Deanna Emberley Bailey

Author of Crossing the Horizon

Christmas Morning Light

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Today’s Christmas, again. It’s been 6 years since that hateful, fateful fire took Solon and Liam away. What do we do with this family holiday – also our children’s death day?

“Motion is lotion,” is my friend’s strategy for avoiding knee pain. I can’t argue with motion, but I’d also add, “nature is nurture” and at least for us, “motion in nature” tops it all.

Every Christmas morning since 2010, Chris and I have risen before the sun to hike up a mountain. It’s the same tradition every year, yet always different. Christmas 2010, five fresh inches of powder had fallen overnight and snow softly fell through the beams of our headlamps throughout the entire hike. It was spectacular. Christmas 2013, we carried nearly every article of outdoor gear we owned to survive the summit temperature at 15 degrees below zero and stayed only briefly before scurrying home to the hot tub.

This morning, Christmas 2015, temperatures were freakishly warm, as they have been on the east coast for weeks. Except for some low clouds along the horizon and the occasional drifter, the sky was quite clear. We watched the full moon setting through the trees while ascending and then spent nearly an hour atop the mountain watching the colors change as our part of the world turned again to face the sun.

The world turned to face the sun. Again.

Why the world did not simply stop in place when our children died upset me greatly in 2010. How could all of these people be moving around still doing their thing, when our children were dead? How dare the world continue to turn when our world had come to a screeching halt?

Today, Christmas 2015, up on top of that mountain, and further along in my grief journey, I realize I am more in love with our changing world, our spinning, revolving earth than I have been in six years. Watching the colors of sunrise shift as the light returned brought me comfort, and joy too. Today, I celebrated the fact that the sun does rise each day to extinguish darkness and make life possible. I’m thankful for the 10 and 12 years we had with our boys.

Darkness gives way to more light and life every day.

Silence

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When Solon and Liam died, all boy noise ceased. Silence replaced lively conversations, music, movements — Fat, ugly, disturbing silence. What does a grieving parent do with the sudden silence? You have to find a way around it.

Just as an amputee continues to feel the presence of a severed limb, after the fire Chris and I awoke expecting to hear the joyful noise of our sons. Silence screamed the reality of their departure until slowly, sadly, we could wrap our minds around their absence. It took years.

Angry, hurt by the silence early on, I started creating boy noise myself. I downloaded the boys’ iTunes library, and listened intently, flooding my brain with happy memories. I played Solon’s piano and wailed on Liam’s drums. Tears flowed, but filling that surrounding silence with boys’ music comforted. I wondered, could our boys hear my music too from their afterlives? Did they know how Chris and I were feeling?

From the moment they died, I craved the sound of Solon and Liam’s voices. I still do. Thank goodness Chris had saved two of the boys’ phone messages. In one, Liam asked Dad to bring milk home because we needed more. In the other, Solon told Dad about a movie we watched and says a sweet goodnight. In those early days, I listened to both over and over again, crying tears of sadness and tears of joy. Precious memories still ring out when I listen to these. It hurts like hell, but feels really good too.

As happy as I was to hear the boys’ recorded voices, I longed most for conversation with them, the sounds of interaction — relationship negotiated in real time. Silence screamed, “your relationship with your sons is over!” Yet, I couldn’t allow that to happen, couldn’t bear for it to be true.   I had to find a way to communicate through the silence, to continue our relationship.

As I wrote Crossing the Horizon, the boys struggled with the very same issues I was facing. They dealt with separation and silence in a whole new world. They struggled to communicate with me and Chris back home. They needed to find new ways to communicate safely with one another. When they realized they couldn’t simply talk to Chris and me, they eventually found they could communicate with us in other ways.

In many ways, writing Crossing the Horizon filled that heart-wrenching silence. It wasn’t simply something to fill the time. Letting my thoughts flow freely on the screen gave me relationship with the boys again. Our relationships are different now. They are full of a different kind of sound –the inner noise of loving thoughts crossing the horizon. Always.

Inner Voice

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How do you to it? How do you keep it together after both of your children die traumatically? The truth is, you can’t at first.   Don’t expect that you will. Allow yourself to fall apart. Let friends and family be with you to listen without judgment as all of your emotions surface. Let out all that craziness you feel. Cry, scream, hug, talk (if you can). There will be time later to knit yourself together again. No one can say how you’ll manage it. Your solutions will be unique to you.

In the first month after the fire killed our sons I was unable to mentally escape the horror. I relived the early morning sights, sounds and smells over and over. Every part of me screamed for relief, wanting desperately to travel back in time and do over the events that put us in that location at that moment. Of course, rewinding time was impossible.

I’ve never been so scared — scared beyond anything imaginable by the sudden disappearance of my children, utterly confused about how to go on living. I was a lost soul, downright zombie-like in my day-to-day movements because my brain was elsewhere. It was elsewhere for a long while.

Yet somehow, five years later I am better. Much better. ‘How’d that happen?’ I ask myself. I didn’t know what I was doing then, because I was elsewhere, of course, but I do know now, looking back: I listened. That’s how I got through my grief. I listened to my body and soul, following the internal cues that directed me to what worked.

If some activity helped me feel the tiniest bit better I chose to do more of it. If another activity made me feel worse, I avoided it whenever I could. Today I’m stronger, healthier and more at peace largely because I listened to my inner voice – I listened hard to hear my soul through the noise of my pain.

Four months after the boys died, I began a written healing exercise, as task to be completed in one sitting. Its purpose: to get the boys out of the fire in my mind and create for them a safe place. I had no idea that this little healing exercise prescribed by my trauma therapist would grow into this book, Crossing the Horizon.

Yet, because I was intent on following my inner voice, I did what felt good and I just kept writing, one day from Liam’s perspective and the next day from Solon’s. Now, when I read Crossing the Horizon, I see buried beneath the story’s action and adventure the trajectory of my early grief and the seeds of my most trusted survival strategy: Listen to your inner voice. That will get you through.

In Crossing the Horizon, Solon and Liam struggle to adjust to their new surroundings. Over and over again, without knowing where it would lead them, at the advice of their Guiding Spirit, the boys learn to trust their intuition to navigate in their new world and travel to and from earth again. Each time, their intuition brings them one step closer to the goal of helping their parents heal.

Intuition helps the boys solve the riddles of their afterlife just as following my intuition helped me heal. Yours can help you too. Listen.