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November 14th was my Seanna’s birthday. She would have been 17. Holy crap. That sounds so old. It can’t be that it was only the end of last summer she died, but it was. She was small for her age, and she was, of course, Peter Pan. Brain damage meant she was mentally and emotionally always vascillating around the 2 – 4 years of age mark depending on the day, and always needed help with or someone else to take over every kind of personal care. So 17 is just a number, not really an age that applies, but wow…is it ever a long time!
She’s not my daughter by birth, so I wasn’t there for every moment of it, but nearly since the beginning, and so last summer when Seanna died so suddenly, so tragically and needlessly because of someone else’s monumental – and to this day I insist “criminal” – stupidity, I felt as though I fell into a dimension of Nothingness. I wept helplessly during the viewings, but was otherwise dry and numb for nearly a year. I became immobile and disinterested and unaware of time passing. I remember almost nothing of the last year at all.
Imagine my surprise then to find myself so crowded I have to clear a spot to set a cup of coffee down no matter on what surface I care to set it. I didn’t just “let the place go” when she died. The second most stressful thing a person can do is buy and move into a new house, and I was in the middle of doing that when Seanna died. She’s never been in this home and so there were no memories or memorabilia of her here for me to leave out about the place. None of this stuff crowding me (that I suddenly noticed) was here when I moved in, nor when she died. So where the hell did it come from???
Eventually I realized that, little by little, I was picking up things here and there in thrift shops and plucking things unnecessarily out of storage to fill up the emptiness I felt. Or trying to. A perceived emptiness so deep and wide and all-consuming that it seemed to be the state of the neighbourhood, even the city I live in, not just my own mind and body. But I’m not empty. Certainly not of my love for her nor my memories of her, and I’ve enough longing burning for her to light the city free of charge in perpetuity. I’m not wrong, though, about the universe’s energy dipping when her life stopped flowing into it. Especially the energy in this neighbourhood where she lived. If you saw the hordes of weeping children and teachers at her funeral and the days before I think you’d agree.
Damn. This is turning out to be just a plain ol’ sob post! I know that people die every day. It’s normal. Perfectly normal and necessary. What I meant to relay (simply and succintly, honestly I did mean to do it that way) is that when she died there followed the sense that emptiness pervaded even my surroundings and so I filled them with every little thing I could until there is now no room to move. And now that I see none of these “fillers” make me feel any less lonely for her, nor do they unbreak my heart, it’s time for me to give away all these pretty but unnecessary things.
I have learned, the very, very hardest way, that the times when I feel I have the least, when I am the most empty, the most in need, the most desperate to receive anything at all that may fill my mind, body, or soul with a feeling of comfort, is the time when if I looked hard enough I may find more to give than I thought I had, and more reasons to give it away than ever I had before.
There’s no trinket in the whole goddamn house I can pick up and say, “Oh no! I can’t give this away! I’ll regret it eventually. One day some years down the road I won’t be able to remember Seanna because I don’t have ‘that thing’!” Never-ever. And what would I give away that would accidentally make her vanish? She already did. And so now with Christmas coming I commence the season of giving early with…giving. Lots of it. My goal is to give away at least 50 things by Christmas week.
This will be accomplished by gifting the Helping Hands mission on Barton Street and the Hamilton Freecycle group www.HamiltonONFreecycle@yahoogroups.com
Stephanie Hansen
