a huge daily part of my life in 2010 and now, five years after her last breath, it's like I don't even remember her. I swore to never forget... I feel like I wrote this novel too late. I've lost so many details, and I'm scared the Elyssa of the sequel is not the Elyssa of the original.

As far as stats go, I fell behind on day one, but today I had a day off work so I made a big push and now I'm literally exactly at the word count goal for today: 10,002.

I feel like this novel has no plot. I've been sitting on this one-sentence plotline since before I wrote 2253, and only now that I'm 10k in am I realising that it was an extremely thin plotline and I have zero idea how I'm going to milk 50k out of it. I've written ten thousand words of exactly nothing so far because I'm trying to delay the actual exciting bits so I have something to look forward to to keep me moving. It's hard to trust the process anymore. I think of my old novels, like 2253 or Reuben or Rebecca's World or Chasm, and I remember how nothing fazed me and it all came so easily. I just somehow came up with ideas like drunk Mafia games or 10,000-year old roller rinks or magic teddy bears. I didn't have to work for it, it was just sort of there. And I haven't felt that since before Brittney died. I still maintain that Kyrie (2014) was the best thing I've ever written. I think it's no coincidence that it was the last novel before Brittney died, setting off a chain reaction of death and grief that I still feel to this day.

Ten Years

A few months ago (June), this blog celebrated its tenth anniversary. It's outlived some of my friendships (because said friends died). Heck, it's almost outlived the Blogger platform itself. It's listened to me when quite literally no-one else will. Some people think I'm ridiculous for wanting to post my 'private' thoughts online 'where everyone can see them.' I've always had a couple rebuttals to that one:
1. Honey, this blog barely scratches the surface of my thoughts. These are by no means the private thoughts. Not by a long shot. I fully recognise that people might see them, and I am 100% okay with that. In fact, the reason I post things is because I want people to see them.
2. 'Where everyone can see them?' Don't make me laugh. Since Brittney died, there's been nobody to read these unless I post one of the especially good (or especially offensive) posts on my personal Facebook page. In a way, that's why I did this -- then those who really did care to know how I thought could read them at their own leisure, and at their own pace, and those who found this blog 'too negative' could simply forget about its existence.

I started this blog just before the car accident that almost killed me (we're talking days before). As a result, this blog has chronicled my life as I navigated through that paradigm shift and the consequences of my conclusions about life. That accident was a major life event and probably was the thing that had the greatest impact on my life up until 2015/The Year From Hell (incidentally, this blog also serves as a nice before-and-after of the state of my soul in relation to said Year From Hell). Many times I've posted things thinking it would be the final record of my thoughts before my untimely death, and I've also tried at other times to post the happy things that I could not feel in an attempt to remember something, anything besides the soul-sucking depression.

Often, this blog has been a place where I can offload some of the mental weight of depression without actually burdening an actual overstretched human being. I think in a way, that was my secret motivation for starting a blog in the first place (that and I thought people would be far more interested in me and my thoughts/writing career/computer nerdiness than they actually are). Turned out only Brittney was even moderately interested in such things, and she was the greatest supporter of this blog until her death in February 2015. (To this day, I would say she is still the greatest supporter this blog has had over the entire ten years.) I managed to somehow hold onto this blog during college, and it probably saved my life more than once by giving me a safe place to vent when not a single soul on the planet was willing to acknowledge my existence.

Anyone who's been here since the Brittney days (I don't even know if there are any out there) might remember the old name -- Thoughts From The Asylum. I named it that partly because sixteen-year-old me felt like she was living in an insane asylum (while this may have been a slightly extreme take on the situation, it was not entirely inaccurate), and partly because she took asylum from a dysfunctional home life (from which she had literally zero refuge because homeschool) in writing, which has been a focus of this blog since its inception. When dance started to become a bigger factor in my life and I started seriously considering making a career of it, I renamed the blog The Edge Of The Dream -- after the White Heart song -- in reference to my faith at the time that bigger and better things were to come for me in the world of dance and performing. (In a nutshell -- has that happened? Kind of... yes, in the sense that I have done more as a performer by this point in my life than I could have imagined eight years ago when I changed the blog name; but also no, in the sense that my hope was and still is to direct a dance team. In that sense, I am still, in September 2020, at the edge of the dream -- and wondering when I will finally start heading toward the centre.)

I'm glad to have this blog. Sometimes I read back through my own words and find deep encouragement here, from my past self, words that I need to hear in the present that no-one can provide. Often it provides me with a small escape into the world as it was before 2015, when my mother's family still spoke to each other, Brittney and I wrote copiously and proofread each other's work constantly, and I still had some semblance of childlike faith in God (to SUPER condense that update: I've somehow managed to not become agnostic. I definitely still believe God exists. But I'm still not convinced He loves me. I really think no-one other than God Himself will be able to convince me otherwise).

I plan to continue writing and posting here. Whenever I feel the urge to write but have no clear idea of what I want to talk about, I tend to go to Blogger and open up a 'new post' page. I have probably about as many unfinished drafts as I do published posts because of this practice. It's somehow different, more freeing, to write in Blogger than in a Pages document despite how simple literally all my Pages documents are (I keep them almost Windows-Notepad-esque in their simplicity, even -- perhaps especially -- for my novels). This probably also explains the amount of rambling posts on this blog (which probably also explains the lack of readership).
Anyway, where I was going with this is that this has been such a comforting habit over the past ten years. In this time of societal and personal upheaval, you'd better believe I don't plan on letting go of this blog anytime soon.

Thanks to any of you who may have actually stuck around over the years (and managed to not criticise me extensively for being 'too negative' on my OWN PERSONAL BLOG THAT YOU ARE IN NO WAY REQUIRED TO READ). Here's to another ten years at the asylum/edge of the dream.

My Room

Cleaning out my room at my parents' house for the final time.

Sure, I've moved away before, but before I always had the option of coming back. My possessions continued to reside here in this cheery pink room, under increasingly thick grey layers of dust and the occasional spiderweb. I never really truly had to move out of this room. I left for years at a time, but it was still my room.

But now I've just gotten married, and my sister is planning to take over my room. This requires me to clean it out for perhaps the first time ever. I've certainly straightened it up once or twice, but never truly deep-cleaned, and I've especially not had to pack it all away into storage at the same time. It's funny how few of my finds truly surprised me (apparently I pretty much knew exactly where everything was, despite some things not seeing the light of day for over a decade), yet when I dusted them off, only then did they bring back memories.

I'm a terribly, terribly sentimental person. I will keep a Staples receipt for pens and paperclips for nostalgic reasons, even though I know I will probably never look at it again. Part of the reason I had never truly cleaned out my room was because I was suffering so much loss already and I knew I couldn't bear to throw anything away. But now I'm forced to, and that, coupled with knowing this room is no longer my safe place anymore, is a very emotional process.

This room was where I cowered in fear from my mother's outbursts and listened to ABBA CDs nonstop on my headphones. This room was where I listened to Oilers hockey games and paced the carpet in the dark as I listened, working out some new plot idea. This room is where I would write all day long and late into the night on my old Windows XP machine with a 20GB hard drive (pretty sure the processor on that thing was measured in megahertz), or simply stare at the screensaver and daydream. This room was where I would sit on the floor after dance class and choreograph to Petra and White Heart, planning all sorts of dance shows with M. This room was where I sketched out revenge stories centering around the youth group that hated me. I've fallen asleep on the grey-pink carpet, I've made endless crochet and cross-stitch projects, I played hours of Polly Pocket with my sister, I've written over half a million words of ideas and prose, I've tap danced, I've even practiced a few ballet steps here. I've done so many self-portrait photoshoots, written so many blog posts, lost myself in so many dreams, cried so many silent but tortured tears. I moved into this room somewhere around 2003/2004, and it's been a home base for me ever since.

I found cards with greetings in both M's and Brittney's handwriting. I found a bear that my late grandfather gave me when I got baptised. I found mementos from a 2004 trip to see my now-deceased great-uncle and his wife in B.C. I found bookmarks my sister had made me, story ideas I'd sketched out on the back of church bulletins, and tickets for shows I'd performed in as a child. I even found a folder with all my work and costume designs and very early choreography for a book/dance company idea I had nursed for some three or four years in my early teens before joining the real world and realising that that exact particular idea was simply not feasible (it's not completely dead, though, the dream of a dance team and even some sections of choreography from that period still live on in my present work).

These are things that you never know the value of when you first receive them. This is another part of why I can't throw anything out. How could I have known on my 20th birthday when I received that card from M that she would be dead barely five years later? If I had thrown that card out two weeks later like I'm told 'normal people' always do, I would now have nothing left of the fierce woman who so often inspired and encouraged me. No-one else will ever exist with that exact handwriting, that exact way of wording things. And even if someone could forge it, they could never forge her personality, her essence, her spirit, her -- the things that all who knew her fell in love with.

Brittney was one of the very few people who was capable of being encouraging in writing. Sometimes her birthday cards to me were the only source of encouragement I would get for that entire year. This words-of-affirmation person had to scrape together all the encouragement she could, and sometimes it was contained only in the left-handed script of this one dear friend.

How could I know that my grandfather would only give me two gifts in the entire twenty-three years he knew me? Yes, I will never play with that stuffed bear, but my grandfather was a hardened, bitter man who rarely showed approval, let alone affection. That bear showed me what his gruff voice and distant actions never managed to do. I would rather remember that than simply replay the fading memory of his critical voice over and over in my head.

Memories fade. And these people meant far too much to me for me to justify callously tossing aside the things that remind me of them and their huge, huge impacts on my life. And because I never know which bright young life will disappear next, I can't afford to lose any of those memories. I learned when M died that just because something is statistically improbable (losing TWO best friends at age 22 in three years?), DOES NOT mean it's impossible. Especially if it's something bad. You know, like losing SEVEN people to death in four years; all but one under the age of 27. What's to say there won't be an eighth? Statistically, there should have been no more deaths in my life after Brittney for a good fifteen years, save maybe my grandfather due to his age and health. Yet there were five more in 1,461 days. Improbable, you say -- but it happened. It happened in real life, in my life. You truly never know. You can 'be positive' and 'not think about it now' and believe in the health and wealth of your friends all you want, but you truly. never. know. Nobody escapes the death of the ones they love the most. Nobody. (Except the ones who die young.)

(Side note: I am literally not even joking, iTunes just started playing Memories Fade by Tears For Fears. I did not plan this, and I am not making this up. I just started playing TFF and I had completely forgotten that song even existed.)

This room has been my safe haven through a lot of things, when there was no-one to talk to and no-one to go to. The golden light, amplified by the pink walls, seemed to bring a modicum of hope even on the darkest days of suicidal depression. The lone incandescent bulb that hung from the 2x10s that made up the upper floor above me lit the way to many a late-night story idea -- the spaceships that allowed me to travel through time and space, away from the pain of whatever situation I was in.

To not have even the option of spending a day alone in this room again -- it steals the breath from my chest. This room was one of my few constants in a world that insisted on dying away around me. It was always there, even after Brittney died and M died. It was my sanctuary when the world was against me (and let's be honest, it still is in many ways). I feel untethered without it, but it is time...
Another goodbye. It never gets easier.

Thank you, big pink room with the tree-dappled southern sunlight and the desks lining the walls, for all the good times and for sheltering me through all the bad times. Thank you for all the memories. Thank you for the safety and protection and inspiration you provided. I'll miss you something awful.

The First Empty Birthday... Again

You know, I had just gotten kind of used to celebrating Brittney's birthday without her. I had only just started to be sort-of okay. And now I have to start all over again, to re-learn to celebrate a birthday without the birthday girl here, to re-learn to hunker down and hold on on yet another date on the calendar -- there's so many of those now, and I'm not even thirty yet. I have to re-travel that entire path of grief, all those years of birthday parties that will never happen, and I have to re-condition myself to at least pretend to be okay again on yet another date when I'm really not.

Yet I'm not allowed to die. The four of you were, Brittney and Grandpa and my cousin and M, but somehow I'm not? How does that make sense? Today on your empty birthday, in some ways I wish it was mine. Why couldn't you take me with you? Why did you get to go and I had to stay here, in the shadowlands of the oxygen-dependent? You had so much more to offer than I ever have. Why leave me here? What could I possibly still do here that you couldn't have done a thousand times better? Am I just a cosmic punching bag and mere sweet death would be too good for me? How long -- how long must I watch my friends and family marry and have children and work in fields they enjoy and excel at their hobbies and I just watch a steady parade of caskets go past me, I watch my friends fade off my 'recent contacts' list because you can't text the dead. My still-surviving friends roll their eyes when I talk about stuff like grief and death because to them it's years away. They won't have to worry about that for another forty or so years yet. How have I seen more deaths than some sixty-year-olds? How is this fair? They got to at least enjoy their friendship. Mine are always cut short before we have a chance to really see how much we can create and explore together. Am I just destined to be companionless forever? How is that fair? How is any of this justified? Why do I have to be the only one?

I had only just begun to be able to put some of these questions out of my mind, at an uneasy rest. But now they're all back, and I'm so tired of not being able to ignore them and not being able to answer them.

And now I'm back at the beginning, once again. That first not-right, empty birthday. The first 'wish you were here' in a long, LONG neverending line -- given how long my mediocre existence will drag on at this rate, I might end up celebrating eighty of these empty birthdays, the days without you here, though that fact that you even have a birthday means that you were here, and it only emphasizes just how much you're not here anymore.

Music Day - Treasure Of The Broken Land

Four years ago today, dear Brittney left this world, flew beyond the stars without the rest of us and our leaden souls still tethered to time.

I discovered this song probably about a year and a half after her death. It was Mark Heard's (recorded) swan song before his sudden death in August 1992 (Brittney would only have been a month old at the time). It so perfectly captures the tension of being alive on earth and missing those no longer on earth just a phone call or a text away. The song is rich with longing and even a touch of regret, but it's up-tempo enough to keep it from being unlistenable.

My words are weak in the face of such lyrical dexterity, so I'll let the lyrics speak for themselves...

I see you now and then in dreams
Your voice sounds just like it used to...

I thought our days were commonplace
Thought they'd number in the millions
Now there's only the aftertaste
Of circumstance that can't pass this way again...

You were relieved of a life-long thirst
I was dry at the fountain...

I often still wonder why she got to die and I didn't. I attempted suicide just over two years after she died, and yet I lived. Why then didn't she? She had so much more to offer than I ever have. Why did I have to stay while she went on without me?

I awoke when you called my name
I felt the curtain tearing...

Remind you of anything? Like Terry Scott Taylor's gut-wrenching One More Time? 'I thought that I heard / Your voice call my name / But that couldn't be 'cause you walk beyond the stars... Here inside a dream / I see you standing on a hill / You smile, then turn away / Now I must go...'

I could melt the clock hands down
But only in my memory
Nobody gets a second chance
To be the friend that they meant to be...

If this line doesn't force you to re-evaluate your entire life, I'm willing to bet a lot of money that you don't have a pulse. In just a few words, Heard throws the unforgiving march of time and the fragility of human life into razor-sharp focus.

Title: Treasure Of The Broken Land
Artist: Mark Heard
Album: Satellite Sky
Year: 1992
iTunes here; YouTube here.

We live in a broken land -- I think we'll all agree on that, at least to some extent. But she was a treasure in this wasteland of false fronts and manufactured love. She was the real deal. And I miss her every day.

I Know The Drill

Do you know what I hate?

I hate being in my mid-twenties and getting a text saying that a dear friend of mine has died and knowing exactly how the next few weeks will look for me because I've done this all before. I hate that I know exactly which music to listen to and what to avoid. I hate that I know how long it'll take for the news to hit home. I hate that I'm planning a roadtrip for a funeral on Thanksgiving weekend. I hate that I'm so matter-of-fact about this because I know the drill -- I hate that I know the drill.

My friends are celebrating weddings and birthdays and anniversaries. They're going on dates and having children and going on vacation.
And I just keep attending a steady stream of funerals.

I came across a picture the other day featuring myself, my sister, Brittney, and one of my dance friends.
It's a candid shot (though Brittney had seen the camera and was posing), taken by my sister at my birthday party in 2012. And I looked at this picture and realised that two of the four people in that photo are dead, a mere six years later. Brittney, at twenty, was the oldest person in that photo. None of us should be dead, not yet. We're all too young, and yet we're dropping like flies. I've almost come to expect that everyone I've ever loved in going to die young and I'm going to outlive them all, lonely and angry.

When one of my good friends attempted suicide last year, I distinctly remember writing in my journal, 'next death, I die too. I'm not taking this anymore.'

That next death happened this past Thursday.

Yesterday morning one of my very good friends asked me how I was doing. I told her I wasn't doing great and she gave me a hug and there was this strange moment in my head -- both this friend and I have survived suicide attempts and here she is, comforting me in the wake of another friend's suicide. Why did the two of us live? Yet... how strangely beautiful that we did, and now we have each other. We have both been through Hell and back.

The moment reminded me of the old Burlap To Cashmere song...
You have one wing and I have another
Seeking shelter like sister and brother...
Hold my hand and we'll make it all right
From this hell that we live in...
It's a long and lonesome ride
When your friends have all gone home...
(Eileen's Song, Burlap To Cashmere, 1998)

To Love. To Fail.

After surviving a car accident in June 2010, I vowed that I would be an encouraging person. That no-one who encountered me would leave me without knowing they were loved and cared for and important.

When Brittney died, I tried to renew this vow. But the guilt that dogged me for failing to be as kind and caring as possible to her sucked my resolve dry. I had failed. And there was absolutely no redemption to be won. There was no hope of a second chance.

When my cousin died two months later, it only reinforced this. I wasn't close to my cousin, but I could have been -- should have been. I cared for her deeply, but she never knew this. And again, I was left with no hope whatsoever at a second chance to let her know that at least somebody on the planet cared for her. Yes, her parents and siblings loved her. But love shouldn't be limited to that.

By the time my cousin died I was so physically depleted and emotionally wounded that I withdrew into myself. I had failed -- twice. I'm realising this school year that perhaps the thing I fear the most is failure -- of any kind, in any area of life. To have those two relational failures slug me back-to-back convinced me that I was a failure. So I gave up. Better to not try and not fail than to make a vow (even to myself) and go back on it or mess it up -- that is, fail.

I withdrew from everyone. I waited for someone to come break my shell, to draw back the curtain and direct the sunlight onto me again.

...It's hard for me to continue writing this. On one hand, I'm still waiting. Will someone care enough to reach out to me, even through the darkness? (The logic is, if I drag myself out, it's selfish of me. What if nobody wanted me to begin with and then I just show up again, uninvited? FAIL. But if someone else comes searching for me -- that means they missed me. That means they wanted me.)

But on the other hand -- I still want to be that loving, caring, kind person, no matter what the other person is like. On some level I don't want to ask more of people, emotionally/relationally, than I can give back. (To take more than I give is -- you guessed it -- failure. No, I can't win.) I still want to 'give my heart' (as my college program director puts it) -- but 1. I don't think it's worth giving, 2. I can't handle losing anyone else, and 3. what if I screw it up again and accidentally alienate the very people I really care about? That is: what if I fail again? People are pretty graceless as a whole. Ninety-eight percent of the time you have exactly one chance. Foul it up -- say one word with the wrong tone of voice -- and you're automatically a 'killjoy' (at best) or 'toxic' (at worst).

If I could find a way to make people feel loved without screwing it up and without having to get my heart broken again -- I would leap at the chance. But I know it doesn't work like that, so now I have to choose between the two. It's an impossible choice. Either one leads to failure.

Snapshot of the Last Rays of Hope

26 October 2016, 1.52am.

The other day I was flipping through my notes from Songwriting class. I took this class in the final semester of my AA degree, as a modular (week-long intensive) course. This was, of course, the semester when my entire life went to h-e-double-hockey-sticks.

There were a lot of journaling exercises in that class, and it was strange reading some of what I had written in those exercises. At that point in the semester, Brittney had been dead for less than a month. Our family friend was in the final stages of an extremely aggressive cancer and would in fact die less than two weeks later. The two divorces that jaded my entire concept of familial love and care had already burst on the scene (though the extent of the fallout remained to be seen). Less than a month later, God would withdraw His presence and comfort from me and my cousin would die a horrible sudden death two months later. In short, this was in that very intense upheaval period between all those things, and my notes from that class are a unique snapshot of a very short time in my life where despite all the crap I still retained some true faith that it was for good (which left when my cousin died). This was a fleeting moment in my spiritual life, though one can very easily see the torment already in my head.

We had to write a total of six songs for the class. Because I was so completely overwhelmed, I turned out six of the worst songs I have ever written in my entire life, and because of the way everything panned out (in terms of stress, abandonment, and the subsequent loss of inspiration that still haunts me), they have, so far, turned out to be the last. I vaguely remember the concepts behind two or three of them, but the one that stands out to me is the one I wrote for Brittney.

It was composed in a rush before I had really had time to process her death so it was cheesy as heck and because my piano skills are crap the accompaniment was only a couple of token chords in the background just to say it was a song. But I still remember the metaphor I used and I remember the prof in his feedback asking if I wrote poetry because it sounded like I do. I remember feeling incredibly honoured that he would even ask me that -- this was also two years to the week since I had discovered the magic that is Daniel Amos and the songwriting of my artistic hero Terry Scott Taylor (who is nothing if not poetic).

Reading these notes, I was surprised how much hope in God I still retained at that time. Most of the terrible things had happened already by this point. If my cousin hadn't died and God hadn't withdrawn His presence from me, it would have been all uphill from there. Reading those notes made me feel, for the first time, very disconnected with who I used to be. This girl who wrote those notes was hurting but she hoped through the tears. For better or for worse, I am not like that anymore. Hope is a faded memory. I am very conscious of the fact that I have put up a wall to protect myself and nobody is tearing it down -- not even me. Maybe if the wall is strong enough God can't get through to hurt me anymore. It's destroying my fledgling performing arts career (because not only can nothing get in, nothing can get out), but what does that matter anyway? There's no hope for any of that.

Music Day - Magnificent

Yes, Music Day comes early this week.

Today would have been my dear friend's twenty-third birthday. Alas, she took her first step beyond the stars on the first of February.

She taught me tactfulness, the joy of being thankful for little things, grace, and patience... so much patience. She was the kind of person who would take pictures of the way the Christmas tree lights were reflecting on her guitar strings, the type of person who would fangirl over Arthur Conan Doyle (before BBC's Sherlock), the type of person who would create a graph explaining why the Canadian holiday calendar is better than the American one based entirely on turkey consumption.

She hated winter. It seems somehow cruel that her last glimpse of this world was in the dead of it. She was relentlessly encouraging and always ready to pray for me, even though usually I was just freaking out over nothing.

She told me once that U2 was one of her favourite bands. I'd heard of them, but never actually heard any of their music until after the last time I saw her alive. I didn't hear this particular song until not long after she died.

Title: Magnificent
Artist: U2
Album: No Line On The Horizon
Year: 2009
iTunes here; YouTube here.

At the time she told me U2 was her favourite band, I was on my CCM-only kick and I was horrified that she would listen to something like U2 -- they weren't CCM-approved (obviously, this was before my DA days). We actually had quite a falling out over it and I don't know if the rift ever really healed completely -- although we did try to carry on. To some degree we did. Although the last time we really spoke to each other face-to-face, just before we parted, she apologised again for everything. At the time I was taken aback. I had long since forgiven and forgotten, and it actually took me a minute to figure out what she was talking about. I sort of dashed off an apology of my own, and she left.

I wish I had taken time to formulate my words more lovingly that day. Not that they weren't loving, but I was distracted and delivered them flippantly. I wish I had tuned everything else out, looked her right in the eye, and told her, 'I've already forgiven you. Quit carrying this burden.'

But I didn't know... no-one ever knows.

At the time she had less than two years left.

I miss her so much my heart literally, physically hurts. I can't count the amount of times I've thought, Hey, I should tell Brittney about this, or I should ask Brittney for her advice -- she'd understand. My comfort is that she is with the Magnificent; the one who had provided her with her love for the literary, her lovely singing voice, her phenomenal photography instinct, her level-headedness and her kindness.

Only love
Only love can leave such a mark
But only love
Only love can heal such a scar...

Justified till we die
You and I will magnify
The Magnificent
Magnificent...



Brittney's blog.