If there is a lesson to be learned in the death of my daughter, I don’t think I want to learn it. I am not ready to learn it. I don’t want to learn – it hurts too much. I used to have a book called The Stages of Grief. Maybe I still have it. I haven’t looked on my bookshelves. I don’t know where it is, but I know that when I was on day 12, I was in the stage of needing to be comforted…by food apparently. I went to the grocery store that night and I bought a lot of ice cream. So if there is a stage where you just want to eat comfort foot then that’s the stage I must have been in on day 12. Buying comfort food…buying comfort – looking for anything that can make me feel better – even for a little bit – that’s the stage I was in on day 12. As if eating my hurt away will make all of it go away. I don’t know. I know I needed comfort. I also bought some carrots, snap peas, bananas, and blueberries too – my usual healthy food. But I bought a lot of ice cream. I ate one of the boxes of ice cream bars on the way home. Six ice cream bars – gone before I got home. I didn’t care that it was a negative, “make myself sick” way of thinking or that I was only hurting me. I just didn’t care about me. I wanted to feel better. I guess that’s why they call it comfort food because I really wanted and needed comfort.

But as you can guess, it was temporary, but it did work for a minute. But since I always weigh myself, butt naked, in the mornings, I thought to myself that I was sure my next morning weigh in will wake me up. I didn’t have to wait until the morning for that wake-up call. On the way home my stomach hurt again like I wanted to throw up. This time it wasn’t the grief, it was the ice cream. Usually I had been getting that feeling of wanting to throw up when the pain of missing my daughter and the pain of wanting her back right now, right here, became so great it was physically painful. Not this time. It was definitely the ice cream.

Sometimes there are moments I can convince myself that it is still like when she was physically in this world. Because when she walked her journey on this earth, although we may not have physically seen each other daily, we texted or talked regularly, and I always knew she was just an iPhone message or call away. I’m not exactly sure how often we communicated – several times a week at least – I DO know she was always available to me and I was always available to her. Whenever I reached out, she would always get back to me if she couldn’t answer at that specific time. It didn’t really matter how often, neither kept track…. we just talked whenever. We probably saw each other every 3 or 4 weeks. It really depended on what was going on in each of our lives. The last 6 months to a year before she moved on though I noticed it seemed to take more planning. Especially the last 3 months when she got noticeably worse after the spots on her liver were discovered during a PET scan she had in Feb. Her cancer was progressing. I noticed it made a difference. She was trying harder to focus on healing. There was more stress in finding that time to rest and recuperate. Then Covid-19 hit the world and it became unbearable. The separation, the risks, she tried even harder. She was tired all the time. We couldn’t even be together for her birthday on 19 March, then we couldn’t be together for her Adoption Day on 29 March. We had tried to make plans but between the pandemic restrictions, closing of venues and her losing her strength and stamina for daily activities, it became impossible to physically be together at all. We talked/texted more as a result. I started teleworking at home just so I could be available to her if she needed me. I wanted to ensure I was healthy, had not been exposed and would not increase her risk if I needed to go to her.

Sara always spent time with me for my birthday. The past few years, she would come down to San Diego for the Balboa Park Earth fair as I always coordinate the Earth fair booth for the San Diego Natural History Museum Canyoneers. It didn’t matter whether it was on my actual birthday, it just mattered that it was important enough to her that she made the effort to join me for some kind of celebration. I always liked that she came for that event. It gave me a chance to show Payton some of the earth day activities and tell her a little bit about the local flora and fauna She would come in the afternoon for some of the Earth fair, help me close up the booth and then take me out to dinner for my birthday. It was a tradition. But not this year. The Coronavirus changed all that. Little did we know that a little more than two weeks later, Sara’s current journey on this earth would be over. That hurts. Although I wish I would have known that it was to be soon, I know it wouldn’t have made a difference. Hindsight is useless. It never changes anything as you never see hindsight until it is afterwards. I’m not sure what anyone would really do if the future was known on a daily basis. If you knew today what would happen tomorrow, tomorrow would still come. There would always be a tomorrow…until there wasn’t.