Some Nice Things Happened in Vegas

I've always absolutely adored this print on my in-law's vintage lawn furniture.

Glad to be home. And a lot of good happened on what would seem on the surface to be an awful trip, with my father-in-law passing away:

• I am glad beyond words that we got to spend time with my husband’s father in the days before he passed
• Seventy degrees and sunny in January—can’t beat it. Especially when there’s cool lawn furniture to hang out on
• The evening of the day my father-in-law passed, we went out to dinner at a swanky Chinese place with my mother-in-law, brother-in-law, and a close cousin and his wife. It sounds strange to say, but we all had a really, really lovely time. God, it’s sad that my father-in-law passed away, and everybody’s feeling it, no question (there were lots and lots and lots of tears that day), but it’s not the horrible tragedy and utter, paralyzing despair that went on around the sudden death of my young brother. I think it’s been good for me to see that death can happen without everyone’s world being shattered beyond repair
• A Vietnamese food lunch at the Lemongrass Café. This is the one thing I always want to do when I come to Vegas (all the Asian food in my town sucks, and there is no Vietnamese). Vermicelli noodles—yum. Not quite the same as Golden Star in San Francisco on lunch break from the ad agency with Marco and Habeeba, but I’ll take it
• Meeting my husband’s next-oldest brother was such a pleasure (I’d never met any of his siblings before this past year and his dad getting sick). I’m still kind of in awe of what he did for his dad, sat with him day and night in the hospital over the entire last month of his life, worked hard with those in the healthcare system to get him the best possible care. He’s staying with my mother-in-law indefinitely, to help her with the transition. Oh, and he makes the best fried eggs over easy I’ve ever had

My Father-in-Law Died Yesterday

My father-in-law loved Las Vegas.

Peacefully, with one of his sons at his side. My husband and I were on our way home...turned around and came back to Las Vegas. It was a beautiful sunny holiday Monday, which feels so weird. Don't know what weather would be appropriate...crazy torrential rainstorms? 

My father-in-law and I had lots of conversations over the years that I knew him, just me and him. He was no stranger to hardship and grief--losing a baby to cancer, and his first wife in a car wreck when she was 39 and they had three little kids. The thing that he told me in all those conversations that sticks with me the most is this:

"I don't want people to say of me, 'Look at that man, he's had so many horrible things happen to him, oh how he's suffered.' I want them to say, 'Look at how he picked himself up and kept going."

Love to my dear father-in-law. I can't believe he's gone.

P.S. And here is something small and beautiful that my husband wrote sitting in the hospital room with his father's body, waiting for the mortuary, tears running down his cheeks as he wrote:

"I never really knew my father, but I felt love for him. He was always in my life, but his past was always a mystery. He helped to shape me into who I am. He picked me up when I fell. He taught me to see the world as it is. Without him I would have been lost. I am going to miss the father that I never really knew. I am going to miss my dad."

Uncle Allan

My Uncle Allan as a child, on the left in this photo. My grandma's pregnant with my mom here.

One of my favorite uncles, Allan Greist, died January 6th. There's an informal service at his home on Sunday, and I can't go because my husband's dad, who lives in Las Vegas, is going into hospice and we have to travel there to be with him. Ugh. Too much emotional stuff to come back to (we found all this out on a layover trying to get home from Europe). Plus I'm all hopped up on fertility hormones, which doesn't help. 

I cried yesterday, for my uncle and for me, but mostly for my dear aunt and cousin, who have to go through the grief left in the wake of this death. I wish they didn't have to go through it. I wish no one had to go through it. 

My cousin asked me to write something that she could read at the service. I thought I'd share what I wrote here:

"My Uncle Allan was my mom’s oldest brother, and I can’t remember a time when he wasn’t in my life. We lived two hours apart: us in the Colorado mountains, he and his family in Colorado Springs, in my mind the big city. Our families got together frequently, took turns spending weekends at each other’s houses. And always, always, always: Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, Christmas.

"Uncle Allan: such an upbeat, calming, serene presence. I never saw him get angry or frustrated. He took an interest in me—in all us kids. He taught me how to spit watermelon seeds, so I’d have a chance at winning the contest he hosted each summer. He showed me the sunflowers five times bigger than me that he grew in his lush backyard. He taught me how to develop film in his basement dark room, let me loose in there when I was still young enough to do some serious damage. He said, “Of course! Read anything you want,” when I asked him about the wall of books in his living room, and I subsequently spent many happy afternoons curled up in the swivel chair beside them.

"He carved turkeys with finesse and flair all those holidays, all the while telling puns that were over my head as a child, but that made the adults groan. He made me laugh by just acting like he was going to tickle me; he never actually had to do it. And the railroad—he let my brothers run his model railroad trains, a whole portion of the basement with life-like buildings set up on a platform that you could duck under to get into the open middle. I liked being in the center of that world, a place where everything was in order, nothing ever went wrong.

"One of my clearest and best memories happened on a camping trip, a family reunion, a place called Cottonwood. I was six, plus or minus. We went for a hike, a half-dozen of us. We came to a river, a thick, felled evergreen the bridge across. The tree probably wasn’t as high above the water as I remember, and the river probably wasn’t as huge or as swift, but regardless: none of us kids were traversing on our own. My uncle scooped me up, swung me onto his shoulders, walked steadily across, not looking down, footing sure even though the tree was rounded and barky and a fall could have had dire consequences. He set me down safe, where the dirt path started again.

"We all need people to help us across the rivers in our lives, both real and metaphorical. My Uncle Allan helped me. I am so very lucky to have had such a kind, caring, gentle, wise, and loving presence in my life. My dear uncle: Godspeed and God bless.

Love,

Kristen"

Just Because You’ve Been Damaged by Tragedy Doesn’t Mean You Have Nothing Left to Offer the World

Here's where we got married, Glade Park, Colorado.

A sweet story, told to me yesterday about the little log cabin chapel where my husband and I got married:

“When we were building the chapel,” Alice, who owns it, told me, “we were getting wood from an area of Glade Park that had been ravaged by fire. The supporting pillars for the structure that you see in the front, we decided not to strip them of evidence of the burn. We did that to remind us--I could picture those poor trees saying ‘I’m so damaged by the fire, I’m burned and disfigured, I’m no good for anything anymore.’

"And look where they ended up--the most important part of a chapel that’s meant so much to so many, many people.”

Grief: Does it Ever Get Better?

Luke on our last Baja surf trip, just before lighting the evening's fire. He died April 29, 2005 at age 27.

So I lived with my little brother in Santa Barbara, CA, in a little stucco house on the hill we called “The Cota House.” He was killed five years ago, a Friday evening in a motorcycle accident, coming home for a barbecue before we and a bunch of friends went to Ventura to see his band play. He was my best friend, and, when he died, the person I was spending all my time with. My day-to-day life was catastrophically disrupted.

The first few years were absolutely horrible. Lately, I can’t pinpoint exactly when, I’ve been feeling a little better. It’s taken so long to get to this point. I’m starting to feel like his death won’t destroy me. I’m trying hard to build a new life for myself. It’s complicated because it wasn’t just losing him--I also feel like when he died, my whole world got taken away from me. I loved Santa Barbara, loved the beach, loved to surf, and life had it’s challenges for sure but overall the set-up we had, it was pretty idyllic. None of that’s part of my life any longer and that in itself is so, so hard.

The way I generally cope with my brother’s death is to try not to think about it. Pretend it didn’t happen. But once in a while (well, often, if I’m honest) things happen that make it rise to the surface. Like yesterday evening an email inviting me to a bachelorette party for a friend who was there for me those first days and weeks and months. Her party’s the day after my brother’s death date. I’m going to go if I can because I love her and I really believe in celebrating every little thing you can in life, but I wonder how I’m going to be. And reading the paper this morning, I happened across an article that said Prince William's wedding will be held the day of my brother’s death. I’m really sensitive to dates, not just the day my brother died but the days right around that, I have such crystal-clear memories of everything that happened. Seeing those dates the pain comes back and it’s raw and awful, like no time has gone by at all.

I know time has healed me, at least to some extent. But sometimes I wonder if my brother’s death didn’t permanently break me in some very fundamental way.

In the end, I look at it this way. There are two choices: suicide, or to get up every morning and try to make the day a good one. Suicide is absolutely not an option for me, never was. So I get up each day and  try.

Some days are harder than others. I’m feeling edgy today. But I have a lot of good and happy things planned for this lovely Sunday--finishing Christmas gifts for people I love, packing for my long-delayed honeymoon trip to Europe (we got married two years ago, leave Thursday), taking my dad to the airport, making my husband (a third-year engineering student) and the guys he’s studying for finals with chicken tacos for dinner so they can concentrate on thermodynamics or fluids or electronics or whatever they’re doing.

I pray for some happiness and peace today, as I do every day. We’ll see how the day pans out.

Fuzzy

Being fuzzy isn't easy.

My husband’s nickname for me is “Fuzzy,” sometimes “Little Fuzz,” or “LF” for short. As in:

“Hey, Fuzzy, you ready to go to dinner?”

or

“Why you crying Little Fuzz?”

He uses it as a noun, but it’s really an adjective that describes my personality, which in a nutshell is ultra-sensitive and ultra-emotional (these are the difficult parts), but also very caring and nurturing and loving (the good parts, according to my husband.)

Being fuzzy is hard. I take the weight of the world onto my shoulders. I kind of need to be shielded from things (eg, violence in movies, the news), because if I’m not, I’ll obsess over something I see. Say a bad guy dies in an explosion in a movie (which I know is fiction), I’ll still think about his family, the people who loved him, how sad they must be. When I saw the movie Changeling (great movie, but a lot of pretty horrible stuff happenes), I went into a funk for weeks. And the things in real life that have happened to me? I cope best by not thinking or talking about them too much. Pretending, for the most part, that they haven’t happened. Not sure how healthy that is, but it’s the only real coping mechanism I’ve been able to figure out.

My husband’s personality is the opposite of fuzzy--he’s cool, calm and logical at almost all times. He refuses to get caught up in emotion. Which somehow works out. I get to be my artsy, dreamy, sensitive self, and he keeps us rooted in the real world.

One of the many things I love about him.

Photo credit: Jenny Downing.

My Dream Life, Part 3 of 5: Snowboarding

Powder days. Best thing in the world.

I wish snowboarding had been big when I was a child, and that my parents had had the money/time/interest to get me on a board as soon as I had the muscle coordination. In my dream I’m a pro snowboarder, at least through my early 20s, and then I get married and have a passel of kids and live in a little A-frame house in the mountains with prayer flags strung over the loft like a house I saw once in Vail. Funny how this dream doesn’t include any sort of education or intellectual success—things in my real life I’ve worked hard to achieve.

How to make this dream a reality? Well, I’m obviously not going to be a pro snowboarder in this lifetime, but that’s OK. I can still have the little A-frame in the mountains. Hopefully a kid or two. A life lived largely out-of-doors (although my husband, though he’ll go with me occasionally, is decidedly not an outdoorsy person, so that presents some difficulties).

My brother who died, he and I always planned to take one winter off together, live on the mountain, snowboard every day. Maybe there’s a way to make that happen. Snowboarding’s one of the very few places I’ve found peace since my brother died, one of the few things I genuinely want to do.

Hopefully this snow season I’ll be pregnant and sidelined. There’ll be many more seasons to come.

Photo credit: Mihai Japan.

An Ex-Boyfriend Contacted Me Through Facebook

My ex-boyfriends generally fall into two categories: those I’m friendly with, and those who don’t want to talk to me. One of the ones I though was in the latter camp sent me a message over the weekend, out of the blue after about 6 years.

He’s actually the last person I seriously dated before I met my husband. I’m sure his version of why we broke up is probably different, but my version is I was still in love with someone else, and didn’t really want a serious boyfriend, and he wanted to get married and have kids. Not necessarily to/with me, but that was his goal.

Anyway, really nice message, and his picture shows him with a baby so I assume he got the marriage and kids part figured out, which is great. Happy for him. And I’m glad we can be in contact, even though I’m sure it’ll be very sporadic. I hate losing anyone to the past.

But. Ex-boyfriends popping up make me feel unsettled. It’s got me thinking about that time in my past--things were complicated back then but they are infinitely more complicated now. I’ve lived through a lot since we dated, things I don’t necessarily want to talk about in a catching-up conversation with an ex-boyfriend. I feel a lot like I can’t really talk about how things have been. It’s too heavy. So I give the cheery “got married, still doing the same job, living in Colorado now, snowboard season’s going to rock, all’s well” reply, instead of “since we last talked my brother’s been killed, I’ve had to leave California and the ocean and I’ve been to hell and back trying to have a baby and we’re nowhere near through yet.”

And I feel more isolated than ever.

Do the Benefits of Writing Outweigh the Drawbacks?

So I’ve been writing pretty seriously for about a dozen years now. Here’s a brief history of how that’s gone:

• I started with short fiction, and had some quick and easy success with publication. 
• I wrote a short memoir about surfing, which attracted lots of interest from agents, but also lots of requests to change things, which I didn’t want to do. I wanted the book to be how I pictured it, even though I knew that it wasn’t hugely marketable. That project got set aside. 
• Then, I started on a big fiction project, which was essentially a story about figuring out how to be comfortable in your own skin--how to appreciate what's unique about you, vs trying to be someone else. I was working on revising the first 600-page draft when my brother died. After that, all writing stopped.
• About a year later, I started writing again, but all I could write about was my brother, which turned into a memoir that's really about friendship more than anything else. I worked on that for several years and it's done; it's written as well as I can possibly write it. I've half-heartedly tried to find an agent for it; need to work much harder at that. Also I can't name the book for the life of me. I feel like once I can give the book a name, everything will fall into place.
• And since then, a little poetry, which I've decided I don't like writing, some stories about San Francisco, some other fiction pieces and some nonfiction as well. I haven't tried really hard to sell things but I have tried without success, which is discouraging. 

So here's where I'm at with my writing:

• Writing things is really hard, and not all that fun. But when I finish a piece, I am most times in love with it, and I think that makes the misery of writing worth it. I am not one of those writers who enjoys the process.
• It's hard to have had a bit of early success and now nothing. Am I not trying as hard? Has the publishing industry changed so much there are no longer the opportunities there were? Have I changed so much that what I once wrote was interesting/marketable and now it's not?
• I have this nagging fear that writing makes me sad, and if that's the case maybe I shouldn't do it. I think it might make me sad in two ways, first adding an extra thing to do to my already packed day and the stress that comes along with more on my "to do" list (although a solution for that is to work less, which I really and truly am trying to do). Second, fiction or nonfiction, I often write about people and places I miss, which makes me long for the past and feel sad that I can no longer be part of it. That's not healthy. I'm glad I have the memoir about my brother, but writing it was excruciatingly painful (I know I wrote it too soon, I should have let some time pass). Things got better for me surrounding that once I stopped writing about it. Writing about other things doesn't hurt as bad, but it still hurts. I'm so sentimental for the past. 

I know it's kind of heresy to think about stopping writing, but I do think of it sometimes. To give myself more time in the day for other things. Because maybe all the rejection means whatever I once had is gone, and I should stop and save everyone the trouble. Because I don't want to be sad, and anything suspected of making me sad should maybe go out the window.

But here's the bottom line, today anyway: I think the things I write are lovely, even if no one else does. And I want to publish, but it's OK if I don't. Plus, I really haven't been trying that hard or for that long. And I have this gut feeling that my writing's maturing, that I am finding a way to really tell the stories I want to tell. Also, I have a whole list of projects I want to finish.

So for now I'm going to keep on, make time for it. I don't have to do it forever. Today, though, the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.

I'll be checking in here with my progress. :)

Some Good Things That Happened Over the Thanksgiving Holiday

Ugh. Sick on a holiday's the worst. Grateful it wasn't anything serious.

1. Driving over to Colorado’s front range where my brother lives, stopped in Rifle for drive-through Starbucks. When we got to the window the pretty blonde said, “No charge. The people in the black truck in front of you asked how much your order was and paid your bill.” I’ve heard of stuff like that happening, but it’s never happened to me. Totally made my day.
2. I had a urinary tract infection (UTI) in San Francisco early this month, had it treated when I got home but it was back with a vengeance Thanksgiving morning. My first personal experience with resistant bacteria. Wow that hurt and of course everywhere (doctor’s offices, urgent care centers) was closed. But my dad went to the store and got me cranberry juice and painkillers (I had never heard of Azo; it’s amazing) and my mom and husband figured out where to take me to get a prescription. Ended up with my husband in the ER at Swedish Hospital in Denver, they were so nice, tested me and said my white blood cell count was off the charts (“too many to count,”) got me all fixed up. So grateful for all the help.
3. Once I was back at my brothers and feeling better, my mom helped me with the somewhat labor-intensive table decorations I’ve been so excited about and didn’t have the energy to do on my own. Turned out super rustic and cute.
4. Playing Cranium with lots of relatives and friends. Haven’t played since I spent a week in the Florida Keys with my lovely friend Sam, where we played every night. So fun. So good to laugh.
5. Thanksgiving’s usually a pretty traumatic holiday missing my brother who died (we spent many Thanksgivings together just the two of us out in California), but it wasn’t so bad this year. I think my tears early in the day over the pain of the UTI and frustration of trying to find a way to get treated also included some for my brother. After that, the rest of the day I was really OK. Grateful for that. Holidays can be so hard.

Fertility doctor appointments today. Home tomorrow. It’s been a good trip. 

Photo Credit: Taber Andrew Bain

Nor Cal

Ah, the Marina.

I’m all over the Bay Area yesterday, today and tomorrow. It doesn’t hurt to be here like it hurts to be in Santa Barbara. I miss it, but it also feels really intense. Traffic is crazy. Listening to Die Wandaland (Patrick Porter). Patrick was my brother’s best friend in high school. I listened to this album for the first time on a trip to the Bay Area four years ago, and it felt like the right thing to listen to again.

Haven’t cried about my brother’s birthday yet, but it’ll happen; I’m kind of intermittently on the edge of tears right now. Trying to keep this trip mellow but still feeling edgy and uneasy. Can’t wait to be home. Miss my husband terribly.

Missing California

One of my Southern California friends had a birthday last week. So I was thinking about him, and feeling sad and/or envious, I’m not sure which. He grew up in Santa Barbara and is an amazing surfer, he’s been in the surfing press not too long ago and I know his life has its challenges, but I wish I could surf, and be young, and live in that part of the world. I did all those things once; it’s gone, can’t (although I might be wrong) be retrieved. I could do all that--and did--with my youngest brother, but without him, I can’t shake the feeling that I don’t belong. It’s also my brother’s birthday tomorrow, he would have been 33, he’s dead five years now and around his birthday everything always feels off. It passes, but it’s so hard to sit with while it’s happening. I probably should have taken tomorrow off work, but I’m traveling later in the week and it’s just not possible. I try to stay positive and happy and look for the good in each day, but it’s hard right now.

There are fewer days I wake now longing for California. No longer every day, but it still happens.

When am I going to feel like I belong somewhere again?

How Can You Be Happy After Bad Things Happen?

So here's the story:

Girl has childhood with some rough elements. Girl, grown up, does what’s expected of her instead of what she wants. Girl’s first marriage goes down in flames. Girl lives with her beyond-cool baby brother/best friend/soul mate (not sure that's the right word, but don't know what else to use to get across how close we were)--up until he’s killed in an accident. Girl meets and marries fabulous second husband and tries--unsuccessfully so far--to have the baby she’s wanted for absolute-ever.

Girl started out pessimistic by nature, and at this point feels pretty beaten down by life. But girl doesn’t want to be one of those people who wake up in the morning wishing for it all to be over. Instead, she wants to be the kind who wakes up happy and thankful for all the good in her life and all the amazing, beautiful, inspiring things that happen every day.

This blog is intended to document one girl’s attempts--big and small--to get to a happy place.

Welcome to my world. :)