Reaching for Eudaimonia

I can breathe again after months of claustrophobic memories ruling my sleep. They're finally gone. I am still me, but I'm different somehow. Wiser, perhaps. Maybe a little more safeguarded. When I let myself be fragile to people who didn't mind hurting me, I had opened myself up for a battle of thorns. I was growing a black rose garden in my chest, but I've somehow managed to paint them back to red again with forgiveness, watering them with acceptance. I'm searching instead for kindness and understanding. I think I've seen it too, in a pair of deep brown eyes. Fresh starts. It's funny how you never see them coming. Written 6.3.17

Running with him was as much a part of me as my bones or my heart. The day he died my heartbeat seemed to slow to a melody I didn't recognize. I kept trying to find the tempo, the exact moment my inner conductor decided to signal a molto ritardando.  I couldn't do it.  I was too slow to rewind myself backward. I was stuck in slow motion, moving from room to room with dragged feet and crumpled shirts. My body forgot what it felt like to hit the ground hard and confident, pushing against it to move forward.    I was used to my heartbeat being synchronized to his when we would race towards the finish line. Now that he was gone, who was I going to run next to? The couch became my coffin for a year. My eyes were constantly in motion, shifting from the television to our old cat that would stare out the window, wondering when he was going to come in from outside. I would have to tell her to come away. I would try to shelter her under the blankets and hold her ti...

Photo I took of Howard during the 2010 snowstorm. The storm came in quick and covered the forest in a thick blanket of snow. It shrouded the house and weighed down the branches. It went up past our ankles when we marched through it. Howard took out his camera to get some pictures of the house and the trails. We stopped periodically to make snow angels or have a snowball fight.  The rainy blizzard stuck to the silver hairs on his beard making him look like a snow giant. Mom's purple hat was slowly collecting snowflakes too. Both of their cheeks were stained pink. When we laughed our exhales were visible. "Mom, kiss Howard in the snow," I said. I took my own camera and began snapping as many photos as I possibly could. When it snowed over five inches the house ended up looking like something in a postcard or a wintery wonderland.  Photo I took of Momma and Howard during the 2010 snowstorm. Sometimes when we walked through the forest we would hear ...

Many people who I have shared this blog page with are aware that I am in a class for blogging. They usually ask me why I decided to take on such a personal topic for a class. My answer to this ranges from "Yeah, I guess it is kind of crazy" or "My advisors made me do it." The latter is obviously meant as a joke, but they really did have an influence in my decision.  In reality I didn't know at the beginning what I would learn from writing about all of this. I didn't know what it would feel like to share such personal details of my life with friends and strangers.  The overall feeling I have about posting is relief.  I went back to the start of this whole blog decision and I looked at some of my earliest posts. It is there that I see the hesitation in my writing, which I eventually ended up writing about (Thanks, Mom).  I think everyone could tell that I was very unsure at the beginning. I think they knew that I had become accustomed to keeping this p...

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...

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...

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...

When I ask people what I was like 3 years ago when Howard’s death was still fresh, the most common description I am told is that I was ‘alive', but I was 'not living.’ I remember looming from place to place, having conversations that I don't remember, holding everything close to prevent more uncertainty.  I suppose I was trying to keep everything else in my life the same.  I didn't want anything else to change.  I was mad at change.  I know now that change is something that is inevitable, but I remember thinking that. I remember feeling like I was dropped into some parallel universe that fed on chaos and sorrow.  Was Howard’s death some form of punishment?  I was constantly asking myself rhetorical questions like “What did you do to make this happen?” or “Did you do everything that you possibly could have that day?” These were questions that ate me alive for years. When I dared myself to think of the day he died, I would ask myself impossi...

Dear Dad, Today marks 2 years since you died. I know that you might think it would be silly of me to write you like this, but at the same time I don’t really talk to anyone about what happened to you that day. In fact, I don’t really speak at all about it. Sometimes I wonder if something is wrong with me. I can feel everyone in the family wondering why I don’t talk about you. They wonder why I don’t cry.  But I don’t mind telling you that I am scared to. I’m scared if I go there, if I relive that day that I won’t be able to pull myself out of it. I remember what feeling nothing felt like. I remember what showing up and hiding my pain behind a façade to not upset anyone felt like.  I don't want to do that.  I don't want to not feel anything anymore.  Written: (12.1.15)

There were a couple of moments before my dad died that he would talk about what he wanted to happen after he died. He told me he wanted to be cremated and that he was adamant about not being displayed in an open casket in front of friends and family. He would say he wanted people to remember him alive, not dead. Three weeks before he died, he started talking about his death again. I didn't particularly enjoy talking about what would happen after he died, but this time I humored his discussion. Howard said that after he was cremated he wanted some of us in the family to scatter his ashes across the world. He said he would rather be in many places than just in the ground in the middle of Oklahoma. I remember thinking how unique this concept was. It got me thinking about what I wanted to happen to me after I died and why I felt so odd talking about it. I joked with him that I promised I would scatter his ashes anywhere I went, but I was only going to as an excuse to see ...

Hello. My name is Kateleigh. This is my first attempt at a writing and maintaining a blog.             The first question you may ask is: why is your blog titled ‘Reaching for Eudaimonia’? Eudaimonia is a Greek word that was meant to be synonymous to happiness or contentment. Currently it is often meant to refer to reaching a state of human flourishing. The word has since been Anglicized to ‘eudemonia,’ but I purposely kept it at the original.   I believe that we always carry some resemblance to what we have been in the past, which is a very big aspect of the content that will be on this blog.             So am I at my personal eudaimonia? Not even close. That is not to say that I don’t have moments of happiness. But if I am speaking truthfully, most of the time I am still reeling from an unexpected tragedy that happened over three years ago ...