Credit: Alloi Omella  – Ayutthaya, Thailand: Our family visited this site on a cycling trek with Kal and Ellen, our beloved friends/family

I’m sitting in the barren basement shivering and I can’t find a pair of socks. I’m crying and don’t want to go upstairs to wake Don or Charlotte because they are finally sleeping soundly. I just got off the phone with a placement person for counseling, and she says because I am not a resident of BC, I cannot make an appointment. 

I know there are ways around this, and the usual problem-solving me, solution-based, manifesting me could fix this in a hot second. The present me can’t even find a damn pair of socks.

I woke up angry. I tried to sit in meditation and images kept occurring, the same way my dreams, usually nightmarish to begin with, keep stridently-stress flashing. I’m in adrenaline mode so much of the day and night. My neck can’t seem to heal from all the hugging – I keep re-injuring  it every time I receive or give a hug, which is both often and needed. I am a hugger. But even that is hurting me.

It feels like Emily is encased in this beautiful piece of hardwood and I’ve got a dull whittling knife and I can’t get to her. Not in this moment, anyway.

I knew some of these blog entries would be less hopeful than others, yet I still feel called to share because this is grief in all its many iterations.

Thank you for reading; thank you for sending virtual hugs (which are a better option for me, at the moment); thank you for your prayers; thank you for the thousands of you who have reached out and said “if there is anything we can do, name it,”(Here’s what we need/want: by an affordable place to rent by June in Vancouver or surroundings that will take us and our beloved Moondog, fulfilling, well-paying jobs, a counsellor for each Don and me here in Vancouver); thank you to the anonymous person who sent the backwards colouring book that we received from Amazon yesterday – Don and I nestled on the couch and each took up a pen to doodle up a storm; thank you for the cards and notes and condolences: forgive us for not responding promptly or ever because they are very much appreciated and often comforting beyond what you might imagine; lastly, thank you for the affirmations of our most beloved family: I do know that the four of us are and will continue to be magic. In all this grief and anger and bewilderment, I do know that.