Hayley’s Light

I have been amazed at how caring and generous friends and strangers have been since we lost Hayley.  I know a lot of people but I don’t let a large number in to my squad.  Mainly because it is hard to find that many people that swear as much as I do.  Also, my time was spent with Hayley and Henry.  Mostly Hayley, you know girl stuff.  We did just about everything together.  We had adventures, we did boring stuff like the store or got our nails done.  But it didn’t matter as long as we were together.  Please don’t think I have forgotten my other child.  Henry and I have our special time, things we do together.  He is into things that I am not very good at.  I suck at xbox and PC gaming just baffles me.  That is his and Scott’s thing.  Hayley was my best friend.  I was so lucky to have that kind of relationship with her.  It would have been such a different dynamic with two girls.  Henry is a great balance for me.  I have really been amazed to find how much time I spent talking, texting, calling, sitting with, driving with, or everything with her.  Now that it is gone I sit and realize how big of a hole she has left.

My grief has grown.  Just like Finn, the golden retriever puppy.  I am the crazy dog lady.  We are back to 4 dogs but the pack works for me.  My friends and Scott were oh so clever.  They knew if there was a new puppy to care for that I would have no choice but to get out and stay out of bed between 7 and 2 when there would be no witnesses.  They were absolutely right.  I have so many times groaned when I heard him whine, thinking that at that moment there is nothing more I would like to do but stay in bed for hours.  If I sleep it isn’t real.  My three older dogs would think that was the best day ever.  Sleeping on our bed is their favorite.  What I didn’t expect was that for the last 9 weeks Scott sleeps in Hayley’s room, while I sleep in ours with the puppy. We use a crate for him to keep him out of trouble and safe.  He is ready to sleep by 7 p.m.  Of course I am not.  We usually head to bed between 8 and 9 where he is coaxed or herded into his crate by Scott.  Scott then lays on the floor next to the crate reading on his iPad while Finn paces and cries.  I get ready for bed.  By the time I am in bed Finn is asleep.  A couple of times so was Scott.  I am a night owl, going to bed at 8 is not normal.  So I proceed to surf the net, write, crochet, or draw.  I usually fall asleep between 11 and midnight.  If I have to go to the bathroom or grab a charger, I literally will roll and army crawl away from the bed hoping he won’t notice.  He has a savvy sense of my location at all times.  I can be so quiet and he will always wake up and howl, bark or cry until I am back in bed next to the crate.  He knows his job is to watch over me and he takes it way too seriously.  Finn has to pee at any time between 1:30 and 3:00, occasionally twice.  He then will need to go again between 4:45 and 6:30.  At this point I could be totally hosed.  I can tell if he will go back to sleep until maybe 7:30 or 8:00, but most of the time he is up and ready to chew on you or anything he can.  His size makes me forget he is a baby, just a puppy.  I really expect that he can be more self sufficient.  So guess who has NEVER been a morning person, yet by 7:00 each morning I am downstairs nodding off on the couch while I hold one end of a dog toy or toss a ball for an hour.  Thank you Tena and Stacia.  So clever.

Just because I am out of bed does not mean I am active or getting anything accomplished.  My energy level is nearly as low as it can be and still be conscious.  Today I accomplished one load of laundry, got my nails done and painted some rocks.  I was exhausted by 4:00.  The grief I feel is frightening.  The best days are when I can trick my brain to slightly believe she is up at school.  Everyone’s grief is as individual as a fingerprint.  I have learned that I have judged other’s in the past.  I have thought unkind opinions of when someone should be “over” their grief or at least doing better.  I was so very wrong.  My grief reminds me of a long hallway in a hotel.  Sort of like the one in the shining but with no creepy twins at the end of the hall.  I am trying to get to the elevator at the end of the hall to take me to a peaceful place.  But I never reach it.  During my attempts I may open a door.  That door may be my memory of the night I watched her die.  The shock and disbelief.  They said she would be fine.  My screaming her name as they did chest compressions and her soul left her body.  Falling to the ground screaming and weeping intermittently.  Just when they thought I was calming down, the screaming would start again.  The meeting with the surgeon.  This room sucks.  I would give it a negative 100 on trip advisor.  I try so hard not to go into that room but I am not always successful in keeping that door closed.  I have noticed that the narrative has changed slightly.  Shockingly there is now a twinge of pride and a small smile.  What was done that night saved her body so that many others can live and their mothers are not experiencing this hell.  The smile is that I know for a fact Hayley would find it funny that I peed my pants.  I remember thinking briefly that thought when it happened because my brain was not accepting what it was seeing.  It created a scenario where she would survive.

Some rooms contain memories.  Some are years of similar memories grouped together.  Our 18 years of visiting Cannon Beach.  That room has her naked at 2 splashing in the water in front of our rental house.  Skim boarding at around 11.  Bringing friends as she got older.  Dance competitions at Seaside piggy backed on to CB.  The next room might be all the time she and I spent on my parent’s boat.  There are hundreds of rooms that include 15 years of dance recitals, competitions, costumes, hair and make up.  Another may be the day she was born, holding her in my arms for the first time.  The struggle to become pregnant and the reward on April 29, 1998.  The trouble of preeclampsia at the end of the pregnancy, the hospitalization after as my kidneys shut down.  Even while very ill and hospitalized I refused to be separated from Hayley.  She stayed with me in my room at First Hill Swedish, but there had to be another adult at all times.  Sara and Scott took turns.  Nothing could convince me to let her go home without me.  Some rooms are just me sitting in a chair thinking, fuck, I have been through a lot of shit.  How could the worst nightmare happen on top of all the other shit.  I know everyone deals with shit, but my shit hill is so much higher than almost everyone I know.  I have faced financial ruin, faced death, countless surgeries, a separation, loss of my stepmom, loss of my dad, loss of my beloved grandmother, loss of friends and loss of a career.  I cannot remember one 5 year period where we did not face a major life event.  The big stuff, not little stuff.  Yet through it all we had the two H’s, Hayley Storm and Henry Scott.  They even have the same initials.

One of the rooms in Hotel Grief is the room of kindness.  The things that have been done to show care and ease our suffering in basic ways.  This is my way of publicly thanking everyone for everything and anything they did to ease our pain and make things easier for us.  Thanks to my most organized friend, there was food for weeks and weeks.  In that room I see an alternative where if we had not had so much generosity with food, that would have been a stressor that I could not handle.  My friend left a cooler on our porch for the deliveries.  This was not her first rodeo.  How nice not to have to answer the door.  How nice that everyone understood.  Henry called it the magic blue box.  I have a stack of thank you cards, and every time I sit down to try to write and send them, I can’t figure out what to say.  “Thank you for the brownies, they are my favorite and demolishing all of them kept me from crying for a good 15 minutes”.  My friends say people don’t expect a card.

There was the food and then there was the go fund me page.  I have donated to countless causes in my life.  I raised over 2 million dollars in 5 years for Heart Disease Research.  Never did it occur to me we would be on the receiving end.  Without a job meant no family leave pay.  Had we not had that fund I don’t know what I would have done.  I was planning and hoping to be back to work by October.  When I lost Hayley, I cannot even imagine.  That fund gave me peace of mind and the gift of time.

Little gifts have been left on my porch since the summer.  Books, candy, flowers, wonderful things.  It could have been just a single piece of chocolate and it held the power to make me feel loved and gave me that little piece of strength.

The gift of time.  One of Hayley’s favorite people was at my side to make the candle light vigil for Hayley’s recipients a success.  Then there were the 200 plus people that were there burning their fingers on hot wax.  She made the beautiful Red Barn feel like Hayley.  There was the gift of the property for the service.  The gift of Root Beer, Hayley’s favorite.  The gift of speaking at the service and therefore forever being etched in Hayley’s history.  The gift of plants, flowers and programs.  The giant photo of Hayley.  The handmade cookies with her name and favorite sayings.  The talented musicians both friends of Hayley.  The AV System so everyone could hear.  The talented women that made it all look lovely.  The 500 plus people that stood 10 deep for 2 hours.  The people outside that stood in the heat and listened the best they could from the windows and doors.  The slide show lovingly put together by a friend the night before.  The glassy babies at the service and in my home.  The Hayley glassy baby.  Other gifts of time included decorating a Christmas tree in a coastal theme.  Cleaning Henry’s man cave!  Jen deserves a medal.

This room is huge and everywhere I look are the acts of kindness.  Some were as complicated as my brother handling the details at the end to as simple as a letter or a card.  Random Texts or messages on Facebook or in the comments section of this blog.  I devour those messages as if I am starving.  The majority of these acts of kindness have been performed by strangers or acquaintances that I faintly know, maybe from Facebook.  Community members.  I have never been one to graciously accept help.  I finally stopped stressing about all of it when someone said, “letting people help is more about them than you”.  They would do anything to make this go away, to take my pain.  But they can’t, so they bake.  They do something and by doing these acts of kindness they feel less helpless.

A thank you will never suffice; ever.  I love the room of kindness.  It makes me feel less alone.  Some of these strangers I now call friends.  I am so thankful.  So are Scott and Henry.  I thought about the thank you cards, I could never get through them.  I thought about standing on the corner near Safeway with a sandwich board that says “Thank you to the best community;  I am sorry about that time I called your kids entitled brats”

On New Year’s day, over 20 people joined us in the freezing cold to light flying sky lanterns in Hayley’s honor.  To welcome the new year.  I thought for sure the dock might tip and we were all going to do an unintentional polar plunge.  It was so beautiful, the sunset, the mountain, the lake and the lights.  But when I turned and looked at the people that came I was overcome with emotion.  There were people I did not know prior to this tragedy.  There were people I have known 16 years.  Girls that grew up with Hayley all to become amazing young women.  It was moms and dads.  I will continue to do everything I can to keep Hayley’s light alive.  I am not going to have mine and her lives mean nothing but tears and pain.  Every mother thinks their kids are the best, and they hope that they are good people.  Hayley’s death showed me that she was a good person.  The best.  That room in Hotel Grief is the one with light shining through at the bottom of the door.  In there is Hayley’s light.  This room is as painful as all of the others.  Because now I know what I am missing.  I did not notice how bright the light was until it was gone.  Don’t take for granted the light in your lives.  Take the time to think about some of the Hayley stories and imagine what would your story sound like.  The electricity that powered Hayley’s light was not perfect but it touched so many people in such a short time.  Take the time to be thankful.  Thanks is all I have the strength to give to people right now.  I am trying to learn to “be” all of the things Hayley would expect from me, but I have not had much success yet;  But my Thankful Light is super nova bright.

 

Thank you

 

— Dawn, Scott and Henry