The memory of a catastrophic event doesn’t sit like a well-trained dog in a house one day after its anniversary.
Depending on the event, some parts stay with you everyday. You learn how to deal with them.
For my husband, John, and our family; we have the first anniversary of the funeral on June 3, and what I call our “zombie summer” of 2020 where nothing made sense without our daughter, Corrie.
But we can surrender in the darkness, or we can endure. I reflected on this in December 2020.
The path to build up our endurance may be the most painful emotional and physical steps we ever take.
I’ve always used my maternal grandmother’s statements about life as a guide. Most all of them are true, and many I cannot repeat until I try to publish my memoir about this journey. When I was younger, Mimi said:
Never make a decision in the dark. Wait for the dawn to come.
Mimi
As I reflect on where I am one year later in the coming days and weeks, I share in the hopes that someone might find the lessons useful. Today, I share my thoughts on the very person who inspired me to endure.
Mimi
Everyone has someone they hope to emulate, or from whom they desire to learn strength.
No person exerted greater influence over my thoughts, personality, or upbringing than my Mimi. While I was raised in a loving household, too often there was this feeling of:
What will other people think if: I say this, do that, or—as it happened most often—my atypical mind trips over itself in front of others, and I’m caught again without my social GPS?
I cared too much about what other people thought. Even after Corrie died, I did not want people to view my struggle. My emotions and what I wanted were beyond my control. For a while, it felt like a zoo where some people wanted to look at us, but eventually they walk away from the iron bars.
(I want to be very clear that we’ve had and have many supportive people in our lives who’ve helped us, since Corrie earned her wings.)
You still feel isolated and alone. Only one person stood as a model for the attitude I needed to take.
It was only a few weeks ago my grandmother had the gumption to tell her Dominoes Friends about how wrong they were about an issue and why. She let them know what she thought, and walked away like she dropped the mic.
Mimi once said, “I hope one day I have a lot of money, so that I can tell certain people to: ‘Go to hell.’ That’s what I need is some go to hell money.”
Now I’m not saying that I believe that thought or I’ll say the same idea, but I needed her spirit and strength from the time I saw my daughter take her last breath.
Because no one could walk that path with me. No one, not even my husband, deserved to hear or know the details that will always dwell in my mind and soul.
I required Mimi’s strength to say: “it doesn’t matter what anyone thinks about what I say, how I live, raise my son, teach, what I write, or how I handle my grief because I walk in the shoes no one wants to wear.”
Mimi set that example for me. She set the bar high. She knew the loss of a child herself.
After all, where would Becks, her nickname for me, be without her Mimi?
Corrie's Season 