A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes

A dream is a wish your heart makes
When you're fast asleep
In dreams you will lose your heartaches
Whatever you wish for, you keep

Have faith in your dreams and someday
Your rainbow will come smiling through
No matter how your heart is grieving
If you keep on believing
The dream that you wish will come true

--" A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes,” Walt Disney Music Company

Dear Thi,

We have taken half a trip around the sun apart from each other. Half a year has gone by. I put some distance between myself and the tragedy that turned my world upside-down. I found my smile again. I discovered courage that I know you’d expect from me, and strength to start at a different job to see what challenges another place has to offer. I found new curiosity to prove my worth not as a 12-year veteran at a company, but as someone coming in fresh and inquisitive.

And yet sometimes I am taken back to the day I delivered you in that hospital room, when I cuddled you so small and soft and still. A friend has just suffered a midterm loss; her little girl was only a few weeks further along than you. The announcement text I read is like a slap in the face. I am sitting in a new company where I hardly know anyone, at a chair and table that is not mine, staring into a foreign space, a sea of strangers. Suddenly, I miss you so keenly; I wonder where you are, what you could have been doing, and how you fare, having been without a mother to guide you for half a year through. Suddenly, I find myself in a restroom stall, locked in to let my tears pour out, a small and temporary space to mourn you and that newly departed baby before putting myself together and putting my game face back on, ready to once again face a place where no one knows my past.

It is June, a summer when you should have been with me, alive and whole. I realize I still have flannel sheets on the crib that Luc never uses but for the occasional nap. We were going to transition him to his Big Brother, Big Boy room when you came along, but after you passed, neither Daddy nor I felt right about having our one living child far away from us during nights after we have left him to work for most of the day. I pull off the flannel to launder and stretch on cool, summer cotton sheets with little farm animal prints. There was a time when I was pregnant with Luc when a strange and utterly morbid thought fleeted across my mind—I imagined having to pack up all the baby things I had bought and been gifted for him, diapers and all, and having to give them away if my baby didn’t make it to term. “Would anyone like these things?” I could hear myself saying, “They were for my baby who isn’t here anymore.” 

You couldn’t imagine the fear and shame I felt over such a nightmarish daydream, how our minds could take us to such dark places. We retreat afterward to our nest of safety, our normal lives, until they are so violently arrested by nightmare becoming reality. The irony is not lost on me, how I had these pre-partum anxiety attacks for the one that made it, but felt a false sense of experience and assurance for the one that did not; how I was changing linens on a crib that neither of my babies ever really used. “Oh, my girl, my girl—why did you leave me, my girl?” I thought as I crumbled to the floor of the nursery and had a good cry. Recovering from grief is like learning to walk again. Up to a point, you feel confident on your regained skills over something you spent most of your remembered life doing. But sometimes you stumble, fall, find yourself on your knees, your confidence shaken when you bruise up.

A few nights later, I had a dream. I was peering into a bassinet, where a beautiful, lively baby giggled up at me. That sad refrain that ran through my head transformed into a new one: “My girl, my girl, oh there you are, my little girl!” I cooed to her. I woke in the early dawn hours, tears eking from my eyes and onto my pillow, my heart feeling hollow for want of an ephemeral vision. And yet, like Pandora’s Box, there is a soft sense of hope tugging the sadness gently away. After all, a dream is a wish your heart makes.

Somewhere Over the Rainbow

"Someday I'll wish upon a star
Wake up where the clouds are far behind me.
Where trouble melts like lemon drops,
High above the chimney top,
That's where you'll find me."

--"Somewhere Over the Rainbow," Israel Kamakawiwoʻole

Dear Thi,

 I see you in rainbows. In the land of Aloha, where the water laps the shore, I hear your strength in the ocean's roar.

You are the fine sand that meets the ocean, past coarse pebbles and driftwood, softened and refined across hundreds of years.

I feel you in my heart at Byodo-In, where the green hills stand, misted by a veil of fog. 

 

There, I rang the brass bell to cleanse the mind and calm the spirit. 

When Luc peered over the bridge to feed a school of koi aglow with the bright colors of the sun, your spirit circled up to meet us and filled him with gleeful giggles.  I hear you in him. I see what you could have been.

Perhaps you heard my secret wish as I lit incense before the towering Amida Buddha.

You perfume the air with lavender and plumeria blossoms--soft, cream-colored petals swirling in a perfect array of symmetry.

You are the thrill of being up-close with nature's animals; you are the carefree shrieks of running through a grassy field, sea-salt-tinged and sun-kissed. How I had wished that you can experience these life joys, and yet I believe you are in a realm that makes these wonders happen, that you are the very essence of these things.

You are the magic of sunrises and sunsets, painting the sky a magnificent array of red and gold.

Your adventurous and fearless spirit is with me when I feel the urge to explore an off-the-path trail to a secluded stream. You propel our family forward, up and across slippery, muddy paths, under the airborne roots of hundred-year-old trees.

 

You are the reward of the 100+feet Manoa Waterfall, flowing strongly with the unstoppable force of love.

You manifest your rainbow colors in the earth's abundance.

You are the jeweled colors of the sea, bright turquoise lit against white sand.

You are the warm tropical breezes that play with my tousled hair.

Dear Thi, grief is a strange creature. In the beginning upon first contact, it rears its ugly head and roars like a tempest so that you cower in fear, riveted by its force coursing through you as you curl up, inept. But with time it mutates, becoming smaller. If you are lucky, you can shape it, molding it into a hard ball that you can contemplate as you pass it back and forth between your raw palms. You can't ever get rid of it, can't throw it away, for it bounces back. If you don't keep close guard, it once again becomes a creature beyond your control. With experience, courage, and strength, you can learn how to rein it in.

Sometimes, it is as if I am walking along the shore, comfortable and dry, and then suddenly a tidal wave washes in and beats me over the head. I stand sodden, shocked from cold, reeling from what just hit me. This is the memory my grief over you, catching me by surprise. But for the first time in a long time--having seen you in the beauty that I am privileged to experience in the Land of Aloha, knowing that you are in nature's fine touches that caress me, comfort me, and soothe me--I feel a sense of peace that was missing for a long time. I am no longer so lost, indecisive, and afraid. I feel your love; I feel your strength. You are not here, but everywhere.

"It'll be alright, Mama," I can hear you say. For you are around me, bigger than me, even as I hold you safely nestled in my heart.