My Last Bad Day/How to Be Happy, Chapter One

I want to tell you a story from the summer that my sister died, just a little vignette that shaped my world view. It may sound melodramatic at first, but bear with me- I'm going somewhere with this....
 
In July of 2000, my little sister was struck by a car and killed, at the age of 14, in a ghastly auto-pedestrian accident witnessed by her twin. The driver wasn't drunk, just a young nurse driving home from church with younger siblings in car. Distracted by something, maybe the kids, maybe the radio, at exactly the wrong moment. She was speeding a little, but not recklessly for the road or conditions--There's really just no villain in this story, no target for anger, nothing to do with the pain but feel it. I was told that the driver had to be sedated at the scene, and I can certainly imagine that. What I can't imagine is why no one thought to do that for my sister, the teenage girl by the side of the road screaming, slipping into profound emotional shock, as her twin sister's body lay on the asphalt nearby with every bone broken, but her heart still beating. Not at the scene, not in the ambulance, not at the hospital that was a mere formality at that point. Her heartbeat meant they had to bring her, the condition of her body and brain stem made her heartbeat irrelevant. With the exception of one kidney, every organ was too damaged to donate.
At no point in this event did any medical professional take a moment to assess the surviving twin sister's condition as she crumbled, distraught, right in front of them, and think that just maybe it might be a good idea to treat her for shock.

The twins came into our family when they were three months old, and I was 14. I spent my teenage years with a baby on my hip, essentially a co-mom. They were my first babies, and losing one was beyond any pain I had endured or imagined. 
The only thing more gut-wrenchingly painful was watching my other baby sister's world disintegrate around her, feeling powerless to fix her shattered soul.... to lose a twin, someone you've spent nearly every minute of your existence with, at the age of 14, and witness it? To layer that kind of grief with all of the emotional confusion of being a teenage girl? For her it was like being ripped in half, and not even being sure which half was her, and which was gone.

I spent 10 days in my hometown trying to help my family pick up the pieces, assuming I would deal with my own grief later, at home with my fiance's support.
I came home to a crumbling relationship with someone who couldn't understand grieving, and had no patience for me in that state. I'm not exaggerating when I say he was cold and cruel. I know now that he is/was a clinical narcissist and incapable of empathy, but at that time, I was utterly bewildered.
My daughter was 14 months old and looked exactly like the twins did at that age. Sinead O'Connor's song "Three Babies" lodged itself into my brain during the funeral, and ran in a perpetual loop for months.
Every morning I woke up relieved, thinking I had finally awakened from the worst dream ever, thankful that all my sisters were alive... remembering felt like a sledgehammer blow to the center of my chest, every morning.
It rained every day for 3 and a half weeks.
My mother's best friend's daughter was killed 5 weeks after my sister, also in an auto accident
Life was heavy, and no one around me seemed willing or able to share the burden. I avoided any situation that could possibly require small talk- being asked "how are you" felt like being handed a loaded weapon, as the only reply I could muster was "My sister is dead and my marriage is crumbling, you?" 

One day at work I started feeling sick and realized I'd be throwing up soon, so I left early. I didn't even make it to the parking lot before my stomach revolted. I threw up in a tiny little strip of landscaping next to the building, eventually looking up to see a large group of people standing together with horrified faces- I made it exactly as far as the bus stop. Fantastic!. I hate throwing up, really extremely very much hate it, and having an audience really takes it up a notch. In that moment, nauseated, heaving lovely yellow bile, with a crowd of spectators, I felt entirely, thoroughly, irretrievably, redundantly pathetic.

Someone took my arm, explaining that since I was still on my employer's property, an EMT needed to evaluate me before letting me drive home. I was trying to decide whether I was grateful or pissed that my bus stop audience practically alerted the media when I felt a sharp pain in my knee and screamed "something just BIT me!"
He kept walking so I followed, feeling another sharp pain a little higher "it just bit me again!"
Once inside I went straight to the bathroom, and between bouts of dry heaves I removed my pants to see what the hell had bitten me- to my surprise, little bee corpses fell to the floor.
 My first thought? 
"So that's what a bee sting feels like." It actually was my first, and second bee sting, ever. My next thought was that "My throat's not swelling shut, so apparently I'm not allergic..."

I realized that my unintended audience wasn't the biggest drawback to the site where I'd lost my lunch. The ground-dwelling hive of bees I had graced with my stomach contents were not pleased, and the wide-leg pants I was wearing gave them a direct path straight upwards to communicate their displeasure, unequivocally.

I had a little moment there, a "come to Jesus" meeting with the Universe, in a way.
The Depeche Mode song "Blasphemous Rumors" cuing up in my brain.
My internal monologue goes something like this:
You have got to be kidding me. Weeks of nothing but death, grief, tragedy and relentless lonely pain, and now this? Am I on God's Absurdist Comedy Hour? Bees. FLEW UP MY PANTS. I'm being Punked by the Universe right? Seriously? Bees? I'm lucky I didn't get stung in the hoo-ha! 

Right there my brain stopped to process the truth of that last sentence: 
I actually did feel lucky. As absurdly unlucky as it may have been to throw up on an underground bee's nest in the first place, overall I was genuinely thankful that I was only stung twice, and had no life-threatening allergies, that bystanders had cared enough to fetch help, that a medical professional had been nearby so even if I were allergic odds were that I'd have been okay...one sting on the knee, one on a butt cheek- truly, it could have been worse. A lot worse. 
I could have had dozens of stings, including several to the vagina, and I didn't.
I'm pretty sure I exhaled a breath I'd been holding since the news of my sister's death knocked the wind out of me.

Bees flew up my pants, and it could have been worse. I felt lucky. It felt good to find something, even a small thing, to be thankful for. Something could have gone wrong but didn't, a set of variables coincided in a relatively harmless, even funny conclusion instead of a tragic one.... I almost forgot that could happen.

How did I go from death-grief-gloom-pain to Bees Flew Up My Pants to the world making sense again?
Somehow the bees reminded me of how to find a silver lining, to reset my baseline from what could have gone right that didn't (seeing only the loss) to noticing what could have gone wrong that didn't. It didn't change the fact that one of my beloved baby sisters was dead, but it did remind me to be thankful that both of them were not, that my daughter was not, that I was still here and could keep loving them all.

My relationship still sucked, and I was still financially trapped in it, but I was working, and had plans for my future independence. Patience and persistence would get me there.
I could control my own perspective. I could choose to see how many things hadn't gone wrong:
My mother didn't lose two daughters in the same year.
I wasn't permanently trapped in an unhealthy relationship.
I had friends who cared enough to listen, and comfort me when they could.
I wasn't as alone as I felt.

Acknowledging what I hadn't lost helped me honor what I had lost without being overwhelmed by it.
I lost a beloved sister who was like a daughter to me. I lost the illusion of a loving relationship, one I had planned my life around. 
Both of those losses were real, and painful, but neither of them could take away my joy in watching my daughter grow, or planting a garden, or feeling the sun warm my face, or reading a favorite poet's new work.
I might feel hopeless or helpless, but I could change that.

I lost the ability to make small talk, and found the silver lining of deeper, closer friendships, and an ability to risk social awkwardness to offer kindness to a stranger, compassion to an acquaintance, an unexpected ally to a coworker.
I lost the ability to feel sorry for myself, and gained deeper compassion for others' pain and my own.
I learned that I can be happy even when I'm sad, or hurt, or struggling, or busy, or late, or arguing with someone, or behind on my laundry, or worried about money, or frustrated with myself for any reason whatsoever. 
My empathy was amplified, my appreciation for every aspect of my life multiplied, my confidence in my ability to endure what I must and do what I can solidified.
My sense of humor got a shade more macabre.
I became comfortable with sadness, and lost the need to ignore it, or drown it, or drown it out, or run away from it. I gained the ability to be a resource to others who are suffering, without losing my own center. I can sit quietly, comfortably, with someone in pain while they feel their way through it.
I became intolerant of certain traits and behaviors, and able to stand up to them. I call Bullshit a lot faster now, especially on subtle, unspoken shit. Just ask anyone who has ever told me "everything happens for a reason".


I became more me. The Undisputed Queen of the Silver Lining. 
I stopped having "bad days". My days since then have been many combination of a thousand different adjectives and sometimes I will come right out and say "today was hard" and pay attention to why. 

I remembered this, and why I chose it for my Senior Quote in 1990, because the moment I read it, I felt the truth of it in my soul:

-how fortunate are you and i,whose home
is timelessness:we who have wandered down
from fragrant mountains of eternal now
to frolic in such mysteries as birth
and death a day(or maybe even less)

(still the truest thing I know, even when I forget to remember it.)



Every. Single. Minute. Matters.
We are here, on this planet, with human bodies and hearts and brains and emotions and perceptions and lives for a microscopically infinitesimal speck of time in a Universe that our human brains are literally incapable of ever comprehending. We cannot comprehend the vastness that surrounds us with the brains that we were born with, and that's all part and parcel of the ride.
We explore what we can, learn what we can, we keep trying and we keep going and we just keep loving. That last part is risky, because loss can be so painful but it is always, always, always worth it. Feeling, feeling anything at all, ever, is a miracle, period, and whether or not you believe that miracle has an author, no human mind has put it into words, but we keep trying and that's beautiful.

That's my creed and I'm sticking to it. We're not here to be happy, we're here to be. I'm happy to be here, period.
I'm also happy that I've made it this far without a bee sting on my vagina. Really. I'm pretty sure that might qualify as a bad day. So far though, nothing else has.