Healing and Dealing with Grief and Trauma

I haven’t wanted to post because there’s just so much, so much deep tragedy and trauma in my life. I don’t want to write any of it down because I want to pretend none of it is true.

But as a person who has chosen to always live in truth and joy and integrity, no matter what happens, I guess I should say it.

Except I can’t.

So for now, I’m not going to even write about my deep deep trauma and grief of the past year and a half, because sometimes I feel like my heart is going to stop, it all hurts so deeply. I will save that writing for another time when I’m able.

So instead of saying the words aloud, I’m going to write about how I’m putting one foot in front of the other every day.

1. My Beautiful Soul Children: I feel like my kids and I are on a ship, the three of us, flying through the warm starry skies, and I’m steering, and they need me to stay strong and steady in the midst of so much heartbreak. I want to demonstrate for them how one deals with some very crushing blows. I never wanted any of this to happen. In fact, I have dedicated my life to protecting them, my family, from pain, and I couldn’t protect them from this. So, I want to show them how to hold their heads up, to stand back up, and keep looking to the beauty and the light and the magic, because it’s everywhere, in the miracle of the daffodils pushing up out of the frozen ground, in the wild jungle of blooming flowers in our greenhouse, in the return of the mother and father ducks at the pond who are tending to their nests, waiting for their babies to be born. And soon we’ll see the little yellow fluffs following their mothers in a line around the pond. I have told the kids, that sometimes, the grief will hit them like a tsunami wave, and you fall on the floor wailing, and you feel like you will never get back up again. But the miracle is, you do get back up. And then you make dinner, and hold the people you love, and create and make art and laugh and love and carry on.
2. Fashion: For me, I need to wear bright sparkly colors. Like Frida Kahlo, I find the more pain I am in, the brighter my clothing becomes. I don’t even realize I’m glowing in bright raspberry and tangerine sparkles and feathers from head to toe, I just know it soothes my aching a little bit to adorn myself in everything bright and cheerful.
3. Color: This also applies to my house. Out go all neutrals and dull colors, replaced by the brightest sparkliest of pillows and furniture and art. My living room now looks like the inside of a genie bottle, exactly as I wanted it to. And the disco balls that hang outside the windows make light bounce around the room all day, and the sequin pillows splash pink light up onto the wall, and it makes me feel happy.
4. Creating! Creating! Creating!! Pretty much every moment of every day that I’m not doing laundry, cooking, homework help, advising, cheering, looking for jobs, etc. I am creating. I’m writing, painting, dancing, connecting, glittering, transforming everything mundane into the magical. There is some sort of balm in creating, in making something, a defiant fist shake at all the loss and sadness in the world. World! You may try to crush me, but I meet your crushing losses with color and creation! Shazam.
5. Nature: Walks in the woods, sitting in a tree, having the kids walk with me to look for petite fragile snowdrops who are the first tiny flowers to unfurl in near spring, crocuses, daffodils. How many flowers can we find?
6. Magical Moments: I attended a very disturbing dance performance the other night at  the Peabody Essex Museum, which I love. It was excellent, important, and very disturbing–about violence against women and hard, very hard gender issues. Henry met me afterwards and we were walking to the car together in Salem, on those ancient cobblestone streets. I stopped and looked up. “Henry, look up.” I whispered. He did. We were under an umbrella of a tree breaking into blossoms. Half open, some tightly budded, most half open, some in full flower, they filled the warm spring air with their fragrance, and we breathed it in. Then we looked at the old brick building, an old library that looks like an old insane asylum, and we looked for ghost faces in the attic windows and then ran screaming to the car. Magical moment. Because I think in the end, that’s what life is, stringing together these magical moments. There’s never a time of permeating overarching happiness. I mean there is kind of, but if you are paying attention at all to the world around us, there’s a lot of heartbreak out there, and in here, so I string together the magical moments.
7. Service: this really helps me get through my days. I work with homeless children, holding them, making them laugh, loving them. I just put together a Go Fund Me page for a dear old friend who has Stage 4 breast cancer and the treatment she needed wasn’t covered by insurance. Another friend said, “Do you really need to take on someone else right now? I think you need to focus on yourself and your own grief.” But for me, this is how I take care of myself–by caring for others. I put together her fundraising page and we raised more than $30,000 in a week! From strangers! If that’s not a beacon of hope in this world I don’t what is. People can be really awesome. And she was able to get treated. And her tumors shrunk. How cool is that? Even better, Henry asked me to sell his arcade to donate to her. I said, “Don’t you like your arcade?” He said, “Yeah, but it’s not very important compared to someone’s life.” My sweet sensitive boy. EVEN BETTER, he then did a project at school where he created a new type of Go Fund Me website where you can fund people and their projects and he tied it in with the video games he loves, and it made me so happy to see him taking action to help.
8. Action: Which brings me back to, it’s all about action, not words. I love words–obviously. I’m a writer, I get a huge thrill out of reading or creating a new metaphor. I love word gymnastics, gorgeous combinations, the power of a good sentence. Well, I suppose I should say it’s about actions and words. I have heard so many lies from people who claim to be good people, and to me, you can’t be a good person and lie. You can’t. Align your words and your actions. I talk to the kids about this all the time-a lack of integrity causes pain, and we never ever want to cause pain in this world. The world will give us enough pain without us adding to it. So we live in integrity and truth, and that brings us to joy. We align our words and actions. You don’t have to say, “I’m going to work with homeless children.” Just  go do it. Don’t say a word. Hold those babies! Love those babies!
9. Teaching: And speaking of babies, they are the picture of joy. For me, I adore children, and one of the ways I’m hanging in there, my form of therapy in dealing with my grief, is teaching. I took on more classes and reached out to many other places to teach there too. Children are my happy place. When I walk into the school and they race towards me to knock me down by throwing their arms around me. And we laugh and talk about rainbow and unicorns and golden sparkling dragon eggs and delicate fairies and goblins and trolls… I am filled with joy.
10. Storytelling: And last, stories. For one of my classes about The Land of Stories by Chris Colfer, I had the children make lanterns. I gave them ribbons and tiny birds and butterflies and a little votive and we made golden tags and wrote in glowing illumination “Fairy Tales Light Our Path” because for me, storytelling does exactly that. They light our way. Not in an overt way, in a soul way. And the kids took home their lanterns to place next to their beds. Some of my favorite moments with my own kids has been talking about ancient fairy tales, and what they think they mean. (I’m still not sure what the heck the story of Rumpelstiltskin means, but I can talk forever to people about what they think it means.)
11. And when I talk of children and fairy tales and glowing lanterns and blossoms, and beautiful words, my heart is soothed, and I feel the world can be really really beautiful and deep and profound, and I’m glad I’m here.