Peace

About a month after the passing of my dear Shahdi, friends and relatives started encouraging me to quit wearing the mourning color of black. My polite response to them was that I would stop wearing black when I would reach some level of internal peace with this colossal tragedy that transformed my life into an abyss of regrets, longing, and sorrow.

Five months later, I am still wearing black because peace has not yet been within my reach. Peace eludes me. Black fits my mood which is shrouded under dense black clouds. Clouds which belong to a savage storm that invaded my life a few months ago.  A storm with severe lightening, fierce winds, and flooding rain which has stayed around for months and is only slightly letting up lately. In the virtual island where I reside now, the island of the “Unfortunate Parents”, it rains forever and the blue sky is always covered by the dark clouds. If I reach some level of peace, I might be able to move into a neighborhood on this virtual island where the effects of the storm are not as intense, where the dark clouds are still there but the lightening is less frequent and the rain is more intermittent.   

In order to reach even that level of peace, I have to travel long and far, where many ill-fated parents before me have traveled including my own grandmothers.  I believe the only path to reach peace after losing a child is to learn to live again without one’s missing child, with the vast emptiness that one feels, and with the partial loss of one’s heart and soul which was cruelly taken away.

When I was thirty one, on a beautiful Wednesday morning, on December 22nd, my beloved Shahdi eagerly joined me on my life journey, just in time to have her very first mommy-made nourishment!  My other travel companions were Mehrdad and Arman. It was so lovely to have a cute smart little girl added to our group. She brought so much joy, happiness, intelligence, beauty and talent to our ensemble. For twenty years she accompanied us, loved us, and enriched our lives. Thus, with her gone, we lost one of the four pillars of our life journey. Sadly, our journey is continuing without her lively presence, brilliant mind, unique personality, and wonderful contributions.  I have to learn how to make the rest of my journey tolerable without her at my side. That is the hardest part of losing a child.

Contrary to popular belief, surviving the milestones after suffering a loss (i.e. – birthdays, holidays, New Years, etc.) are not the most difficult, but rather the everyday ordinary events in life are the most challenging. The first time I entered a grocery store two weeks after Shahdi’s passing, I became so overwhelmed with sorrow and despair that I had to leave the store as fast as I could before breaking into a loud sob.

In the past five months I have experienced countless such encounters at different stores, streets, buildings, parks, shopping malls, neighborhoods, restaurants, and around our house and backyard. Every single one of these encounters has brought tears of sorrow to my eyes and a deep longing to see my beloved Shahdi.

I suppose the best way to describe it is to think of one’s heart as if it were made of thousands of little glass jars put together, with each jar holding a precious memory, a link to all the pleasant experiences in one’s life.  As I have been going through the grieving process, I have lost many of these glass jars along the way.  They usually break  when I find myself in a situation where I am consumed by sorrow like when I opened the kitchen cupboard and found Shahdi’s half-finished box of  hot chocolate there, or when I bought raspberries and strawberries but Shahdi wasn’t there to enjoy them and they sat in the refrigerator for days, or when I saw Shahdi’s note on the kitchen cupboard, or when her trampoline was disassembled and moved away, or when I had to wash her bedding and put them away forever, or when I put away the Hawaiian towel that Nora had given her a couple of years ago, or when I had to pack her boots and shoes that were in the mudroom…

The list is endless. As expected, many of these jars have broken so far, and as time goes by fewer jars will remain to be broken. At some point, if I ever reach peace, my heart will only have a limited amount of jars left. The other part of my heart will be lost forever. The remaining jars will be overflowing with memories and emotions because the memories in the broken jars were transferred to these jars. These are the strong ones which will never break because the memories they contain have gone through the grieving process multiple times, and hence are no longer expected to cause a ‘broken-heart’ feeling in me.

Simply stated, gradually one is expected to become desensitized to the point where one can recall the memories without breaking down and feeling sorrowful. Hopefully, someday I will reach that point. But, I am not in any hurry. I am enjoying reliving my memories with my beautiful daughter. I just wish Shahdi were alive so we could continue making more memories.

Alas, what a pity that she dropped out of our journey unexpectedly. But, as her mother, as I once carried her for over nine months in my womb, I now will carry her in my heart for as far as my journey will take me.

I love and miss you my darling child,

You always will be my beautiful baby girl…