Well, it had to happen sometime. I finally had to buy toothpaste. For those who may not have been following this blog for the past several years, an early grief trigger I had revolved around needing to buy toothpaste. (Sounds so silly to say that now, but at the time, it was hard.) I wrote about it in this blog post:
After I wrote that post a caring friend of mine sent me a box full of tubes of toothpaste. (Boy, did that make me laugh when those arrived!) Those toothpaste tubes lasted nearly three years.
So much has changed for me during those three years, and the grief does hit a bit differently now. Know what, though, there were still definite twinges when we finished this last tube of “freebie non-griefy” toothpaste and I had to suck it up and buy more at the store. Isn’t it funny the connections our brains can make sometimes to inanimate objects, the weight we can give to things?
There have been other things that have taken a seemingly ridiculous amount of time for me to face or deal with. Take Kendall’s headstone, for instance. I agonized over that, finally creating a custom design centered around the Washington, D.C. temple, where we were married in 2001. I created the design fall of 2021 and then I never completed the process. I found the company I wanted to use, finalized the design, picked the material, and then….just kept putting it off. Felt blocked when I would think about taking care of it. I change my mind often about design things, and this was literally going to be set in stone, not to mention the fact that it was also my headstone (so weird) and I just…didn’t pull that final trigger.
And then I got married, which made the whole thing seem even weirder. My last name isn’t even Sawyer anymore. But finally last spring when we hit the three year mark for Kendall’s death I decided that enough was enough and I was going to get that headstone laid. It took until NOVEMBER for them to finally get it in the ground, but it was definitely a load off of my mind to have it done.
Who knows where I will actually end up being buried when the time comes, if it will be there or with Jaime somewhere, but honestly, I don’t know that I much care. It’s a problem for another day (and by that point, frankly won’t be my problem anyway).
I don’t think I ever talked on this blog about the significance of where Kenny is buried. There is a private cemetery within walking distance of our home, and in the late spring of 2019 a friend of ours discovered that there was a family of owls living in a quiet, secluded area of the cemetery that is surrounded by trees. For that entire summer our family went there regularly to watch “our owl family” at dusk. We saw the owl chicks when they were first big enough to climb out of their nest, when they first started hopping from branch to branch and then taking short flights, when the mama owl took one of the chicks on a hunting expedition down in the brush. It was magical.
We named the father, mother, and two owl chicks (we’re convinced one was male and one female because of their sizes). And yes, they did of course have Harry Potter names as per family tradition (we’ve had Dobby our dog, rabbits Albus and Lupin the Lop, Trevor the frog, Winky the goldfish and Moody the beta fish, Hedwig and Luna our parakeets, Nymphadora Tonks the leopard gecko, Fred and George the gerbil twins, Nagini our garden snake, Fluffy the ground squirrel who snuck in our van and came home with us after a camping trip and then hung out in our yard for a year, Sprouts the squirrel that during Covid and when Kendall was sick would sit on a branch outside our living room window and chatter at us, then run across our window sills, atop our fence and leap up into the tree in the backyard at the same time every day….). I know, it’s a lot. Lest you think we live in a complete animal menagerie here, those pets were over a 15+ year period, and other than an abundance of garden snakes each spring and summer and plenty of squirrels up in our trees, we only have the dog currently.
But the owls were pretty amazing. They let us get so close! The father owl (“James”) especially was massive and more than a little intimidating, but as long as we didn’t get too close to the babies and stayed relatively quiet, he generally seemed fine with us being there.
When the time came to need to choose a grave site, there was no question which cemetery I wanted. What a blessing that we already had happy memories associated with being there, in that beautiful location. Even better, we were able to reserve the spot in that very same area of the cemetery (I later learned was called the “Secret Garden” corner), and Kendall’s grave is directly under one of our owl trees.
I could name other things that I am only now “facing,” like finally going through the storage unit that still had things that had been evacuated with my first bad flooding. When we emptied that out a few months ago, for the first time I went through Kendall’s items from the hospital, read cards and letters that had gotten missed amidst everything, revisited long forgotten photographs and childhood keepsakes, went through painful and happy and nostalgic and humorous memories that I had kept buried. It felt like a big step for me to do that.
There are still plenty of things I have continued to put off sorting through or dealing with, but bit by bit I’ve been climbing out of that deep dark grief hole. Or at least shining a light in where before I was afraid of what I might unearth. And know what? It hasn’t been as scary as I had built it up in my mind to be.
