Reaching for Eudaimonia

Dear Dad, I trusted someone. I really trusted someone and they broke it.  “You’re only broken if you choose to be,” You said to me after my first heartache. “I know, I know,” I say to you out loud in the heavy darkness of the guestroom. I can’t sleep in my room. I can’t spend more than two minutes in there. “Get out of your head. Stop replaying that part. Stop thinking about it. You didn’t do anything wrong. Don’t let this break you,” You say. But it has. “What if I can’t do it on my own?” I ask you.   No reply. They come over, one after the other, in the afternoon when the sun is setting just below the treetops. The living room is painted pink by the sunset. That used to make me smile. They tell me they can’t see beyond the wall I’ve put up. They say when they search my eyes for recognition they can see I’m inhabiting some other world. I remember this world. I remember it too well. Their arms are like anchors around my body trying to...

The day after Thanksgiving my family typically starts to decorate for Christmas. My grandma still says that if the tree isn't up before December 1st, then it is bad luck.  In 2013 my cousin Sarah, who was eleven at the time, had come over to help decorate.  I always joked that we needed the extra reinforcements at our house since Momma is an interior designer and was determined to set up three Christmas trees in the living room, each of them a different size. I called it her little tree village.  That year I had also convinced Mom to buy the white-wired Christmas lights. Sarah and I went all around the house draping the lights around mirrors, bed frames, curtain rods, windows and the borders of the rooms.  Howard said that it looked pretty.  After he died I ended keeping the ones in my bedroom that were wrapped around the metal frames of my bed for over a year.  I would leave the those lights on during the night. I couldn't sleep in...

I used to think writing was a sort of superpower since it felt like stopping time. I remember exactly when I found the love for books and for writing. Mom used to take my brother and me to the library on the weekends when we were kids. She was a single mom in college at the time and needed to find time to study while looking after us. I used to run through the automatic doors at the Metropolitan on a mission with a wide grin. I had a lot of favorite books, but I used to be a big fan of the Junie B. Jones books by Barbara Park. There were 28 of them. I am pretty sure I read them all about three times a piece. We used to spend hours at the library and I would leave with about five books to take home to read at a time. My grandmother used to call me Matilda. In third grade one of the projects was to create a short story and illustrate it. I wrote about a young girl whose father was a pirate. All I remember about it was her father was going to sail away for a long time. The g...

It's funny how music can bring up memories in an instant. Last week I was driving down I-235 to pick mom up for our weekly lunch (typically at McNellies Pub, because it's as Irish as you can get in Oklahoma) when a song came on the radio. The song was "Your Mama Don't Dance" by one of Howard's favorite bands, Poison. As soon as the song started in on its contagiously fun rhythms, I couldn't help but smile and laugh. The summer before Howard died he started listening to his old records that he kept up at the top of his side of the closet. I remember when he pulled out his old record player and speakers with wires tangled all over the place. I remember 3 weeks worth of listening to music from famous hair bands from the 80s. On the weekends I would wake up to Howard jamming out abnormally early in the morning.  Since I am not anywhere remotely close to a morning person, this used to drive me crazy. I would throw off the covers, head down the hallway...

My father was the most rational person that I knew. He could help anyone pull themselves out of an emotional breakdown. He knew I was an over-thinker... a really destructive over-thinker. He would always pull me out when I would bury myself with the world.  He would ask me how I could take something so small and insignificant and somehow warp it into something that didn't resemble the original.  I didn't have an answer to this. I joked with him that my over-thinking could be helpful when planning a plot twist in one of my novels, but we both knew that it was a problem.   I wish he was here to give me advice. I am going through an emotional earthquake as of late. Yet, I know what he would tell me to do.  "Don't let anyone have that much control over your emotions, Kateleigh." I still hear his words in my head, although his face has started to fade. I haven't managed to figure out how to implement this life lesson. Sometimes I wonder if...

Dear Dad, You died a year ago today. The foggy recollection that this is no longer an approaching inevitability, but rather a fact that I need to accept is mind-numbingly painful. I still try to remember that day, the day you left us. Sometimes the memories seem hazy, but other times I see it in a monotonous pattern constantly on replay. A year ago it was sunny and unnaturally warm for the first day of December. It was a Sunday and I had come home straight after my weekend job at the little mom-and-pop café. When I got home you were dressed to do yard work. “How was work?” You asked. “Fine. Kind of a slow day, actually,” I replied. You smiled and gave me a hug. I was glad to be home. I had a test in Physics that coming Thursday and wanted to study as much as I could. Mom was cleaning the kitchen, preparing for dinner. You said that you wanted something spicy to eat. We planned on watching Masterpiece Theatre that night. “Are you going outside to work?...

I have to be honest about this process. I write these passages often times with tears rushing down my face, gasping for air by the end and praying that I could find some peace. Sometimes the salt from my tears irritates my skin and dries it out. It stings. I have to tell you what my mother told me a couple of days ago. First, I want to mention that my mom reads this blog. She knows that some of the most personal ways that she coped is on here for everyone to see. She doesn’t say anything about being uncomfortable about it. I asked her how she felt. I asked her if there was anything that she didn’t want me to share. She told me that helping others understand is more important than any other insecurity she might have about it. She also told me that she could tell that I was holding back. I know what she means. I know I have to say it eventually. I know the day is coming when everyone who reads this will want to know how he died, if that isn’t already the case. As she...

My father was a little odd about buying things, specifically clothes. He never wore anything that had any labels or any other traces of a brand. He always said that wearing them was basically free advertising. He bought his clothes a little bit oversized. My father was over six feet tall and of average build. He said he didn't like clothes fitting too close. I knew that he didn't quite like it when I wore his sweaters, but they were cozy. When he died I slept for days in the same forest green fraying sweatshirt. I knew it looked like it swallowed me, but in a way I already thought that the world had swallowed me. Mom slept with his shirts rolled up and under her pillow for over a year. His clothes were the only articles that still smelled like him. When I wore them I still felt like he was there. When I wore them I felt safe. Giving away his clothing was really hard to do. I was sometimes afraid to walk into their closet because the clothes lingered there, like appari...

In the spring of 2015, Mom began to pack some of Howard's things away. She had kept all of his clothes and shoes in the same place for around a year and a half. "What if he needs them?" She would mumble this sometimes when I asked her if she needed help, even though we both knew he wasn't going to need them.  I remember the day she found a heavy grey metal box in the back of their closet.  Mom yelled my name, she sounded like she was panicked. I ran to her as fast as I could. It had reminded me of the way she screamed my name the day she found Howard in the woods.  When I found her she was sitting on the floor with a screw driver trying to open the box. It had a lock on it. She was trying different angles on it, sometimes hitting it hard on the hinges.  "What are you doing?" I asked her.  She stopped trying to pry it open and looked up at me with misty eyes.  "Have you seen this before?" She asked me.  I shook my h...