Not gone

This photo was a glitch of my old phone. I’d forgotten about it until tonight.

There’s not a hole in the space where she was.

---

This was the fleeting feeling of last Saturday, sitting across from a friend, enjoying the sunlight, and it’s been cycling endlessly: there’s no hole in the circle where Stella stood, unless we let it be such a thing for us. Instead, there is a bright light where she stood and we’re all there yet, holding hands, glancing around at eachother, wondering what happened, not moving for fear of ending something we don’t want to end.

We’re not without her, we’re not without the spirit and energy and feeling of her; but we are without the physical Stella Blue. The smile is not there to witness live, her string bean, flailing energy we cannot share a room with; this is the baseline our egos, my ego holds instinctively. There’s no measuring this pain of the living girl gone, a pain that continues and morphs and deepens; and there’s no way around this missing, longing, loss experience of ours…we’re human, we’re flesh and blood after all, how could Stella’s death be ok with those of us still here?

She would be 20 now, long hair streaming, smile beaming, gathering friends, fretting boys, pummeling schoolwork, reaching for her sister, deflecting her mother and father when not falling into us. With no high school career to highlight a college trajectory I can only imagine she would have followed in her sisters footsteps at UW. And though we don’t know where she was headed in her life, we can’t stop wondering. She might be excelling at volleyball, ultimate frisbee, or taken up softball; can you not see her in that uniform with braided hair? Or maybe she’d be snarling at sports altogether, instead partying hard like we worried she might, drinking, smoking and making a scene. I’m pretty damn sure she’d have been the loudest person at whichever house or sportsbar she happened to pick when the Seahawks played in the Super Bowl; and there’s no question in my mind she would be filling every room with her incredible, Stella-watt smile.

I can fall into this mesmerizing spool of what ifs, and do, often, wondering what she’d be doing today, when I’d get to see her, or snuggle with her while watching a movie, would she even let me now? I can brutalize myself by wanting her sweet face 6 inches from me, close enough to smell; I can conjure that, and do. It’s all there for me whether I want it or not; that pain is there to pull inward and roll around in.

And that pain is also there to be seen, felt and placed down for a minute; like a voice silenced for our own good.

It’s a choice I believe; it’s a choice to continue to live in the past, as if it’s our charge to stay lost with a loved ones body gone, to soak in what we do not have, as if, if we don’t we’re unwhole, disconnected, ignoring ourself. But I know, when I’m in a big place - and that happens writing here, this writing platform is where I feel most brave, where I put down words to live by - I know our job is to shoo away shame, embrace her new place in us and ask over and over what is real, what is the world really saying to us about this trial of life and death?

So, I choose to find myself here as often as I can:

I see light where she once stood in the circle and it emboldens me;

and I feel more love from everyone in that circle who casts their gaze my way, watching me look for her, and at the same time looking for her themselves:

there’s no argument to this, there is more light.

And when the chikedee sings her piercing song and it startles you to now;

and when the strong sunlight holds you rooted to a spot in your living room;

and when you see a familiar face in clarity, as if for the first time in a spell, a face you see daily and yet forget to see;

and when you stand up from dinner, and walk to the sink with purpose and no grumbling, and do the dishes with care,

this is you filled with that light, the light we somehow forget to see.

Stella gone, a loss? SUCH a loss. Oh goddamn I miss that girl…oh fuck, it’s not a thing to live without her, when I sit and sink in the life she’s gone from, it is not possible to be ok then.

But if I keep looking toward that light in the circle, she’s most definitely not gone.

What else could be true?

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I write here because I’m able to access a particular frame of mind when writing to this audience; an audience that started on Caring Bridge and lives surprisingly deep within me still, you’ve become a part of me, like I’m talking to myself; someone very separate from the one who speaks intimately face to face with others. I really don’t know how to speak about this grief in person, words fail me almost entirely; writing is the way I find the connections that complete the fleeting thoughts and feelings that pass through me and bond with the practice of living with grief. Often I sit to write with one image and you somehow pull it out of me.