Danielle Louise Joanette-Kluck passed from this life one year ago today. As has become a cathartic personal tradition on milestone dates, I've written her a letter, which I share with you below.
Danielle, my love,
It’s been one year since I held your hand and felt you squeeze mine for the last time. Though only the first of many, it’s still surreal to think about.
I went back and read the blogs I wrote and the other letters I’ve written to you (some of which I’ve also published as blogs), and it very easily brought back feelings and memories of the past year. There are a number of moments that I remember like they were yesterday, and that I’ll likely never forget.
It seems like a good time to take stock. How are Torin and I doing, one year out? There are a few different axes upon which we can measure, but I think I’m going to upgrade the overall answer from my frequent reply of “okay most days” to “pretty good on average”.
I’ve hit a stride in my single-parenthood and feel more comfortable.Things aren’t perfect. I still need more practice at managing (and preventing) tantrums, but those have been less frequent than they were a few months ago. Now I just wish I could get Torin to more reliably brush his teeth and eat what’s on his plate… But these are trivialities. By and large, Torin is a wonderful little boy, and he fills my heart to bursting. (“Dada, I’d like a hug, please.”)
We’ve still been in a regular cadence of Torin’s Mimi and Papa taking him one day a week. I do just fine on weeks when it doesn’t work out, like when they went on vacation, but boy is it nice to have an evening to myself. (And when they went on a longer vacation, Meema and then Grandpa came at the tail end of it, and then Mimi and Papa were back, and oh me oh my so many grandparents for the Torin!)
I’m getting (and/or making) more opportunities to be social these days. A lot of it is virtual, after Torin is in bed. However, just the other day, none of the neighbors’ kids were available to watch Torin during bi-weekly neighborhood game-night, so I scrambled to find someone and was put in touch with a babysitter. Torin got along splendidly with her! This is big, because it opens the door for me to participate in something on a larger scale than two-hours-long-and-just-down-the-street without having to lean on my parents every time.
Emotionally, I’ll still occasionally get triggered by something, but not often. I’m able to speak matter-of-factly about what happened a year ago without breaking down. It helps a lot, I think, that I explicitly give myself time to grieve, so that it doesn’t sneak up on me. Day to day, that time is while I’m sitting with Torin to put him to sleep, as I’ve mentioned before. On milestone days, I’ll take a whole day off work (or two days in this case) just to have to myself.
Everything is harder in the context of Torin, however. He got moved to a new class at school for kids 2.5+ (with slightly cheaper rates, whoop!), and I was filling out an introductory questionnaire to give to his new teachers, when I got to a question about Mommy and Daddy. It was difficult to write what I did, which was that you had passed last year and to please not discuss you with Torin without me present. It’s not like I’m hiding you from him - we scroll through dozens of photos and videos of the two of you every single night as I put him to bed - but I’d prefer you not be accidentally brought up in the exact same casual, present tense way that teachers might talk to classmates about their parents. He’s eventually going to have questions, and I want him to arrive at them on his own rather than be prompted.
It’s not that the longer it takes him to ask, the more prepared (emotionally or otherwise) I’ll be to answer him, though maybe that’s part of it. My main concern is with his lingual skills - which are coming along great, but still, he’s two - I want him to understand as best as possible what I tell him. For that, I think the farther along he is with his comprehension skills, the better.
Speaking of skills, Torin is fast becoming a whiz (relative to his age) at arithmetic! He’s not always in the mood, and if you ask him too many questions in a row he’ll get bored and stop answering, but he can do basic addition and subtraction of small numbers, e.g. “What’s five take-away three?” Apparently in his new class, they’re going to focus more on numbers and letters, so I hope he’ll continue to grow there.
It breaks my heart when I think about how much you’re missing, and it’s only going to get worse. One of the videos we watch every night - recently imported from your phone - is of you holding Torin while we all sing him Happy Birthday on his 1st birthday. In just under two months from now, he’ll be having his 3rd birthday, and you will have missed more of them than you got to see. Not super long after that, he’ll have been alive without you longer than he’ll have been alive with you. … I collapsed in a sobbing pile after writing that sentence. You get the point.
Maybe continuing to write to you about how proud I am of him will take away some of this particular brand of pain. I hope so, because I’m going to keep doing it. It hurts, but it also makes me feel closer to you, which obviously feels great.
There’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while. Not dwelling on, not this time, just something my mind came back to repeatedly until I had figured it out to my satisfaction. It has, at times, struck me as odd how perfectly natural it feels to address you like this, or even aloud, even though, as someone who does not believe in any sort of afterlife, I don’t think I’m actually speaking to anyone. I’ve done a lot of self-introspection and almost wrote a blog post about it before deciding that it would bore people to tears to read a non-psychology major’s amateur technical description of what essentially boils down to the meaning of “alive in our hearts”, which I feel like everyone kind of inherently understands to some degree without needing explanation. But maybe I can paraphrase what I came up with.
Put in its simplest terms though, it’s your memory I’m addressing. Even when someone else is alive, if they’re not, like, in the room with you, then they’re represented in your mind solely by all the things you remember about them. And if you love that person, it’s an awfully strong imprint. The fact that your memory is no longer attached to another person walking around out there when I’m not looking, well... It doesn’t make you seem any less real to me.
Danielle, I am still head over heels in love with you.
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