Un bouquet de houx vert et de bruyère en fleur

In an uncanny feat of timing, I discovered the poem Demain, des l'aube by Victor Hugo at the exact same time that my world was crumbling down. Already in the vulnerable position of convalescing from a rather brutal surgery, I was introduced to one of the most poignant poems touching on grief right as I faced the mortality of the two most impactful relationships of my life.

I nestled those words against my heart, held them tight, clutching at anything that could in some small way show me that somewhere, sometime, someone else knew what this knife sharp pain in my chest felt like. 

Silently, I recited it, over and over in my mind. I memorized it in French. I whispered it to myself as I lay flat in the bathtub, staring at the ceiling, weeping silent tears as water lapped at the edge of my face. I drove in silence, repetitively doling out the French words, one after another, on autopilot. So many times, I arrived at my destinations, cheeks wet, not remembering how I got there, not knowing how many times I let the soft French words roll around in my mouth. To say I was in a daze wouldn't do justice to it. 

To say I am not still in the daze would be a lie. 

I had only three weeks between the two deaths, followed immediately by the need to clean out my nana's house, swiftly followed by the start of summer term. I threw myself into that summer term with a ferociousness that can be understood only by others who have felt the pull of something that wanted to drown them and fought like hell to get away from it. Without knowing it, I had enrolled in the most challenging class I had faced yet. And while I may have bitched through every challenging text I read, every essay I wrote or project I pieced together, secretly I welcomed it. Because the escape it offered my brain was something I couldn't have found any other way. If I was pouring every waking moment into reading and researching, I didn't have to feel. 

I'm paying for it now, to be sure. I find myself dissociating at the drop of a hat as we approach the holidays. 

The holidays have always been a challenging time for me, particularly Thanksgiving.  Too many firsts and lasts compacted into that holiday week even before this past spring's losses added a new layer to the trauma onion that is my complicated relationship with this holiday. But now I find myself navigating new emotional triggers with a rawness I haven't felt in two decades. 

There is a loneliness I can't describe in being the last person alive out of all your significant childhood relationships. I am the only person I've ever known that lost them all before they were 40 years old.  

November is brutal. In the span of 5 weeks I mark the time for 11 anniversaries; 11 separate moments that irrevocably shaped the person I am. 

Eleven. 

Big T traumas. 

Little t traumas. 

Some dates that are irreversibly entwined in my memory with someone I loved at one point who I can no longer text and say "hey, remember the time..."

Remember the year my Mom was fighting with my grandma again, and refused to go to Thanksgiving, so you picked me up and went with me, and then we had a sleepover. And that night we were going to sneak out and meet up with a boy, but your key broke in the ignition? Well, they sold grandma's house. You wouldn't even recognize it now...

That was the last Thanksgiving, the last time, I ever saw my cousin. And now you're gone too. 

That was the night some creep was following us, after we bailed on my family Thanksgiving to go do dumb teenager stuff, and we had to pull into the fire station to get the other car to give up. Do you remember? How freaked out we were?... I whisper into the darkness, and nothing answers.

I'm the sole owner of the memories now. What do you do when the "clean break that comes with death" marries the "jagged pieces of the end of a friendship"? What do you do, when you're the only one left to shoulder all the memories, when all the people who could reminisce on the myriad of things that make you you have gone?

I don't have an answer for that. I'm resigning myself to the fact that I will likely never have an answer to that. 

Today would be my cousin's 49th birthday. Next week, I mark 24 years since I last heard their laugh. 

In a few days, it would be the 41st birthday of the friend I lost this past spring. It never ends. My life feels like a series of days that tally my losses.

 I wonder where I can find some holly and heather...