A Is for Avah

Grief, Avoidance, and the Altar I Couldn’t Look At

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A Is for Avah

Content note: child loss and grief

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It was easier to ignore the pain.

That sounds obvious. Who wants to hurt? Who wants to actively experience unpleasant assaults to their senses?

But what if, in that ignoring, in that avoiding, those acts are the actual sources of pain? Not the thing you’re avoiding. What if the analgesia you’re seeking actually comes from confronting?

From the confrontation.

I’ve found this to be true when it comes to my very own psychological pain. I learned this the hard way.

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Ignoring it took effort.
It took strategy.
It took training myself not to look at the altar my husband built for our daughter.

The one he tends to quietly and faithfully. Alone.

My eyes would dart away from it whenever I passed by.
Wouldn’t touch it.
Wouldn’t look at it.

I would not.
I could not.

Not on a shelf.
Not in this house. “Not with a mouse,” says one of my intruding thoughts as I write this.
Not in this moment. Not ever.

I could feel it in my body when I did.

It’s always sharp and immediate.
Like being stabbed in the chest over and over and over and over again times infinity. Then stabbed 4 more times, for good measure.

So I learned how not to look.

Avoidance became a skill I became a maestro at performing.

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Today, I decided to stop.

I told myself I would at least try to endure it.
I told myself I might die. Parts of me wished I would. It wouldn’t have been my first (obviously failed) suicide attempt.

Another Intrusive Thought: “That’s what you’ve been wanting anyway, right? Put on your big girl drawz and do it, you coward!”

So I lit the candle.

I replaced the batteries in the glowing letter A thing. The little light-up doohickey that stands for her name.

And I held my breath until I was lightheaded and on the verge of syncope.

Editor Me: A quick Google search says it’s called a battery-powered LED marquee letter light.

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And then I broke.

I didn’t cry.

I wailed.

There is a difference.

I wasn’t delicate, poetic, or contained.

I was animalistic.
I was unchecked.
I was loud and ugly and unashamed.

I was the only one in the house, the only time I would ever allow this kind of grief to erupt from my body.

I would never do this in front of an audience.
Not with strangers.
Not with family.
Never family.

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Until now, numbing and avoiding pain had been my method of survival.

My default.
My religion.
My home.

But I can’t live here anymore.
I have to leave this place. My Home. My Prison. My Hell.

I hadn’t realized that the hell I had been living in for years was not something that just dropped in my lap.

I had been building it myself.

Brick by muthafuckin’ brick.
My own hellish prison.
Built for me, by me.

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Avoidance looks like protection.
It feels like control.

It is neither.

Because it forces you to lie.

It’s a slow construction of a life you cannot breathe inside of, and you’ll die a horrible, suffocating death if you stay.

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I had three rainbow babies after her, including twins. When they were babies, learning their ABCs, I didn’t teach them that A was for apple.

A is for Avah.

It will always be for Avah.

I forced them to know their dead, older sister, the ghost they’d never know in the flesh. They would only know her from videos and pictures, from altars, and from learning the alphabet.

The irony of that statement is not lost on me.

Rainbows

Rainbows with their Pops.

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I don’t know what “total healing” looks like.
Is there even such a thing?
Why do we chase waterfalls?

But I do know this: I don’t trust tidy narratives about grief.

I only know that today I chose to look.
I chose to light the candle and replace the batteries.
I chose not to flinch.

And it hurt. It really hurt.

But it also felt like oxygen.

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I am including a photo of her altar here.

Not for spectacle.
Not for sympathy.

But because she existed.

Because she still does.

Because A is not for apple.

A will always be for my Avah.

Avah