Living with Our Ghosts (or how Pittsburgh Saved Me)

I declared myself "cured" (for lack of a better word) not long ago and decided to make a break from the long established blog I had been writing about the journey of grief recovery and began this one to try and finally take myself in a new direction.  But, it didn't take long before some of the same old issues tugged on my heart strings, so after considering for a day or two, I figured I might as well get them out there and discuss them because trying to focus on the beginning of baseball season or hockey playoffs just seemed sort of hollow in comparison.  And that's all fine.  No one's life is sunshine and butterflies all the time (particularly right now - there has been slim to none in the way of sunshine in the area for days).  For me, a couple of events collided to create my current state of mind, which really is not helped by the dreary and rainy spring weather.  First, I tripped across an old blog post I wrote on the day I buried my mother, on April Fool's Day exactly four years ago.  And, second, I'm trying to do some homework on eating disorders so we can travel over to Harrisburg early next week in support of legislation pertaining to educational material for the disease.  It's brought back all the early years for us when I was fighting with my kids' school as first one, then the other of them became ill.

I remember so well when I wrote the blog post a few hours after burying my mom.  I was sitting in the lobby of our hotel, curled up in a overstuffed chair next to the large picture window with a cup of coffee from the quaint little coffee shop adjacent to the lobby while my daughter slept upstairs.  My relatives had invited us to have dinner with them, but Marissa begged off.  We were just both so tired, I think.  This was the first quiet moment we'd had in ten years.  Finally, no elderly mother with Alzheimer's and a myriad of other issues to care for.  No older sister struggling with an eating disorder and raging at the world because it wouldn't set her free because she had died just a few months before.  She had finally finding a way to get the disease to let her go.  Marissa had fought her own demons, and would have a few more battles to face before she was done, but she was recovering from her own eating disorder and cross addictions.  We were battle weary.  There really was no other way to describe it.

Fast forward four years and our lives are very different.  My daughter is a college graduate, sober and recovered from her eating disorder.  We volunteer for OFA, we go to hockey games and have a baseball ticket package.  We go to Steelers games when we can, but watch the rest from our sports cave in my little post war cottage less than 10 miles from the stadium.  There is the zoo, and the symphony, the ballet, theater and museums.  There are arts fairs and quaint little shops along the Strip.  There is so much to do and see here, that it was just too hard to continue to stay curled up in a chair next to a window and watching the world go by.  We've learned, in short, to live again.   Our problem these days is that there is more to do than there is time (and sometimes money).  Many of my friends were dubious when we chose to move, warning me that we couldn't run from our problems.  That is true.  I can tell you that all the ghosts that live within our memories just move along with you, but Pittsburgh (despite our radon mitigation device downstairs) was like a breath of fresh air.  I am just so grateful to be here that, for once, good words fail me.

The thing I've been thinking about over the last few days, as a result of all this soul searching, is that we never forget the ones we lost, but it serves no one and nothing to stop living as a result.  Kelsey never got to see Pittsburgh, but I've often thought she would have loved it here.  Rather than feeling a crushing guilt over that, I can only try and carry her in my heart wherever I go and whatever I do.  And we can try to honor her memory by risking the stirring up of old memories  in support of a first small step in eating disorder awareness in the state.  My first small step toward trying to pay back what we've been given.  More to come.