How Do People Do This?

This is so incredibly hard. Every time I think it's starting to get a bit easier, I'm reminded that it's not. How do people do this? I have limited real-life resources of those who've had to endure this, and they help, and family and friends help, but really: how do people do this?

I do mental gymnastics and try to focus on anything I can find that's good. I try to call forth and bring to life moments of her life mainly for myself but also so a part of her lives on for everyone.

That unsourceable, unverifiable, and probable apocryphal quote often contributed to Hemingway about everyone having two deaths, the final one being the last time someone says your name, is always in my head. So that's part of it, my struggle to keep her alive somehow. But those memories, as well as seemingly random unrelated triggers in music, movies, TV, literature and conversations will bring on a huge wave of sadness and despair.

So what are my options? To try to not think about her? But even if I could "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" her away from my memories, that would come at a cost of losing her forever. I'd never give away my memories of her and her life in exchange for a pain-free future if that future didn't include her in some form.

I assume it gets better at some point. Logic tells me this, as well as personal experiences of those who try to provide me some comfort. And sometimes it does seem to be getting better. A major moment in what I had hoped was a permanent movement forward was when I learned of the positive real-world effects Adri's organ donations have made. And it is a bit better when I think of that. But still, the waves return, just as strong and just as painful if *perhaps* a bit less frequent, and I have to subject family, friends, and social media to all of this in my (seemingly) futile attempt to quell the darkness.

So again: how do people do this? 

Driving

When she was a little girl Adrianna was obsessed with driving and couldn't wait until she got her license. She'd spend hours playing Pole Position and would always ask for a Power Wheel, something I couldn't afford then and which was not practical for apartment living, either.

She'd ask about cars, draw cars, play more Pole Position, want to visit friends whose parents weren't monsters and got them Power Wheels, and would ask questions about driving techniques. And, of course, we had the go-kart track.

The summer of her 15th year she and I did a self-run driving course that was offered. The parent would have to fill out all these forms and complete all these checklists, the kid performing various tasks such as parallel parking, merging on a highway, the ever-important three-point turn, etc.

|It was fun, and we did it all in a manual transmission car, so she had to learn how to shift and the clutch as well. I always thought this was an important life skill, and I also figured having to shift gears would prevent her from being on the phone or whatever since both hands would be occupied.

She did well.

However, as the years went by she started to like driving less and less. It scared her, and she started dreading having to do so. The onset of the COVID years in 2020 just exasperated this, and she’d have mini panic attacks when she had to drive alone. After her medical event of 2024 she stopped driving completely, because now she also had the fear that maybe she’d pass out again, and maybe the next time she’d be driving with her boys in the car. This terrified her.

However, recently earlier this year she had expressed a desire to start driving again. She asked me if I could drive with her and do the lessons all over again so she could regain her confidence, and I told her we would. She saw this as a way to start to move forward again, to become the self-sufficient person she always had been. A not-so-small significant step towards rejoining life as it were.

Of course, that never happened, and it’s another thing I feel bad about. Maybe I should have tried to gently push her last year to start driving again, but for me it was always difficult to know how hard to push her. She pushed herself, usually, and I didn’t want to overwhelm her. I did tell her I’d be here as her driving coach whenever she was ready.

Here's a video of terrible quality from before the HD days of one of our driving sessions 20 years ago almost to the day. She does well with me in the passenger seat and Cindy in back playing the part of camera man. I love it.

And when I went to my YouTube channel to get the URL I noticed that she had commented on the video three years ago:

“You were so patient with me! We need to try again, like I relearn.”

I never saw this comment until now.

Adri Learning to Drive

The Imagined Future

 

I wrote this in a blog post concerning Adri in 2007, over 18 years ago. Suffice it to say that history has proven that I was never able to strike that balance successfully despite my best efforts:

"Sometimes it's almost a bit too much for me to take, for she's a thousand miles away and there's very little I can do at the spur of a moment after a frantic phone call. Also, there's really only so much you can do for other people; they really do have to help themselves, especially if that "help" is going to be a permanent, life-changing help and not just a short, temporary antidote. Now I'm sounding like John Galt or something. While I'm all for teaching people to fish, they have to be alive to make use of this skill. It's a fine scary line and I don't know where it is with her sometimes."

 I always saw this future, this outcome, but tried to not let it become a self-fulfilling prophecy. I knew (intellectually) that there is free will and the future is not set, that there were two possible outcomes for her and us, that of course we were not fated to the present we have now.

I'd hope and try to believe this wasn't the reality we'd find ourselves in, and I think if anything I tried harder and with more sense of urgency since I couldn't claim ignorance in some future where she didn't survive. I'd seen it, I would stop it.

When she survived last year, for a New York minute I started to believe we had passed that fork in the timeline and were on the good outcome. I couldn't believe our good fortune to having beaten the odds that made me look like a pessimistic worry wart for nothing, but I was glad to be wrong.

But that optimistic outlook was short-lived.

I don't want to make it seem I was resigned to this, because I was *not*. But, there was the little dark raincloud that I'd *try* to ignore or thwart inside of me.

I'll say this, though: I've reacted a lot better than my future imagined self did with this outcome. I'm guessing it's the boys who have prevented that, at least. And Cindy. And maybe we're stronger than we think.

And maybe I'd had years to prepare myself.

The Austin Zeitgeist And Her Eyes

Mid to late 80s Austin, for me, will always live in my head as a perpetual summer: sun-drenched Shiner Bock-soaked days filled with music, cheap Tex-Mex and shiny happy people at the zenith of their lives. Also, of course and most importantly, the time and place that gave rise to my daughter, both figuratively and literally.

To me, no band better perfectly encapsulates all of this then Zeitgeist / The Reivers. "In Your Eyes," with its jangly guitars, harmonies and memories of Liberty Lunch, might as well stand in for all I miss of that moment in time and place that is forever lost to me, one of the many placeholders, memory hooks and focal points that will none the less always keep me connected to Adrianna. In a bit of synchronicity, the day after I wrote the above we received some news that has made me happy for the first time in almost two months: We had decided that morning that Adri would have wanted to donate organs to help others, and UT Southwest sent a letter of thanks and says that two people have had their sight restored because of her. I cannot overstate how good this has made me feel. Her last act was one of kindness, and a part of her is still with us and this news just fills me with hope and contentment, and I so appreciate them taking the time to let us know result of her gift. “In Your Eyes” will forever take on new meaning for me now. Adrianna's beautiful eyes live on, and the world, to me, is just a bit better than it was yesterday.

Here's the video for "In Your Eyes." Let's pretend we're watching 120 Minutes on MTV for a moment:

https://youtu.be/Gr5DTCk_7bY?si=-1vHE-4ixansptOD

Ouroboros

I’m trapped in a perpetual self-circular Catch-22 world where I strive to remember and talk about happy moments and the positive energy and force that was Adrianna, to ward off the darkness that would otherwise engulf me at her loss, and to celebrate her.

For her boys, for her, for me, for her family and friends, and for others.

I try not to think of her gone but of the life she led, because if I don’t and allow myself to dwell too much on the former, I risk emotional destruction as well as not honoring the latter. I need to be present for the boys, offering them strength as well as a way to celebrate her life and always have her be a part of it.

So I think of her, remembering her joy, her intelligence, her passion, he laughter, her smile, her hopes and dreams.

In doing so, however, I’m reminded of just how much I miss her now and how unfair this all is to her and her boys. I’m reminded of how she lived life and how none of us will get so share that with her in the future. The good memories are swallowed up and replaced with darkness and despair of the future, a horrible ouroboros constantly consuming the good memories as fast or faster than I can remember them in this never-ending Sisyphean battle I find myself in my attempt to make sense of and come to grips with what, apparently, is reality.

(Those Greeks had a word for everything.)

Still, I’ll continue. I have no other real option. Memories of her may be painful, but that’s only because she created such rich, vibrant, long-lasting memories because she wasn’t just a spectator in her life: she was the star.

Butterfly

Adrianna was my butterfly, a beautiful being in a perpetual chrysalis stage just waiting to emerge into her fully self-actualized state. Always on the cusp but just not quite there, at least to her own satisfaction. It was even one of her favorite words, or at least the Spanish version:

“La mariposa.”

When she was a little girl and learned that in Spanish class she fell in love with the sound of the word, an almost onomatopoeia whose lilting pronunciation captured the lifeforce of a being who’d burst forth after their metamorphosis to live an all-to-short couple of weeks. But they’d live their best lives during that month.

During the summer of 1995 she’d repeat the butterfly’s Spanish name almost endlessly and it became our summer song. A short song like the life cycle of the butterfly, but just as beautiful.

I used songwriting as an outlet then to express and attempt to capture my intense love for her. Little distilled and concentrated three to five minute pieces of my heart and soul. I had no illusions as to the quality of these songs, but I didn’t care. They were the best way I had to express myself… mainly to myself, but also for her. Plus, I didn’t really have a choice; a guitar lived in my hands most waking hours then, and melody, chord progressions and words just came out whether I wanted them to or not.

That summer, the summer of the mariposa, I wrote a song called “Butterfly,” this time without guitar in hand, but while I was supposedly teaching a computer class at Exline near Fair Park in Dallas. While the kids were at their computers playing Math Blaster I saw Adri, who came with me to the summer classes, playing with a group of kids at the far end of the room. Twirling, spinning, flittering about with her wide bright eyes and infectious laughter.

The words and music were at once in my head, born somehow fully formed. I scribbled them down and kept repeating the music in my head, music that to me captured the movements of la mariposa, hoping I wouldn’t forget it by the time I had a chance to pick up a guitar and make a quick recording.

I didn’t forget.

Again, no illusions as to quality. I did all this for me, mostly, and her. I knew that I’d always have to keep my day job. But they served their purpose, these songs. And with those caveats, I share the lyrics for Butterfly, in yet another attempt to honor my daughter and at the same time keep myself from being swallowed up by all this darkness. I need to push the darkness out and fill it, just a bit, with images of my butterfly who I miss so much:

       She floats by, like a butterfly,

       Flittering, gracefully.

       Eyes so bright, captured starlight so blue.

When she smiles

She sends a thousand ships,

When she laughs

The birds all sing.

When she cries

A little part of me dies.

        Every day she has a lot to say,

        Whispering endlessly.

        Gentle voice, full of crimson and gold.

If I’m lost,

Then she will lead the way;

When I’m found

She’ll be right there.

When she leaves

A little part of me dies. 

Eye to the Future

I’m a weird person with occasionally odd insights or thoughts. I readily admit this, but it took a while for me to realize that the things I thought about and how I viewed reality did not necessarily jive with the rest of humanity. It’s hard to know this, of course, because each of us only has our own individual perceptions and view of the world. By definition it is all we ever really know, and the obvious assumption is that what one thinks and feels is how everyone thinks and feels. 

I thought my view of time brought on by my time-space synesthesia, for example, was how everyone viewed reality: days of the week and months of the year having a specific color, and sort of “out there” in three-dimensional space in a physical order. It wasn’t until I learned about synesthesia in one of my psych courses in college that I realized that this wasn’t how everyone viewed the world. 

Etc.

Another one of my observations that evidently is odd, strange, and weird is how I view cameras, or rather camera lenses. At some point I realized that the camera lens pointed at you, the one that you’re asked to smile at and say cheese, is an eye. An actual, real eye from the future. That round two or three-inch circle is a large unblinking eye that is someone looking at you *right now* from some distant time in the future. As you look at that eye with its all-black iris and allow yourself be photographed, your future spouse is l looking at you, viewing you in that instant years or decades from now in some distant time and place. Your yet-to-be-born grandchildren are looking at you through that long temporal lens. That eye may be a conduit to an even more distant time where your grandchildren’s grandchildren are looking at you.

And you are looking at them. Right now. Right then. Truly connected by that mechanical temporal eye that can span the enormous gulf of years.

I thought of that when I photographed or videoed Adrianna, that my eye was standing in for a future eye, and it thrilled me to think of what they’d think and see one day. 

I have never verbalized any of this until the other day because while part of me thought it was normal, another part of me realized that perhaps it wasn’t. But I’ve been thinking about it all the time since the event.

The boys and Stephen were over for The Fourth of July a couple of days ago, and we watched some old videos I took of Adri from over 30 years ago. She was playing at Discovery Zone much like her boys play now, and several times she looked right at the camera, that eye from the future, her eyes smiling and so full of life. She was looking at all of us *now*, and we all could feel it. It was of course sad, seeing her full of love of life and promise and hope, knowing she’s not here now… but at the same time there was some happiness at the connection that was felt at that instant: two moments connected, somehow, over the span of a lifetime. 

My heart quickened. She could see us, and we could see her. 

And I know that someday her grandchildren will see her and she will, somehow, have seen them. 

All of this is a bit lessened with the advent of cellphone photography, where the all-seeing temporal eye to the future is small, but its there none the less. So next time when you look into that eye, realize what is really happening and give a mental wave to all of those in the future. They’re watching you.

Go Karts

Yesterday at the go kart place, the boys kept telling anyone who'd listen in line that their mom used to come here. I, of course, was mad at myself for never thinking to take them here with Adri when I had a chance; she'd have loved to see them driving around where she used to drive around.

It's a constant struggle to quell regrets about things I could have done and said when I had a chance. It's not healthy and I usually know that I did all I could do, sometimes more than what would be expected or the norm, but the regrets still creep in and I try to banish them from my mind like some sort of emotional game of whack-a-mole (a game I was never that good at).

At one point a man arrived with his daughter who was about 12. He asked the procedure, where to buy tickets, etc. Then he asked if this was an activity for girls, saying he didn't know what was appropriate since she was his only child. Everyone at that point racing were boys.

 I told him that of course this is an activity for girls, that I had brought my only-child girl here when she was young, and that in fact those two boys were here children.

That made him smile and they decided to stay. 

Endless Summer

The hardest day of the year for me for years and years used to be August 1st, because that was the day that Adrianna would fly back to Louisville after her six-week stay with me in the summer that started the day after her birthday, June 19th, until August 1st.

I tried to enjoy those six weeks, and I did, but at the same time I was constantly aware of the countdown to when she'd leave.

"Now we only have 32 days... Now she leaves in just 24 days..." etc. I tried to live in the moment, and we did. We did a lot together. I found a job that allowed her to come with me so she didn't spend most of those 6 weeks in some day care. At the time we'd drive from rec center to day care to community center each day and I'd teach computer classes. She'd help me set up the computers, hand out papers, and occasionally participate in other activities that were taking place when we were at the location. It was great. It wasn't a lot of money, but it was enough and we were able to spend so much time together.

"Now we only have 12 days left..."

I'd take a week off during July 4th and we'd drive to spend some time at my grandparents' summer cottage in Lake Geneva, WI and also see my dad. It was a 16-hour drive, but she never complained and we had great conversations and listened to music.

"Now just 3 days..."

But then August 1st would come, and I'd take her to the airport and put her on the plane. She'd be quietly crying and I felt terrible for her, having to go back and forth, always missing one parent. I'd remind her that her mother will be so happy to see her. I'd remind her that she'd be back at Thanksgiving, which was "only" 3 months away. I'd usually say that with a catch in my throat, trying not to break down as I was trying to convince myself as much as her that 3 months was nothing. But, of course, it wasn't nothing. It was everything.

I'd stay until the plane took off and then drive home, the car suddenly so empty, trying not to cry but rarely succeeding,

I suffered these little deaths 4 times a year (and I'm sure she did, too), but the end of the summer was the worst. It followed the longest stretch with her that was then followed by the longest stretch without her.

Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat.


And they were like little deaths that we both had to endure to survive. I couldn't image anything worse, or at least tried to not allow myself to imagine anything worse. But when something far worse did arrive, it turned out to be several magnitudes worse. Unbelievably worse, which of course isn't surprising and seems self-evident.

I always thought of The Beach Boys' album "Endless Summer," a compilation album released one summer when I was a kid, and I always wished for an endless summer with Adrianna, one that didn't consist of a finite set of days that counted down to zero. I always knew this was a stand in for life itself, whose days slip away one by one no matter what. I just will never forgive life for giving my daughter such a small calendar. 


But I'm thankful for the pages we did have. 

Cards

 Adrianna was the sort that always wrote small novelettes in the cards that she gave me on my birthday or Father's Day. She'd begin under the preprinted text and then continue on the facing page and almost always had to conclude on the back, making it a sort of logic puzzle or game to figure out the intended correct flow of what she wrote.

Like everything she did, she put her all into card giving, and I appreciated it. I'd keep all the cards in a drawer dedicated to them in my desk, and it was overflowing when I went through it afterward. 

However, over the last three or four years I stopped keeping them all, because I was dumb and thought I'd have a lifetime of cards to and from her. I had so many already, I'd have more next year and the year after that. I didn't want to be a hoarder or overly obsessive about her.

It was a terrible decision, because as it turns out, spoiler alert, nothing is guaranteed. There will be no more cards, no more expressions of her love and thoughts. Who cares if it had been a bit obsessive to save everything. Who cares if I had run out of drawer space.

I don't want to give the impression that Adri wasn't appreciative of my support (she was), or that she felt entitled (she didn't), or that she wasn't self-aware (she was). Here's what she wrote in her Father's Day card to me the last year she still lived in Louisville:


"Dad,
I wish I could be with you, see you, hug and kiss you today. I miss you so much. You have always been a strong support in my life. A strong positive role model in my chaotic world.

I appreciate all that you have done, continue to do, and all that you are. You mean the world to me and I love you so much!

I love you always and forever and I hope you know that in your heart. You're a special man, father, and person!


I love you always,
Adri "


This might have been 12 years ago, but I feel like she's talking to me now, and I wish I could talk to her and thank her and make it 100% clear that I feel the same.


tl; dr: save those cards