How I spent my summer vacation

You didn't think I was going to follow through, did you? (Missing from photo---some of my favorite people.)

I didn’t want to feel sadness going into our Chatham vacation but there it sat. In my chest. It’s always in my chest. As I folded each thin cotton dress and set aside each pair of worn flip flops, I thought of her. I thought of how much my mom would love to be joining us on this trip. I thought about how seeking joy, no matter how much I know she would want it for me, feels like I am betraying her.

And then I danced alone in my bedroom on a Tuesday morning.

I visited Chatham for the first time two summers ago when Bec and Jeff first invited us to join them at the house they’d rented there. By that time, five months after her diagnosis, my mom had tried two kinds of chemotherapy and a grueling round of radiation and was beginning to feel like and know that she was dying. We all had hoped she would join us in Chatham but she just didn’t feel well enough. I didn’t want to leave her but I was tired. I had been to every appointment since her diagnosis and thought I owed it to myself and especially Dan to take the week for vacation. My guilt and worry were exacerbated when I checked in with my mom each day via text message and learned she was getting worse. She was supposed to have chemo that week---the first treatment I’d be missing---and she skipped it. I read magazines on a towel warmed by the Chatham sand and tried to pretend I didn’t know how poorly she was doing.

As I packed for this year’s return to that beach, I thought of all of this. Here I was again trying to forget her. I felt constipated in my chest.

And then a song from the Broadway version of The Lion King came on---out of my shuffled iPod rose Circle of Life. I closed my eyes and listened. My neck started to roll in rhythm with the swelling chorus and as my arms rose above me, I lifted my knees and set each foot back down in gentle stomps. My hands swayed through the air as my body moved. I felt my mom telling me to go down to Chatham and love my sisters up for her. To love up my Aunt Gail who joined us from Miami. To love up my brothers-in-law and nieces and nephews. To let myself be loved up. That it didn’t mean I was forgetting her. That it was our turn for the long beach days that she had enjoyed so many of during her life.

I did a white girl’s tribal dance and then I finished packing.

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I spent our week in Chatham at the intersection of joy, sorrow, love and anxiety---a four-way stop where each emotion took its turn without pattern, unsure who had the right of way. We packed coolers of food and stared at the ocean all day in a semi-circle of beach chairs, family and love. But afterwards, as I hung towels over the railing and thought of my mom doing this chore on summer evenings, sorrow took and squeezed my heart. At night we did puzzles and laughed and talked over big delicious dinners, good coffee, and fresh blueberry and key lime pies. And then I’d go out on the porch alone for a bit with a glass of wine and let myself think of her text messages.

“I skipped chemo today. I don’t think I’m going to do it anymore.”

It was a great week---a wonderful week in so many ways---but the sad tugging never quite left me. My sisters probably felt the same but we didn’t talk about it as much as you’d think we would have. It’s hard to synchronize our grief. The aching, working, sobbing, writing, child-raising and anguish of our days rarely coincide. Or maybe like so many other families hit by tragedy, we just don’t know how to talk about it. We just try to get through the days.

But when everyone packed up their damp bathing suits and greasy half-used bottles of suntan lotion to leave Bec and Jeff to enjoy the rest of their vacation without us, the grief came through in the heaviest of good byes. Our sadness was left for the last moments of the trip when our hearts dropped together, contained and disguised by the busyness of getting out the door. We all felt it, some of us cried. We hugged good bye and it was every good bye. The good bye with our mom and dad, the good bye with the house, the good bye to life innocent of this pain. It was the good bye in which we now exist. And it was good bye to a reprieve from the ache of pretending out in our individual worlds, that we are hurting less than we are.

When one of my sisters started welling up, I locked the door of the bedroom behind us and told her to let it out, to give herself that one minute to cry. She took just the minute. Then she put on her sunglasses---we all put on our sunglasses---and we walked out the door.

We emerged from our vacuum and felt the sorrow of not being able to keep each other in our pockets.


Photos by Becky Breslin. Also, there is an entire sister/Ohio constituency/family that was missing from this trip and is missing from these photos. Don't you think they should move east?

Chatham on Dwellable