When school's out forever

It’s been almost fourteen years since the day I found out that my daughter had cancer. In the past decade and a half, I’ve written hundreds of essays about grief, trying to make sense of her illness and death.

As each year passes, I wonder about the narrative of this story of losing a child. What purpose does writing about her serve? Is it making me dwell on my grief, glorify it, draw it out across the years like slow-pulled misery taffy?

It can be a compulsion, trying to explain the persistent ache of her silence, how it’s endless, how I miss the woman she never got to be as much as the child she was.

The death of a child represents an affront to the natural order of things. It’s losing faith in certainty forever. It’s missing her in ways you didn’t know were possible, every day, all the time.

I keep writing about losing Ana because, for me, her death isn’t just one story. It’s like a serialized novel, unfolding in vignettes that are connected to the different months, seasons, and years of my life. It’s endlessly complex, but it did have a beginning. It started in August with a bad stomachache. It was the kind of pain that had me driving Ana to an emergency clinic at 10 am on a Saturday morning.

A brief car ride. A call to my husband when the clinic directed us to the hospital. A CT scan to see what was happening. A cinematic moment of terror as we were walked into an unkempt but empty room in the ER to face a scared-looking doctor who was tasked with telling us what he saw in that very first scan.

Ana didn’t go home that day. She would not go home for forty days. We would learn, together, what it means for a child to have cancer.

That day in August is a story about the threshold between before and after. Anyone whose child has been diagnosed with cancer has crossed this threshold. It’s a hard line that ruptured my life, and it’s burned into my psyche like a scar.

Every subsequent August since then has its own story to tell. This year, as as the zinnias, dahlias, and asters bloom, as the mornings grow cooler and the hummingbirds fatten up for their long migration south, the month feels empty.

In New York, school doesn’t start until after Labor Day, but the preparation for the next seasonal shift has already begun. Mid-to-late August used to be an incredibly busy time for my family. The days are quiet now, but my heart remembers the buzz of excitement and kinetic joy that filled the house in August.

But it also remembers the trauma of the ER, the way cancer stole our normalcy, and how abruptly our cherished August routine came to a screeching halt. Instead of starting sixth grade, Ana spent the last week of August, all of September, and the first week of October trying not to die. She’d been profoundly anemic, profoundly thin, profoundly sick, and we didn’t know if she’d ever come home again.

She did come home. She went back to school on October. She lived to see five more Augusts and five more first days of school before the cancer got her. And after that? August kept coming, a decade of Augusts that Ana hasn’t been here to see.

The new story of August is that I have grown old and the month is meaningless. It arrived this year with a sharp reminder of the old pain and an unexpected longing to go out and buy school supplies. And here I am again, gazing out the window at a yard filled with flowers, surprised that grief can still derail me because August doesn’t come with both my girls alive and healthy and within arm’s reach. Not anymore.

Maybe I’m being too hard on August. Every month has a story where grief plays a starring role. Ana died in March. She was born in May. She had her liver transplant in February. She adored September and October. Even the months that brought her joy are hard. I hate that she isn’t here to see them.

I’ve often thought of grief as a place, somewhere far beneath the earth. There is no mycelium here, no sunlight, no worms, no soil filled with organic matter. It’s just caverns and darkness and dead stone, with trails that lead in every direction.

It’s a place where I’m always lost, no matter where I go, though occasionally I find a lightkeeper to walk with me and guide me to the next leg of this journey.

But lately, grief feels like a river, wide and deep and endless. It carries me forward through time and further away from Ana.

The river is the current that runs beneath me. Most days, it’s manageable. I have learned to ride its inexorable pull, to dip beneath the surface when I need to and emerge somewhere calmer.

Except sometimes there’s an undertow, a current so relentless, so overwhelming, so dispassionately persistent, that I’m sure it will drown me. It’s there on the day she died and on Christmas morning. It’s there when I listen to a recording of her voice and recall how she used to sing with her entire body.

And it’s here in August, when I remember her pain and how we drove to the emergency clinic in Kingston, joking about a stick bug that clung to the passenger side mirror of a car I no longer own. We were supposed to go school shopping that day. She was supposed to try on jeans at Aeropostale and get a cotton candy smoothie. We were supposed to have more time in those last languid days of summer before the next chapter of her life. But August had other plans.

When this time of year inevitably rolls around and the back-to-school ads appear, I feel the sense of despair I felt when I stepped over the threshold from before to after. I think about how much I miss Ana and how unfair it is that she’ll never get to see what the world looks like now, even in all its fucked-up chaos.

Sometimes the story of grief is that it’s so heavy and so large and so endless, that the full truth of it can’t fully be told. I can only hold it close and let the current wash me away from solid ground for a while.

This time of year makes me sad because that’s when the nightmare started, but that’s only be part of the story.

The whole story of grief is much larger than any one month. It’s about how things can change in an instant, how aging with profound grief is incredibly lonely, how certain months and holidays and memories come with a darkness that terrifies me.

August is the month the mask slipped. It revealed that death travels alongside every family, even mine. It’s the month that I learned that there are no rational explanations for the bad things that sometimes happen to children. It’s when the river of grief swells and the current gets strong. Like all swift currents, I’ll have to ride this one out and hope I reach solid ground by September.