My City of Ruins

There are lots of positives to having a big Italian family like mine.  I always had cousins to play with when I would tire of my younger sister, and my older cousins introduced me to my love of the Yankees, basketball, and great bands like The Who and The Rolling Stones.  My aunts and uncles doted on me and would spoil me with compliments and treats. My Aunt Emilia even let me live with her family one summer when my parents were split working between Albany and Lake George. When you have a big family, there are lots of people to love you.  Unfortunately, there are a few negatives too.  When you have so many people to love, you also have multiple heartaches when you lose a member of a large family.  In the past 15 months we have had to say goodbye to my beloved cousin, Michael,  and my sweet Uncle Joe.  Now my cousin, Danny, has lost his courageous and beautiful wife, Josie, leaving their 6 children mourning their kind and generous mother. I ache for their loss and realize how lucky I am to have had both of my parents well into adulthood.  Each of these losses reverberate through a large family like mine with little echoes of pain from previous losses.

With Josie's death weighing heavily on my heart, I had to drive to Canada this weekend to take my niece and her friend to Bravo Con (the Comic Con of video games) in Toronto.  Just like the lame old joke says, I made the mistake of assuming that my I-phone would work outside of the US.  This wrong belief led me to have to navigate the 4 and 5 lane highways without my GPS.  This wasn't a problem when the girls were in the car because they used their phones to help guide me through the maze of roads.  But the other times when the girls weren't with me were pure hell on earth.  After dropping the girls off with their chaperone and friends, I had to try to remember the way back to the hotel. Needless to say, I became very lost...more than once.  I was cursing my phone service and the blip which was causing it not to work.  Here I was in a great city like Toronto but was completely unable to explore much because I was afraid I wouldn't be able to find my way back to the hotel. I was never a super confident driver but doing so without the safety net of GPS made me anxious, nervous, and very scared.  However, by the end of the whirlwind weekend, I felt confident of my ability to manage those highways without too much help from the GPS. I was able to find my way to certain places and was helped by the Canadian families my niece was visiting.

It reminded me of another time in my life when I felt like I had lost my direction.  Anyone who has lost a loved one knows how uncomfortable and disorienting it can be those first few months after his/her death.  Things that you did on automatic pilot  like grocery shopping or driving to work can become emotional obstacle courses.  The punches that grief delivers can strike you at any time and make you feel like you will never be able to find your way again.  Whether one week, one month, or one year passes, the potential of grief to knock you off course never completely disappears.  While it's different for every person, I'm pretty sure that the death of a loved one is the one of the most stressful things you can go through.

When I lost my father, grief played its constant mind games with me.  I suddenly felt unable to do basic things like interview for a new position.  Shortly after he died, I was called to interview for a position in Syracuse.  Moving for a job had been a possibility before my father passed and I was excited at the prospect of starting fresh in a new city.  But when the day for the interview came I felt uneasy and ill-prepared (and anyone who knows me knows how over prepared I get when it comes to interviews).  As I sat in the office waiting for my turn to interview, I suddenly was overcome with my first full fledged panic attack.  I excused myself from the office on the pretense of making a phone call and drove all the way back to Albany.  My whole sense of being was shaken to the core, and my priorities were knocked out of order.  I felt like getting a job that would take me so far away from my family would not only be wrong but should be unthinkable.  Without my father to anchor me, I felt like I didn't even know myself or my goals anymore.

While not everyone suffers panic attacks after losing a loved one, I do believe we all change in one way or another.  Having distance from the grenade that was launched into my life the day my father died, I now can see how I have changed for the better.  For instance, I have more faith in my ability to get through ANYTHING because losing him was the worst thing that has ever happened to me.  I fought (and still fight) my depression and anxiety and envisioned myself teaching once again, a goal that I reached three months after my dad's death.  Just like I found my way on the streets of Toronto without my GPS, I created a "new normal" in my life without my dad.  While I'm sure losing my mom will create the same havoc in my life, the difference will be that I will have lived through great loss before and am stronger because of it.  My wish for my young cousins (and for anyone else experiencing the excruciating pain of grief) is that they remember that even though all feels lost now, a new path will open. That path will be graced by the love of their angel mother and the strength they gain from living through the sadness and coming out the other side changed for the better.  You will rise up and find your way again.