Reaching for Eudaimonia

I finally started writing the book about you. Is it strange that it took me back to the beginning of this entire blog? It felt just like the first time I pressed the "publish" button on the introduction post. Perhaps it is because it is a new introduction into this side of me? It's strange to be here, recounting all of this again. First question that pops into my head that my mentor would ask: Does it hurt less? I think my answer would be yes and no. It does hurt less because I've finally began the journey into turning my memories and experiences of you into a book and it will probably feel a lot smoother to write. It doesn't hurt any less because I still have to recount it. It still feels like pressing on a bruise or stepping on a sticker. But it's a change in perspective. I've been told not to put on the editor hat, because I've always been a writer to reread after I finish a chapter. I've been told to just write it out, to write f...

These muggy summers have me missing the fresh air of springtime. I miss the budding lilies in your resting place where the softest moss grows in place of tragedy. Sometimes I run out there through the twigs leaving snags in my shirts and my hands feeling their way through brush. I know I get small cuts on my knuckles but it's worth it to talk to you. I miss those days when the house would be quiet enough to hear the hum of the geothermal system you managed to experiment with. You would curse under your breath when you found that the basement had flooded (yet again). I would chuckle silently hearing you come up the stairs in a huff. If you were here I'd ask you if it was alright that I had made all these mistakes in your absence. I would ask you what it is I'm supposed to be looking for. I would ask you for help. Mom called this my love letter to my father. I suppose it is, really. I made my peace long ago not to discuss my pain in full detail with people. I neve...

Dear Dad, Today I turned 19. It was the first time in 10 years that you weren't there for my birthday. Remember when we used to always pick a restaurant to go to that no one in the family had heard of so they were forced to try something new? I remember how you used to laugh so secretly. I thought it was such a diabolical plan. Today feels weird without you here. My favorite part about my birthday became sharing it with you when I was 8 years old. I would always memorize what day yours would be on before mine because I knew that whatever week of the day yours fell on, mine would be exactly one week later. One thing I missed when I woke up today was one of your signature cat birthday cards. I loved how year after year you would go and find the craziest looking cat card and write something quite clever on the inside. I always looked forward to your quips and you always looked forward to my reaction (which was usually faked annoyance). Secretly we both loved it. So now...

I know what it feels like to fly. It feels like being held by your arms and being swung around in circles as we are both getting dizzy and giggling like crazy. It feels like I'm six years old again in the backyard at Grandma's house. Caleb is playing baseball outside with our cousins John, Angel and the twins, Tim and James. My hair is bleached by the sun a bright yellow blonde in messy pigtails and my skin is all tanned. Our fort that we built out of the cardboard boxes that the new couches came in is set up with a sign that says "Home Sweet Home, Wecome" instead of "Home Sweet Home, Welcome." "Again, Howie, again!" I laugh and scream with my arms stretched out towards you. You smile back and grab my arms to swing me in circles more and before I know it my legs are off the ground and I'm flying again. I can tell you love Momma and she loves you back. You are growing on me and I'm growing on you too. I can tell you make Momm...

One of my earliest memories of Howard was when I was around 5 or 6 when he was dating Mom. I was waiting up for her to come home, but I was really excited to see him too. I had on one of those pink nightgowns with one of the Disney princesses on the front. My hair was a chaotic mess of curls and tangles, partially because I hated to brush it and partially because Mom always brushed it for me before I went to bed.  Grandma had the fan whirling around in the kitchen at a medium speed, occasionally clicking when it rocked because a screw was loose somewhere.  I sat in Grandma's chair at the table, leaning back and watching out the window for headlights. My eyes felt itchy and dry and all I wanted to do was shut them for just a moment. I knew I couldn't though. I had to wait for Mom to get home.  I looked around the room, noticing the pictures of fruit all over the walls. Small ones, big ones, with the addition of fake fruit stuffed into wooden baskets for dec...

"I can't ever escape Jane Austen," He would say in exasperation. There we would be, Mom and I, on the couch with popcorn in our hands and tissues on the table. We were (yet again) watching the BBC versions of the Jane Austen novels. We'd smile hesitantly, almost guilty, for watching Pride and Prejudice for the third weekend in a row. Mom and I basically had the lines down for some of the scenes and were not ashamed to practice them in public, laughing and smiling uncontrollably. "Howard, we cannot help it if Colin Firth is perfection," I would say to him. He'd lift one of his thick grey and black brows and cross his arms. "How is this productive?" He'd say. "You're the one who bought these DVDs!" I'd say back. Mom would laugh at our bantering. And of course Howard would just mumble something under his breath and make a break for it to escape the English romantics. I always thought that was a little odd since h...

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 ...

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...

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...

I have been reaching out to my old high school friends and some of my past relationships in hopes that they might shed some light on what I was like the first couple of years. Some bring up things that I didn’t even know happened. After the first week, one of my best friends since childhood took an entire week of school off because she didn’t want me to be alone. Our neighbors, who are more like family, told me that I couldn’t fall asleep without a lot of people around me.  Sleeping is probably the only thing I can recall.  I am still in the process of understanding who I was then because I genuinely believe it will heal some of the issues I deal with today.  I have become a worrier.  It is also sometimes quite difficult for me to open up to people I do not know. This used to be very different for me.  But the best one (in my opinion) is that I have anxiety about what I will do if something happens to the other people I care about and love de...

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...

The first week after Howard died I lost around 10 pounds. My grandmother had moved in and was cooking for mom and me for almost every meal. If we ate it was only a couple of bites.  My aunt and uncle from Texas came up to help, and our friends and neighbors were constantly bringing in these wooden care baskets full of food that seemed endless. Mom couldn't sleep by herself. I couldn't sleep by myself. Mom cried everyday. I held her everyday. I didn't cry about it.  A few weeks later I had a dream about Howard. In the dream I woke up and it felt like the untouched quiet that usually swept over the house on an early Saturday morning. I could smell some food cooking in the kitchen. When I rounded the corner of the hallway I saw Howard standing over the gas-stove making breakfast. I ran towards him and I hugged him as tightly as I could. "Howard, I had the most awful dream in the world," I said to him. He turned to me looking confused and asked, ...

Dear Dad, Today feels so incomplete without you.  There are no words for this kind of sadness. There is a bsolutely nothing at all.  Written: 12.25.13 ( 24 days after my father died) 

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 ...

Dear Dad, You will miss my high school graduation today. I will sit in the rows of other excited seniors who are wondering what their futures will be like and I will wish that you were here. I always wish you were here. I suppose that is not a secret. I sometimes can’t bear the rush of inevitable sadness that shows its face when I least expect it. I’m only 18 but I feel so much older. I’ve changed in so many ways that I didn’t think I could. I don’t talk my head off, as you said I do. I don’t go out with my friends to the bookstore or to see a movie like I usually do.   I am sitting here, wishing that this day would be over so I don’t have to feel sad about it anymore. I wonder if there are others that will be graduating today that are missing one of their parents. Sometimes it’s comforting to think that I am not alone in this loss. I need your advice. I need you to be here for Mom. I need you to tell my brother that when people told him “you’re the man of ...

Chinese Pistache Tree. Photo provided by Flickr My grandmother once told me she thought I came from Mother Nature, herself. She told me when I was around 3 or 4 she found me sitting down in her driveway during a northern downpour that Oklahoma City gets every now and then.   She told me I was looking up and my arms reached towards the sky, like I was welcoming something. When I came in completely soaked to the bone she gave me a big smile.        “What were you doing out there?” She said she asked.          “Saying hello,” I said.        “To whom, dearest?” She asked.        “To the raindrops.” When I was 9 I thought I could talk to trees. Mom had married my stepfather, Howard. I was the flower girl at their wedding but my grandmother called me flower child instead. Mom and Howard dated for 5 years because he wanted to make sure my brother Caleb and I lik...

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 ...