Settling In Gently by R.A.Davis

2016.11.30 Unpublished: America 11/30/16 I've never had a straightforward relationship with this country. I was born here, but moved to Holland when I was little, and went to Dutch schools, spoke Dutch at home, celebrated Saint Nicholas rather than Christmas… our family had to return to America under traumatic circumstances, compounding drama upon trauma with death, abuse, and loss.  Horrifyingly, my own children's lives have repeated this pattern. We come crashing back to my family home in Utah, only in the wake of horrific loss. Now we're here trying to recover from the shock of it, and all the subsequent revelations about what was true, what we thought was true, and what we might be able to make true in the future. I'm still here ringing like a bell.  But my children, they’ve reacted against our new place in a way that feels very familiar to me. Last night my six-year-old went to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, everything and replaced every syllable with the word po...

Today is six months since Matt​'s death. I am relieved to feel time passing, getting us further and further from that moment of horror and pain. But it also means that the finality of it is starting to sink in-- all his chances and options were suddenly closed off and there will never be any explanations or answers or happy endings for him. I've found unfinished screenplays in his work notebooks. I've found journals with just one or two entries. And that's it. When someone dies by suicide, they don't get rid of their unbearable, impossible pain. They give it to their families-- to their children. Right now we are still struggling to breathe under the weight of that sudden horrifying tsunami of pain, and trying to find ways to understand it, forgive it, be gentle with it, move through it and with it, transform it from jagged spikes into rolling waves. It's already been six months. It's only been six months. Time expands and contracts weirdly with death-- ...