Erin and Anna Kate’s favorite Barbies to play with. L to R: Joseph, Tiffany, Elizabeth, Sharpay, Abby, Hannah, Kelly, Lauren, and Tyler.

They had an entire fictional storyline that they played with these guys. I will miss them, but thought Anna Kate would enjoy them more.

Woke up very early and very depressed this morning. This is not getting any better. I know no one said it would but I’m not sure how long I can live like this. It is a giant weight crashing down on me. So not much to say this morning.

Some more artwork I found.

I hope you can see the detail on this one. Simone Howley came and gave Erin a drawing book on the Thursday after she had her first surgery (Thursday July 24) I think. Anyway, when we came home I found this drawing, and Simone said she didn’t do it. So Erin drew it, before she got too sick to do so. It is our cat Buffy.

This is just something she drew one day this spring or summer. It ended up in my bedroom.

Imagine this folded – the left side is the back of a home made card, the right side is the front. She made this after I went to a “me and mom” karate thing one Saturday in May 2013.

Here is the sweet inside:

My favorite thing that Erin ever drew was heart people. She just started doing that and I am the one who called them heart people. She knew I loved them.

And finally, here are pictures of a balloon she drew wonderful things on. She and Shaun met Nana and Papa(w) at Rosie’s the week before we left for Iowa. She always got a balloon, but this is the first one she did artwork on. I was sitting near her when she drew on it. If you wonder what something is let me know.

Thank you for sharing my memories of Erin. I hope I find more soon that I’m able to share. She was so special to me, it’s my privilege to share her with you.

This is what I have handy of Erin’s artwork and stuff.

This was what she drew for Shaun this past Father’s Day 2014.

She and I colored in a solar themed mandala on the Solstice (June 21 2014). This was the one she picked and colored.

We found this tucked into a magazine on the coffee table. Erin’s friend Anna Kate said that she named her Mary for no real reason (she asked when Erin showed it to her).

Erin_Meltingpot – read this she wrote for class. She first got introduced to the Melting Pot by the Howley’s. She loved going there and I wish we had taken her as a family more than once, but she got to go with the Howley’s a few times.

Last_reportcard – Her last Report Card. She managed all A’s even while sick.

Just a note. She was on a very strong NSAID before we left to go to Iowa, so I had to look at all of her poop to make sure she wasn’t bleeding. You may not believe it but finding this note she wrote on my desk brought tears to my eyes. I’m sure you will get a good laugh, though.

I will have to make it a point to scan and upload more. Enjoy.

Every new day brings with it more reminders and more of what are now just memories. Last night I went with Shaun to see Guardians of the Galaxy. I’m not sure if Erin wanted to see it. For some reason, she was wary of superheroes and didn’t watch many of those movies. Maybe she thought it would be scary. We had talked about seeing this one maybe, and she enjoyed Groot in the commercials and of course Rocket.

Just pulling into the parking lot was hard. For Pete’s sake, there are so many “firsts” I will have to do without her that I think everything is going to be painful. She loved movies and we rarely went without her. That meant that we didn’t see a lot of “our” movies but we saw all of the kid ones. Usually a friend would come along too, and they would sit and giggle in the back seat of the van on the way there and back.

So by the time I got into the seat at the movies, having skipped popcorn and then finding a seat for only two, I cried. Big tears. She always sat in between us so that we could protect her. The last movie we saw together, which I think was Malificent (and she saw it 3-4 times), she raised the arm holder in between she and I and laid her head on me for awhile. At the end of the movie, I cried in the bathroom, and then on the way to the car, and part of the way home. I miss her so much. Honestly the previews were tough to watch too. A My Little Pony movie is coming out and we would have seen it together. Probably the Box Trolls too.

The other day I was thinking of how she loved the Flash Gordon theme song from the old 80’s movie, and also Werewolves of London. I saw something on the internet that reminded me of Flash, and immediately I thought of Werewolves too. I tried to introduce her to Godzilla (Blue Oyster Cult), but she wasn’t as amused. She didn’t’ know who Godzilla was, and I had to look him up on the internet. When the previews for the latest Godzilla came out, we looked again at the old one and laughed. That was all we had but today it’s just sad and funny.

To add insult to injury, we got home and upon being asked which snack to eat I picked popcorn. Half way through the bowl I realized that the three of us ate popcorn for a snack nearly every night. I could see her little hands going into the bowl. Yeah, I know I am half-nuts, but these are the things that my grieving heart remembers.

I slept with her Bunny last night hoping that would draw her into my dreams. I lucid dream and honestly have often dreamed of the dead. They come to visit and I know they are deceased and so do they, and we share moments or whatever. But all of my dreams last night were completely devoid of Erin. Almost conspicuously so.

It will continue to amaze me that everywhere I go, there is a thread of Erin. At least for me. I went to Publix to buy some thank you cards with Shaun, and as I walked in and saw the area they always put their seasonal stuff I thought of Erin. I looked at the cake and balloon area, and thought of Erin. I went to the bathroom and there she was. I went into her favorite stall, and when I washed my hands I thought of how she always used too much soap, took such a long time to wash it off, and how she hated cold water washes (she would wait on the hot to heat up). I thought of how I was always there waiting on her to give her a drying napkin or whatever they had. I rarely let her go in alone. She was always my most precious accomplishment in life and I wasn’t about to let anyone snatch her.

I thought of the last time that we went into Publix, and how we looked at protein bars to take on our trip to Iowa. Erin had needed extra protein in her diet back in the spring, and we always had protein bars because she didn’t like the kid’s version of Ensure. She said it hurt her stomach, and that it tasted bad. She was so picky. Everything had to be just “so” or she wouldn’t eat it. She would compare each piece of meat to the others and only eat the ones that looked the same. Sometime this year, I finally told her that it was flesh off of some animal’s bones, and that it was never going to all look the same unless it was fake and processed in a factory to look that way. I’m not sure that helped my cause of getting her to eat, but it was the truth!

When we stopped at Starbucks, I thought of Erin. She liked to drink tall hot chocolate, kid’s temp, extra whipped cream. She would always notice if the barista did not drizzle some chocolate on the whipped cream, and she loved to have a hole stopper, one of those cardboard things that you use for hot drinks, and a straw. She didn’t need any of that but I guess it was neat to have for her so I always got her one even if she didn’t go in with me.

Today I will see both of Erin’s best friends, separately. It just worked out that both families wanted to come over today. I will miss her friends, and will miss seeing them grow up together. She and Simone Howley had started saying that they were going to live in an apartment at Auburn, and adopt a lot of animals. I am not sure what her and Anna Kate Stafford were going to do but I’m sure they had some plan. Erin sort of kept her friends compartmentalized, but not to be mean. She never liked to leave anyone out and so it was often easier to just give one her full attention. So when Anna Kate would come into town (after she moved), Erin would devote her attention to her, and otherwise have one-on-one play dates. She knew what it felt like to get left out and that was just the best solution any of us had. I am not sure it was the BEST solution, but anyway, I suddenly felt like I wanted to explain that to whomever wanted to know.

I am suddenly panicking at the prospect of giving some of Erin’s things to her friends (if you are reading this, don’t worry about it), but only because I am so discombobulated on the inside. The truth is she would want Anna Kate to have their favorite Barbies and her McKenna doll. She wants Simone to have Oliver the black stuffed cat that she gave her on her first hospital visit, and who went into several surgeries with Erin (he went each time we were admitted). I am intuitive enough still, in this state of chaos, to know she WANTS them to have them. So I devised a plan to take pictures, and to put them in a scrap book and label them with what they are. That’s the memory I need to keep, not the stuff necessarily. My mother kept all of my stuff and 30 years later it was all ruined and not even savable due to how it was stored. I don’t want to do that.

I will admit when I saw the dad in Publix with his daughter, hugging and horsing around going down the aisle, I cried. If you see me out and I’m crying, just look the other way. I am sure that I will be crying for a long time. I miss her terribly.

Yesterday was an exceedingly bad day. I think I cried nearly all day. I have this awful feeling in my chest, and in the pit of my stomach. At one point I watched videos of Erin, the few that I had, on my phone. At the end of one, I sort of yelled at her for using my phone because I had already told her not to. I felt really bad watching that, because the video she was recording of her room and stuff was so sweet.

I titled this post Losing My Religion not because I am religious, but because I have all but shut the door on my own spiritual path of the last ~13 years. In short, I had to “find myself” so to speak and then I embarked on a strong Service to Others path. You can look that up on Google. I learned to transmute negative emotions into compassion and to thus raise my vibration. Then I wanted to help others. It wasn’t pretty but I did a pretty good job and was committed. I was connected to the Universe (to explain it in the simplest way). And now, I’m left with pain and suffering. I could compare myself with countless martyrs I suppose. I am having a pity party, and I intend to own it and fully admit to it.

I still feel bad today. No, I’m not suicidal but trust me death would be kinder. But it’s not my luck. I will probably live to be 100 years old. I realize I am being unfair to Shaun in wishing for death, but really I am wishing for an end to this horrible pain I am feeling. I cannot logically see an end until I pass from this plane of existence. The emotions will probably follow me for lifetimes and will be encoded into my DNA and that of my soul family. I wish that I wasn’t passing on that to anyone else, but maybe there is value in it somewhere.

I know I have said this, but everywhere there are memories of Erin. I read something about losing a parent, you lose the past. Losing a spouse, you lose the present. But losing a child, you lose your future. I think that is pretty accurate and whomever came up with it is pretty clever. But no one knows how this feels unless you have lost your own. And people, they do not know what to say. So I try to graciously say “thank you” to each of them but the truth is that no one knows if she is or isn’t suffering, or if she’s in a better place, or if I even share your particular beliefs about the afterlife. You say those things because it makes you feel better to try and comfort me. And I appreciate that you take the time and the effort to do that, and that you care enough to do so. She is not here with me, however, and so there is nothing that will make me feel any better about any of this. Probably ever. I know I am selfish to want to control what path her spirit took her on, but she is not here with me. And honestly, I can’t get over that. I’m not sure I even want to. No matter what I do, or where I go, there will always be the lingering thought of “Erin would have liked this.”

I am angry now. I was not angry before, or maybe not cognizant of my anger, but I am angry now. I have the tools, I know all of the stuff – everything that happens was for a reason; our souls chose this before we were born; blah blah blah. If you are a religious person maybe you assign different phrasing – it was god’s plan; blah blah blah. I have told people these things so many times, during counseling sessions, personal conversations, etc. Now they just sound damn stupid. And my retort back to the Universe is – I DON’T CARE. I don’t give a damn. I have given my all to be of service to others, and to be a good, kind, decent person, and this is what I get out of it? Nice way to keep me on board. Because if this is some sort of test, it’s one that might kill me. Her memory is just too much to bear.

Since this particular topic is supposed to be about Erin’s memory…We were invited to dinner with a friend and his mother for his birthday last night in Guntersville. On the way back, I thought of how much Erin liked Cathedral Caverns. On her first visit, I bought her a hematite necklace. A few years later she broke it and cried. Shaun took her back again and she got something else, but anyway, I remember the necklace.

On our bike ride this morning I was thinking of how hard she would pedal to keep up, even though we would move much more slowly. I thought of she and I in the pool when we passed. The last few months when we would go, she would wrap her legs and arms around me and would be so sweet as I carried her around the shallow end of the pool. I wish we weren’t always in such a hurry to get here and there, so I could have enjoyed things more. Our entire lives, looking back, seemed to be a rush. I’m really sorry for that now. None of it matters. The things we had to do, we really did not have to.

We donated some of our things and her things today to the Market for A New Leash on Life (707 Andrew Jackson Way). Sent over all of our Halloween stuff, our Xmas tree, and some other things we had already marked for donation before we left for Iowa. Looking at the Halloween stuff made me a bit sad, but there were only a few very sentimental things. There was a snow globe that she got in 2004, her first Halloween. There was a bat that I think we had before she was born but she loved it, along with “Draculi” as she called him (one of the pictures on the obituary site has her holding him. A door hanger she made, and a black cat door hanger that was mine but I gave to her. We donated “Skeleti” the talking skeleton. He was too big to keep and someone else needs to enjoy him. I realized at the last minute I could not let go of her Halloween and Valentine’s place mats. She loved them. Had one for each season/holiday. I also kept her favorite trick or treat bucket. I guess I know all of her most favorite things, or most of them.

Oh, one more thing. I cannot validate that exercise is good for depression. I managed to cry on at least half of my bike ride both yesterday and today, and did not feel one ounce better after than I did before. I feel a tad bit better now after reading some humorous Cracked articles and then writing this. I also don’t get any enjoyment from food anymore (well maybe I will finally lose some weight), and I’m sure I am terrible company. If you read this far, bless you, because I am observing how bitter I sound and am. Or maybe cynical is the word? Hopeless? I’m all out of words, and do not know.