The box we make

‘My daughter is not supposed to be in a box’, I say out loud holding the small, heavy box on my flat hand, raised in front of me.

I was carrying it to it’s new home in my new house and I’d been smacked with the realization I was carrying the only physical remnant of Stella Blue.

I’m testing myself with these words, I thought, trying to pull out a bittersweet longing, one of the good ones…I want one of the good ones, I think.

It doesn’t work, no rush of emotion comes. I keep looking at it,

Stella’s remains in a box,

A box I built before she was born,

put together because I was bored one night 25 years ago, tinkering in my shop.

Tonight I hold it while standing on the steps of my partner’s kitchen, she within earshot when the words come out of my mouth without thinking (but also with purpose).

‘No, she’s not’, says Barbi in delayed response from another room; I can tell she’d paused what she was doing at my words, and waited for words to come to her.

‘No’, I mutter, ‘She’s not.’

I stare at the box, sitting in my hand, and consider it’s contents:

Lye and water dissolved her dead body and left soft, white remains that now sit inside this box, in two, well-used, ziplock bags, sandwich size, all folded up and dusty from so many openings and closings, from all the times I dipped my fingers in to pinch out a bit of this stardust…

to lose in the wind somewhere,

sprinkle in a garden,

put on my tongue, which I do sometimes…to taste, because it’s closer than touching with my fingers, and I long to be closer. It doesn’t taste like much, but I do it anyway.

Do I feel sad to hold this box? Sad … no, that’s not the right word … but there is a particular feeling,

it hums, things slow down, I don’t move, because thinking about Stella-remains in a box isn’t like thinking about doing the dishes, or leaving for the airport;

thinking about your youngest teenage daughter’s remains in a box is statistically unusual and emotionally confusing.

So what do I feel?

The feeling tonight is light … she was a light, a delight, a bright, joyous creature, quick to laugh and quick to cuddle, a believer, a burning, sharing soul;

moody in her 14 year-old version, carrying cancer, but a dear heart, caring at the ready …

spry, constantly singing, humming, lifting everyone up,

and I miss her too … or I’m missing her as I imagine her aging into her 20^th year …

and I remember her … her at 14 years-old, dying,

and I feel her ... her at 11 shooting an arrow in our driveway, all limbs and long hair and loud voice.

So light this feeling.

How can I be sad to have THAT in me?

I accept that she is gone, that she died in her bed in front of us with a final breath so small it almost wasn’t and then wasn’t;

I accept that she lives in me, inside us, only, not out there anymore, inside her sister, and mother, and cousins and Barbi-through-me, all of us.

Mostly, now, I’m grateful to be with her in this way … and I’m not thinking about what could have been.

Those other dark moments still come, plenty often, and they are painful, heavy, sad, devastating, earth-shattering, a thing that shakes me to pieces, yes.

But those moments happen less often now,

and certainly not today,

in this kitchen 6 years later, holding her small, heavy box of remains

that feels so light and good.

My daughter is not in a box, her remains are; she is everywhere.

True story.