Four Months

and a Mother's Day

It’s been four months since Annie died, and honestly, it feels like yesterday and also like those four months have been an eternity. I am healing, and I am still crying. I go many days without crying. I get most hung up when I try to imagine living for a long time and knowing that Annie is not in the future with me. I will never see her heal from mental illness (maybe that was a pipe dream) or get married or have children. People say that often, grievers are numb the first year - that the second one is even harder, and I can’t think forward about living in any sort of way at all, knowing that the pain might get even worse, so I stay close to the present.

I had Annabelle the year after my dad died. I have come up with every way imaginable, trying to figure out why she was the way that she was - the hard parts, I mean, from blaming myself to getting pregnant with her while grieving to her birth story to being a gifted child to her undiagnosed mental illnesses to some one in her life (me or Daniel or a relative or anyone really) causing some sort of trauma to her. The truth is, she was so easy to love and so difficult to parent all of her life. I always wanted to write about her, but I never could imagine it, because I always imagined her alive, without the ability to tell anyone the fullness of my story with her. Now that I can tell more of her story, I find myself wanting to protect her, cover over the hard parts that would never have been fully told.

I am convinced these four months later, that although parts of Annie were always a mystery to me, I knew her best or better than most. There’s this video I took of her in about 2nd grade, and you can see then that she’s already tormented. It’s like an 80-year-old living in a child’s body, and she doesn’t want to take direction from her parents. Things started to fall apart in her mental health when she was in the 7th grade. I was always intervening in the trajectory of her life, though. It’s why I homeschooled her in 4th and 5th grade. I sent her that video some time after she was seeing her psychologist, Natalie. So maybe in 10th and 11th grade. I didn’t send it to her to distress her. I was always trying to celebrate her, and even the differences and harder parts of her. But the video did distress her. She wanted to know why she was the way that she was. I always did too, and although I do feel certain I know her best, I will never know this answer. Even Natalie told me they could never find the source of her shame after weekly or biweekly appointments with her for five years! She also told me that she believed I kept her alive longer than she would have lived without me as her mom, but sometimes, it’s easy to think that all my interventions were either too much or not enough.

Last year, I wrote this post about motherhood: Shaped by Motherhood. Annie’d had her first manic episode last spring. I don’t know. Looking back, it all sorta feels confusing. It’s clear that she’d become delusional, and we’d tried, alongside her psychologist, to get her help, but due to the mental health system in my area, all it did was poke a bear and stir up tensions between us. She was legally an adult - able to make her own choices. Annie’d become quite enamored with Catholicism and was thinking of converting, so when I posted that substack about motherhood, she reposted it on her Girls for Christ Instagram account and told me how much she loved me. I was surprised by it because things were difficult between us. By the end of May, she’d turned violent, we’d called the cops, and she was living on friends’ couches or in her car, and she’d taken down what she posted about me. She didn’t come to her brother’s graduation and instead set out to vandalize the house because we had to change the locks. No one outside of my house seemed to understand her mental health condition, with the exception of her former roommate. Even though Annie has died and the days now are hard, those are some of the darkest, most discouraging days I’ve ever walked through.

I don’t understand why I prayed so many prayers to see God move so much in her life, only to have her story end in such a negative, hard way over the last year of her life. I am convinced not only that I knew her best, but that if she’d stayed on her meds or been more receptive to help, or that the mental health system actually functioned properly, she would still be alive. But, there are too many what-ifs and unknowns to clearly predict anything about her life except what has happened. I know that sometime before her death, Annie was able to understand a sense of what happened with her mental breakdown last year. I think it caused her a lot of shame. Even though I have found some meaning in her life and her story, and plan to write more about it, the fact that God let her story be written this way, with this ending, is hard for me.

I have been disappointed with God and disappointed with friends who seem to have abandoned me. Disappointed with friends who cannot imagine a God as big as mine, who is not mad that I am disappointed with him. Life can be a lot. And yet, in the midst of disappointment, I have seen beauty from relative strangers and continued moving forward, knowing that Annie would want me to be the fullest expression of me. I’ve found I can still minister to others in the midst of my own tragedy, that I can hope, that I can laugh and love. I went back to work and have almost finished the 3rd unit of CPE. I am proud of this accomplishment. Grief gave me the ability to let go of all the bullshit parts of CPE and life in general. As an enneagram 4, I’ve always been for authenticity and transparency, so I didn’t quite know it was possible to pretend less, but I do. I pretend less, am more blunt, and tell the truth. I am proud of what I have learned about myself through CPE. It’s hard for an enneagram 4 to learn more about themselves, and yet, I have. CPE also gives me a place to process my grief and talk about Annie’s life and memory.

This Mother’s Day is hard not only because Annie is dead, but our family doesn’t yet know how to be a family without Annie. We are all grieving in unique ways, and it’s supremely challenging to parent a newly adult child who just lost his sister. I am scared that I am losing not only my daughter but also my son.

A prayer I prayed often over the years for Annie was

Find her and bring her home.¹

It is a prayer that I believe God loves to answer. He loves to find lost people and bring them back to Him. And yet, my confidence in this little prayer falters. In some ways, I know that God is always finding me and bringing me home to him. I need to relearn to trust that he is doing the same for each of the members of my family as we grieve and learn to live again, without a daughter or a sister, as I am now both a mother and a bereaved mother, I will always need finding, and I will always need to be brought back to God. Even though God taught me the depth of the gospel through Annie’s life, I am relearning to trust this same gospel for my son, my daughter, my husband, and myself as I hold onto God and tell him that I’m not letting go until he gives me a blessing, much like Jacob, who learned to walk with a newfound limp as a result of holding on. Still, all that’s left is to press on, in spite of myself, in spite of the unanswered questions. God’s kind enough to give me more answers than most, and I am able to see him at work despite my disappointment with the end of Annie’s story.

Some people reach out to let me know that their child has now followed the Lord because of Annie’s story. Some, like me, grapple with unanswered questions and wonder if they made a mistake (a common symptom for suicide survivors). Many who abandoned Annie have not returned to her, and most of all, I pray that they are able to experience compassion for her and themselves for whatever they suffered in Annie’s final year.

Annie was a great treasure through both the hard and good times. I am blessed to be her mom and to have known her. My love for her continues, and that’s where all the pain comes from.

1. A prayer from Kristi McLelland in her The Running Father teaching series on Luke 15.