Copyright 2017 Francesca Vance
I’ve been asked recently where I got my story ideas from and decided to finally sit down and write it out. The crazy thing is, every single person has a story, and my ‘ideas’ come from my story. So, pull up a seat and read a bit.
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Grief is a peculiar thing. It takes your soul and alters it; lines the core of who you are in deep grooves that are etched into your spirit forever. You can’t think around it, often can’t breathe around it. Life is then separated into two distinct points. Before and After.
Before, life is normal. You worry about all the little mundane things that take up your day to day life. Bills, work, school. Recitals and meetings, groceries, dinner, and the flat tire that ruined your week. You may see horrors on the television, may read about them, or hear them on your way to work. You take a moment and think about them in a disjointed fashion, then continue with your day. Out of sight, out of mind. The words, ‘It couldn’t happen to me’ is not often in the front of your mind during those quiet moments that you see someone else’s life shattered, but they do cross your consciousness. A quiet reassurance that the terror is some other person’s problem and not yours.
Then the unthinkable happens. A wreck maybe, bad news from the doctor, or in my case, a house fire. Those next few days are the worst you will remember, and the days following that you pray to forget. The thought that I remember having the most, was simple. Wake up. I just wanted to wake up from the nightmare that my life now was. I cried myself to sleep with it, and it greeted me in the morning. This is the beginning of After.
It is these days you will struggle to breathe, to cry and beg any higher being for Normal. But your normal is no more. Your normal is long gone, on a hill now with a cold stone marker. It isn’t only the one you lost is gone, that’s not the extent of the change you see. You are different. Before tragedy was a word, or at most it was a terrible thing that happened to someone else. The woman on the news, or the man across town. Now, tragedy is a part of your entire being. It is your bedfellow. It’s there in the quiet stillness of the night, and in the waking hours of dawn when you pray for oblivion.
The hours between dusk and dawn are often the longest, and there were times I was sure time itself had stopped altogether. During the day, you could pretend. Pretend to be okay, to be the same. You smile at the offered condolences, brace yourself through the stumbled well-meaning barbs that leave you stumbling and struggling to keep the in tears inside. Because let’s face it, although most people do mean well, they understand that you lost someone precious to you, they get to go back to their lives and you should too. It’s not pretty to grieve for long, it’s not nice to look at it and makes everyone uncomfortable. The days are easier to get through though, and the fake smile you paste on your face eventually sits more naturally. It’s the nights that are the worst. No longer can you hide in the presence of company, distracting yourself with other people’s words. The fake smile you plaster on is long gone during the night, and you are left alone with your new nightmare.
I remember making coffee in my mother in law’s kitchen, surrounded by family and life, crying to myself, and wondering just how I was going to live now. I knew there would be a time I could think his name and not ache, but I just didn’t know how I was going to get to that point. An end was in sight, but with no notion where the road was. How do you go on when a piece of yourself is gone?
That was my question. How do you live without a heartbeat?
It was something I would learn in the days, months, and years to come. A stumbling mess I was and my husband was no better. The both of us damaged physically and emotionally. And the thing about it was, as alone as we felt, we weren’t alone at all. Our daughters were safe and healthy. Alive. There was family to lend a hand, often cry with, talk with when grief clogged your throat and you needed to speak or lose your mind.
The After finally took shape. Not permanently, but it was a start. Looking back took far more courage than I had, and looking forward was impossible. So for the longest time I did neither. The past was gone, and no matter how much I wanted to change it, to blame someone, I couldn’t. The future hurt, what future could we have with our son not in it? I looked instead only to the next minute. The furthest I would plan was dinner.
Those first months of After, I woke up because I had to. My two daughters had to be fed, and that forced movement. Long days of learning a new way. I no longer needed the same amount of plates, sippy cups and spoons. Instead of three, I now needed two. I couldn’t read anymore, I lost entire interest in everything. I look back now at those days, and I don’t recognize myself. I couldn’t read or write, nothing held my interest; not TV, not books, nothing and no one. I was on autopilot I think, my mind doing what was necessary to protect itself from insanity.
The change in me was forever, I knew that, and yet I wanted to smile and laugh again. I wanted to laugh without guilt, without forcing it. I wanted to pick up a book and get lost in it. Then I started to think of him. To remember. I cried more those days than I thought humanly possible, and over the oddest things. But my desire for LIFE was coming back. Slowly, in the tiniest of increments, I was finding myself again.
I know what my trigger was, my tipping point, the first time I smiled since burying my son.
Alyssa and Jasmine, my two daughters, had been playing in the living room. Romping around again finally, comfortable and secure for the first time in too long, and Ally laughed. A full belly evil villain laugh from her two-year-old self that got her sister tickled, and before I knew it we all three of us were laughing. I don’t recall what exactly they were playing, or even what they were laughing about at first, but it was my turning point. I picked up a book again. I still couldn’t read anything to do with death or loss, but it was a start for me. It was then I took a good look at where my life was and realized something. Belatedly I’ll admit.
Jasmine, my oldest, was a five-year-old little girl who came home from school one day and her world was literally gone. Left in ashes. Brother dead, sister possibly dead, Mother and Father not likely to make it either, home gone. She owned nothing then but the clothes on her back, and her Disney princess backpack. Her entire world was gone. I know material things aren’t important, but to a small child, those bits of things matter. I had lost a son, but she had nearly lost everything. And she was laughing again.
How had I not seen it? So wrapped up in my own grief that I’d overlooked hers. Kids adapt well is a cliche, but it’s a cliche for a reason. I’ve seen it with my own two, especially then. The scars faded, internally and externally, and now that time in their lives is a distant memory. Their brother is remembered, and every night they look at the stars and smile to see his porch light in heaven.
In the wake of that time in my life, the first inklings of a story came to me. Reapers. It began with him, my almost four-year-old son with the biggest smile in the world, and I wanted to think that he didn’t go from this life to the next alone. That someone, something, helped him along. That’s where my stories began, and although they’ve changed and grown over the years, the world they live in filling out and expanding, the core of that grief that stirred these stories to life is on every page I write. My stories aren’t all glitter and rainbows, and the white knight riding off into the sunset after rescuing the damsel, not because I don’t love those stories too, but because not all stories are pretty and perfect.
Life is epic and painful, beautiful and ugly. Life hurts. Life isn’t Happy Ever After, bad things do happen to good people. But there is life after death. Life does go on. Some people don’t always have a perfect life and that’s where my Reapers come in. And be prepared, they don’t get a HEA, not a traditional one anyway, but you will get love, trust, betrayal, a bit of mystery and a few laughs. So the next time you read of someone else’s tragedy or god forbid have one of your own, you’ll think of Cole or Ash perhaps, coming down and helping a loved one transition from this life to the next.
I still have days where I want to crawl in bed and hide from the world, a song will come on and I’m right back to all-consuming grief, but for the most part, I’m where I knew I would be when the road wasn’t there. A day doesn’t go by that those deep brown eyes of his aren’t on my mind. It’s not easy some days, and I expect I’ll always have those moments that I hate fervently the time I was denied. The man he’ll never be, and the memories I’ll never have, but for the most part, I’m thankful and I’ll continue to live with my grief in the only way I can: writing.
God himself knows I couldn’t have done it without my daughters. I faked it so long, the smile and the doing everyday things on autopilot until I realized suddenly I had a new normal. My daughters are growing, my smile isn’t forced now, and my stories continue to expand.
Mommy misses you, little man.
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Now, if you took the time to read all of this, thank you. Everyone has a story, this just happens to be mine. Remember when you look at others, they have a story too, and their pages may be just as dark and just as miraculous as your own.
Later for now, I’m off to plot my way out of the hole I’ve managed to write myself in. Wish me luck!
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