She's Everywhere — well sister

‘She’s Everywhere’ – It’s hard to capture the essence of this song in a sentence. I suppose it’s about being in a valley of dry bones and choosing to believe that life will reemerge one day despite all evidence to the contrary. It’s my favorite song on the EP and I am dedicating it to Krista O’ Reilly Davi-Digui. I have never met Krista, but I have been following her writing and journey for many years. I discovered her when she published an article called “What if All I Want is A Mediocre Life”; and felt she had articulated a sentiment I hadn’t yet found the words to express.

Krista lost her son to suicide last Winter - a loss no mother should ever have to survive. She continues to breathe each day, rise each morning, show up for life and her daughters, and share her heart with others as an educator and writer.

Krista, thank you for graciously accepting the invitation to write this guest blog post. May your words speak to any parents out their grieving the loss of a child. Krista, may joy touch your life in unexpected, unlikely, and healing ways. I am so glad you are who you are.

TO A PARENT WHO HAS LOST A CHILD TO SUICIDE:
By Krista O’Reily-Davi-Digui

It seemed as if you turned toward/somewhere else, away from all/our help, so that we are left to/ask for your help now, not in answers/but in asking all the difficult/and beautiful questions your life/bequeathed. --David Whyte

10 months ago, I lost one of my favourite people. A kindred spirit (though he’d roll his eyes at that). At 23, my son Jairus had his own best friends, but he was one of mine. He made my life better, more interesting, funnier. Harder. I loved spending time with him, and he helped me become a better human.

But when he left, I felt battered. Battered and bruised and desperately weary.

I felt like I had been run over by a freight train, my crushed lungs fought for breath and my muscles ached for reprieve. I felt like my spirit had been used as a punching bag and I was left in a state of shock; an essential piece of my own body, mind, and spirit had been violently ripped away.

Grief is visceral, not reasonable: the howling at the center of grief is raw and real. It is love in its most wild form. -Megan Devine

Loving a child who suffers is hard work. There is no guidebook for this journey which is at least top 3 in my” list of hardest things.” Loving someone who suffers means you say yes to advocating, pouring out, holding fast, putting your own needs to the side because everything you have to give is on reserve for the one who hurts most.

But you hold it all together, take another breath, and keep fighting. Because of course, you’d give your own life in exchange for his. If you could.

CHILD LOSS IS A NEW LETTING GO EVERY MORNING

If there being no guidebook for the journey falls in my top 3 hardest things about loving someone who suffers, so does the reality that you’d do it all over again a million times because you love your child fiercely but you don’t get that chance. They are gone. Every morning they are gone.

Every morning and every birthday and every Mother’s Day and Christmas and anniversary of their death they are gone all over again. Every time one of their friends gets married or announces an engagement or a new career on Facebook, every time your girlfriends talk about their adult children, you are reminded anew that your precious, wanted, needed child is gone. They were real and they were loved, and they were here and now they are gone. One day their younger sisters will grow older than them.

The choices of a grieving parent feel limited: give in to your rage and despair and a sorrow so deep and threatening it could surely drown an entire town or choose to live anyway. Choosing to live anyway means saying yes to living with pain too big for you to address all at once. Choosing to look for hope when a piece of your heart has been ripped out of your body and there are days that the only thing you can do is climb back into bed early afternoon and hope for the comfort of sleep. Choosing to show up to each day for your children who remain, no matter what, because they matter too. They deserve a full, beautiful life and a mom who is present and whole for them.

Regardless of how much beauty there is in your life, how much you have to live for, it’s an agony unlike any other to shove all the raw and unruly pain and fear and grief and love for your missing child into a corner of your body so you have some room leftover for life. It is a cruel thing that the world has continued spinning instead of pausing to acknowledge your child’s absence.

When you try to take someone's pain away from them, you don't make it better. You just tell them it's not OK to talk about their pain. -Megan Devine

THE WORK OF LEARNING TO LIVE AFTER CHILD LOSS

It’s hard work to muster joy when your child’s ashes live in a wooden box on the coffee table. Maybe one day you’ll choose to part with them. But not today.

It’s raw and painful work to give away your son's belongings little by little, to close accounts and clean out his apartment and to acknowledge that as far as the soul-stretching emotional labor of mourning goes, you’ve only touched the tip of the iceberg so far. This scares you.

It’s messy work learning who to trust, or where you feel safe, in a world that loves unsolicited advice-giving, pat answers, and unfailingly cheery greeting cards clearly not written by a parent who has just buried their first-born.

It’s vulnerable work giving yourself permission to laugh and savor good food and watch movies and soak up the sunshine and read good books and make love to your husband and rub your daughters’ shoulders when at your innermost core you are still, ten months in, finding your way through the thick wilds of grief and it may be that you’ll always feel this way.

It’s good and important, conscious work to continually move toward each other as a family when a loss like this could easily tear you apart and the data on mental and physical health outcomes and divorce rates post child-loss is dismal at best.

It’s beautiful work to give yourself permission to feel all of it and to test the truth that you are strong enough to feel it all and remain standing. To acknowledge that you adored your child and that he deserved a better, kinder life than he got, and it is incomprehensible that you only got 23 years with him. It is not enough.

And last in my list of top 3 hardest things about loving a child who suffers is telling the truth that you are ready to start looking ahead. You’ll bring him with you (you’ll never, ever leave him behind) but also, you’re ready to look ahead. One tentative, hopeful glance at a time.

Krista xo

Krista works as a writer & Joyful Living Educator at alifeinprogress.ca. She helps messy humans like herself quiet the noise of comparison, perfectionism, and fear and show up fully to their imperfect and beautiful lives in every season.

Donations to the art scholarship Krista has created in her sons name can be given here.