As I Wake

Every morning, for the last 3 years, since the day she died, as I wake, my first thoughts are of my daughter, Tiffany.  In the first days, weeks and months after losing her, when I opened my eyes, I would lay there in my bed, reorienting myself to the world, adjusting to the new "normal", as it were.  I would have to reacquaint my mind to the fact that my daughter was dead; it was a living nightmare from which I prayed I would wake...only I was already awake.  I couldn't imagine how any of this could possibly be true; how it could be that Tiffany would never call me from her cell phone, never speak my name, never touch or hug her loved ones ever again.  I wanted to turn back the clock and re-live those crucial moments and somehow, somehow, by doing so, by doing something different, have a different outcome, a happy ending.  An ending where Tiffany lives, not dies.

As I wake to a new day, I wish that each day before had been a dream.  Back in the early days of my loss, I didn't know how I was going to get through the interminable hours until I could sleep again.  I wished I could go to sleep and never wake up yet a new day always dawned.  During those first days, weeks and months, I lived in a blur, a surreal world, cocooned in disbelief, numb with anguish, cries and screams of the deepest sorrow escaping from me until it seemed as if I had filled an entire ocean with tears but there was no respite in sight.  I couldn't fathom what had happened to this lovely human being who was my youngest child that would make her want to take her life.  She gave no warning, left no note, no explanation for what she did.  We who are left behind struggle to make sense, to understand what kind of pain and suffering drove her to this.  But we have no answers, only questions.

With every inevitable morning that arises, as I wake, I try to make peace with the fact that Tiffany is truly not of this world any longer.  While I waited for the autopsy and toxicology results, I prayed, prayed harder than I ever had, that what had happened was just a terrible accident.  So many people were certain that it was just an error in judgement - a tragic  mistake.  Until the day the medical examiner's office told me it was a venlafaxine overdose. Shaking, I asked to speak to the medical examiner and I practically begged him to tell me it was an accident.  Like I begged the EMTs to tell me Tiffany was alive; that she wasn't dead.  But he told me that, based on the amount of the drug found in her, it was not possible that it was an accident.  Utterly devastated, I hung up the phone and screamed from the highest heavens to the very depths of my ravaged mother's soul.  How, I thought, could she have done this to herself?

Today, with each dawn of the day, as I wake, the truth sets in a little deeper - the truth that life will never be the same as it was when Tiffany was on this earth.  Oh my god, what love I have for her.  Like the love I have for Troy, my oldest, my son.  That indescribable, overwhelming, soul-filling love that just takes over your heart when you have children.  And yet this child of mine who fought so hard to come into this world, fought so hard to leave it.

With each sunset, as the day winds down, I cry for this child of mine who had such a good heart yet such a fragile soul.  A fragile soul who could not stay long in this world...