I loathe April 12ths. My malaise sets in around mid-January, the seasonal affective disorder giving way to a full-blown panic as the clock ticks toward the spring. Anniversaries for sad things are hard. There’s nothing sadder than the day one of your children died. I hate this about me. I truly do. It undermines all initiative. It blocks most creativity. It is the source of all my heartfelt prayers. Lord, please don’t let me waste half of a blessed year in a hole of my own digging. This year included an added trap door with a booby trap. My daughter’s time since her passing officially eclipsed the time she spent here with us. In an effort to flip the script of grief, I decided, for the first time in seventeen years, to go somewhere else. We set our sights on San Antonio.
Ordinarily, I spend that day in complete seclusion. I don’t open Facebook. I don’t go to the gym. I wake up, shed a few tears, and make my pilgrimage to the cemetery. There, I sit on a concrete bench and play songs, a few favorites of hers and a few of mine. I drink a Dr Pepper in her honor. I eat mac ‘n cheese because she loved it. I have exactly one package of Ferrero Rocher chocolates, the trio like they sell in the checkout line at Brookshire’s. Those were her obsession. If I can find it on a streaming platform, I watch Juno because it’s the last movie we saw together. Some years, if I’m not knee deep in a tear induced migraine at this point, I watch The Little Mermaid or PS, I Love You – two other daughter treasures. It’s like a Día de los Muertos in the spring – only what she liked is allowed.
One of my sons wasn’t with us when Chynna died. He had just turned 8, and it was his birthday party on that very Saturday. He’s my stepson, but I did away with the step part a long time ago. My witty declaration is that he isn’t a step but an entire staircase I have climbed a million times, its destination leading me from the darkness into the light. He barely remembers his sister’s voice. Her laugh escapes his memory. He can’t recall how impossibly short she was at sixteen or how beautiful her singing voice sounded. He misses her in the worst way, the “what he wishes he knew” way. We had been promising him a visit to San Antonio, where he attends law school. No other weekends seemed to work for us. It seemed like divine intervention. I packed my suitcase and tucked one of my daughter’s old Beanie Babies in the side pocket. I wore a locket with her photos. I changed my social media profile picture to a 2007 mother/daughter selfie from the days where you had to turn a digital camera around backwards and hope for the best. We hit the road.
My husband and I don’t discuss her death that often. We speak of Chynna in present tense, as if she’s just across town or away at a college that offers never ending classes. It’s a deliberate decision on my part. She is still here. She must be. Like a modern day E.E. Cummings, I carry her heart in my heart wherever I go. I have found that people deal with death so very differently. My morose babble could be your walled off and never spoken of secret. No one is right. No one is wrong. Some people like to shatter,
glue, and re-shatter their hearts over and over again, like a scab that gets itchy as it’s healing and must be scratched even though you know it will bleed again. Other people prefer the sacrament of silence. If you don’t speak the names of those you miss the most, it hurts a little less. Either way, the pressure builds, doesn’t it? Either way, you have a broken release valve that rivals your broken heart. Either way sucks.
San Antonio is a long drive, especially when, like my husband, you just don’t care for the other person’s driving. He gets weary. I control the music like the passenger princess I am. We ponder through truck stops, wondering where everyone is headed and if anyone really buys the jars of pickled eggs. I look up odd historical facts of all the town signs we pass. Did you know the town of Abbott burned down three separate times, around the turn of the 20th century, only to be rebuilt bigger each time? Sadly, it bit the dust during the Great Depression. This time, I am more silent than usual. My husband wonders what’s coursing through my brain. I remind him that it’s April 10th. He understands.
Our hotel is nicer than we expected. Normally, we seek the Hotel Havana, a 1920s era place in the SATX downtown area, where it smells like Catholic church incense and has velvet flocked wallpaper on the walls. The Havana is too far from our son’s apartment, though, so we settled on the nicest looking chain hotel in his immediate area. The bed is soft. My husband loathes soft beds, but I am a huge fan. I secretly hope that sleep will come easy to me. Perhaps I will close my eyes on April 11th and wake up on the 13th.
That night, at dinner, we chat with the son and his girlfriend. He has made big plans for us. The next night we’ll attend a comedy show. There will be lunch here and brunch there. Oh, and on the 12th – well, he has plans for that, too. I look into his 25-year-old green eyes, the same ones that first touched my heart when he was just three. “We’re going to tour the old Catholic missions on the 12th. I hope that’s ok, Didi.” He calls me by both my stepmom and grandma name. Everyone does these days. I would rather perish than disappoint him, so I hold his gaze and try to speak above a whisper. “Of course it’s ok.” These are the things you do when you love someone. More on that next week.
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