I opened the memorial page just now and saw that it's finally been updated, so I scrolled down looking to see if Dixie's name has been added yet. I can never make myself jump to a name there; on the rare days I end up there, I scroll down slowly, and all the names leave me in tears. Dixie's candle hasn't been lit, but it hasn't been six months, and that's what they said it could take. I saw something I hadn't noticed before, though. Tracy has two candles. I'd read the first one - from a Rogers resident - before, but I'd never seen the second. This was with it:
We always used to say you must have a gaurdian angel, because you made it through so many impossible circumstanses and always came out stronger. As I watched your elusive saddness give way to reveal a person of deep compassion and generosity, a small part of myself healed also. It was so unfair that you died just as you began to reclaim you life after many years of struggling. Yet it was not all in vain, beacuse you are now the gaurdian angel of all of us who knew you. You are my star up in the sky, and I look to you always for courage to go on. I will remember you forever.
I'm bawling. and I wish this were (all of) why. but why did I go to the page in the first place... what had my mind in that frame? ...I called Sara last night, just to talk with a friend and check in because she's discharging later this week... and I'd just given her the run-down of how I'm doing and asked how she was when she started to say the combination of words that make everything inside me collapse. That "I hate this; I hate doing this to you, I hate causing you this pain, but I know you'll want to know... but it's just so hard" prologue that has always meant the worst. I just went stiff and waited. This time it's a girl I don't know: Kate. She was a year older than Sara and I; she had long red hair...Sara says she had the greatest sense of style. And she had a heart attack and died.
And I don't know why exactly... I've dealt with deaths of people closer to me that didn't bring me to tears, but hearing Sara tell me about this girl, I just knew... she was another incredible person. She was another one like Tracy - Sara said - she kept thinking it couldn't be Kate because Kate is so alive... when you try to come up with a word to describe her, that's the one use, she said. So, to hear that she's not...
And I just listened and cried and told her how it's not supposed to happen and asked if her if it isn't going to stop at some point... Please? This is wrong. Isn't it going to end now?
And to hear Sara, so close to discharge, telling me about a girl she knew, who was in Rogers the same amount of times she's been there, who the psychiatrist used to confuse with her, who died of a heart attack... I just started shaking. I trust Sara with every ounce of my being, and I know that things are different this time, but I don't want to let her leave. I want to keep her at Rogers, where there are people like Dwight (who told her, and who I called and left a message for afterward - telling him I was sorry he'd suffered the loss, thanking him for what he's given Sara, on top of everything he knows I thank him for) to keep her safe. I don't want to let her back into this world where these things happen. I want to keep her there. I want to take us all back there. I want my girls back. We're so young. Everyone's always telling us we're so young... and you're not supposed to have heart attacks before you're 20. you're not supposed to have strokes. you're not supposed to die...
and Sara said it was a miracle that I called because she was trying to call Jenna for the wrong reasons, and it was so good that I stopped her from that... and my insides just choked. Jenna. tell me you want to live, Jenna - please... Please live.
stupid people saying things like, "I'm not surprised" and "well, did you see what she did while she was here?" - like we deserve it... like we chose it... without the faintest idea what it's like to be sick or love someone who is. without the faintest idea what happens to you when you realize you want to live, but you have no idea how to do so. when you want to pick up a fork and EAT because you don't want to be sick, and you don't want to die, and you're so beyond hungry - you can hardly feel it, but you know you're starving... when you can no longer feed yourself. when you no longer believe you can get better. when someone is the world to you, and there's nothing you can do to make that difference between life and death... when you're so sick that no matter what choices you make and how hard you try, you die anyway. before you ever get to know how wonderful you are.
damnit. Tracy, Dixie, Jesse, Kate, Abigail... I just want to go home and hold onto someone, to bawl and be told that it's been horrible, it's been absolutely horrible, but it's over now. I'm not going to lose anyone else. we're all safe now.
it just keeps killing people everyday. and I keep weeping because there's nothing else to do.
oh, god, help... please let it stop here. please. please let me hold onto the rest of them in such a way that I can see and touch them - please.
(pool today. 3/3. I have to tell myself over and over again that it matters. I have to tell myself over and over again that my life matters, no matter how helpless I am.)
oh, that they could come home with me.