We want to know.
But we really don’t want to know.
I found out this last week that a press is interested in a work I’d written before Corrie’s death about growing up as a neuroatypical kid. I wrote what that looked like in the 1990s when doctors used words like “grotesque” and dis- and de-. These words were used to describe my abilities from the ages of three to six, and paralleled my son’s life at a time when we became much better with neurodiversity.
The editors really liked it. They want me to change some things, specifically with my neuroatypicality as an adult and embracing it. I am reworking the piece. It is not where I want it, so I put it back for a while.
We want to know,
but we really don’t want to know.
I found out the final cause of my daughter’s death was a benign cyst that ruptured the intestines. It is so rare that it does not have a name. According to research by my sister-in-law, a retired school nurse, only 870 something people have died from this cyst, since records were kept in the early 1500s.
Why my daughter?
I don’t know.
Why anyone’s child whether a baby, a child under ten, a teen or adult should die?
It is a curse to bury your child before you ever enter the ground.
Last week, I found out I wanted and needed to walk into my school each day to get the room ready. The words last year’s students and their parents wrote to me in emails and cards gave me strength to move forward with Corrie on my mind and heart.
I found I was more honest and open than I had been before I started to withdrawal from people after Hayes’s birth mostly due to trust issues with other adults.
I still have a mission to write about the experiences between Hayes and me. Maybe it will help another parent or family member understand the different ways in which our brains process and intrepret. Maybe it will help encourage such a person to ask questions when he or she does not have the same social GPS rather than laugh and say, “What is wrong with them?”
Corrie is one of my four primary inspirations. She is not the only one.
Because I know I still have to be a Mom to Hayes. Choices I make can shape his thought process during his bridge years from child to preteen.
Somehow I must convince myself there was nothing more I could’ve done for Corrie. People can make the argument to or for me all day, but until I have convinced myself, it does’t make a difference.
Logic says we, as parents, are supposed to protect them. John and I did everything to protect Corrie from COVID-19 and something unknown took her.
I can tell you I loved her all five and a half years. I made it a mission to be a good mother to her every day, and I held myself accountable when I slipped. Corrie once told me when I struggled with my health in a previous work environment:
“I hugged you every day Mommy because I knew [that school] made you sad,” she said.
I was sad when I felt I had not reached kids enough. I constantly tried to problem solve in my brain because I loved my students. Corrie forced me to stop thinking about it because when she hugged me it pulled me in like the cliché bear hug.
And Corrie was strong for a five year old.
The words of kids got drove me forward. One in particular told me: “if I was your child, I would not want you to grieve for long.” This student reminded me of how I had helped him, and how I was meant to go one with more students after the loss of my daughter.
I have dedicated the the classroom I have created this year in memory of Corrie.
Corrie's Season 