Thank you Sarah. It does help for you to share. Last night was the first time in over a month when I had time alone to let it out. Ron stayed out late with friends and I told him I needed the time to let down. He's good about holding on to me when I land at the bottom, but it's been so hard to find the safe space in time to let myself go that deep. Once I start that journey, I can't pull myself out of it quickly. The new job, trying to keep TYWC going, and all the house breakdowns seem to just suck the hours away. I do scream, but the last time I really let that go I was hoarse for a week. Not good when you're a voice teacher. And the situation with Gabrielle brings it all back...

It just feels so false to have to plan time for grieving, and yet that's my only option. I'm not giving up... just very, very frustrated that I can't get where I need to in order to start working through this.. Missy asked me today what she should do or say to help Gabrielle and her parents and my response was to simply hold their hands or hug them. There's nothing that can be said by us that will help them make sense of it now. Those answers lie with God.

Love and hugs,
Sheila

Platitudes “God never sends more than you can handle.” Words offered up when the impossible needs explanation. Words spoken in kindness. But, what choice do they give the suffering? When devastation hits, are you supposed to keep standing back up only to be knocked down again? Doesn’t it make more sense to give in to the pain and give up if surviving means you’ll be tested harder the next time? Anything to make it stop… Since the accident, I’ve heard these words too often to count, making me wonder… if this is true, why are some driven to suicide? Is it weakness, or the strength to say enough is enough. I resent the survival instinct that causes me to keep getting back up. This does not feel like strength. More often it feels like insanity. I’ve always believed our lives are written long before we’re born. Some of my most impulsive, irrational decisions have resulted in the greatest gifts. Times when I let go and let God guide my heart and take over as scriptwriter. But, I’ve always been too analytical for my own good. When I hear that phrase, I want to know why a benevolent God would keep testing his children’s strength. I try joking about it. Try to find rationality in a warped theory that struggles keep coming to provide me with smaller, surmountable obstacles. To protect me from the impossibly impassable. Pushing grief aside to get over one hurdle, then the next, doesn’t make it disappear. All it does is increase fear and anxiety, leaving you waiting for the next ax to fall. All sense of control over your own life is gone when your assumptions about the natural order of things are torn from you. When I lost Shannon, my mother said: “Nothing can hurt you now. This is it. This is the worst it can get.” No platitudes. Just the truth. When I had to go back to work two days after the memorial at sea, my father provided the other comment people offer up as comfort: “Keeping busy will help keep your mind off of it.” He meant well, but it’s bullshit. I prefer the harsh honesty of my mother. The struggles of burglary, lack of refrigeration and running water, the car breaking down… these can be handled. But, there’s only so long you can skate on the surface of the volcano before it starts to tremble and erupt. I find myself constantly holding it at bay, just as the earth braces to hold back the flow of lava. It creeps out through the cracks in dreams, robbing me of rest. After a while you start to feel like a zombie, a freak. Still there, but without the benefit of your heart. And, what of Haiti? Surely God didn’t send total devastation, expecting them to handle it. Surely, little children are not expected to starve, struggle for water, wait for parents who may never appear… and handle it. My priest once told me that God created a world where bad things can still happen. So, I cling to the vision of a God who reaches out with help and comfort in the aftermath… I tell myself that our time here is just a small piece of a much longer continuum… But, I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to stop questioning the scriptwriter.

 Took the day off from work and am spending it in a cocoon filled with 22 years of memories.  Missing her more than ever...
    

On this last of the one year markers, I want to thank the people who were at Port Aransas a year ago to help me set Shannon loose into the sea she loved so much... for the flash of blue and purple light in the sky letting me know that her patron Archangel St. Michael was there to catch her on the other side... for the lone dolphin... the full moon... and the crashing waves that carried the cross from her rosary out to sea...

We did her proud and felt her there with us...


Shannon in Cape Town, South Africa

 

So... before everyone gets to NPS... I've been trying to collect up photos of folks wearing the Shannon Leigh t-shirts (both for me personally and for the lawsuit to illustrate the impact of her loss on all of us). I've been copying them over when I see them on facebook or online, but if you have any, please send them to me as email attachments to: sheilasiobhan@aol.com 

 Friends-

 

It is a Herculean task to make a positive difference in a young person’s life.  What we do for them as teenagers can make the difference between fiery aspiration and achievement and life long struggle and strife.  This Tuesday, the four teenaged girls of the Austin Under 21 Poetry Slam Team (photo below) will fly to Chicago to compete in the Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam Festival.  We are nearly $2,500 short and we still need to feed, house and transport these ladies and the angels watching over them (coach, chaperones, directors). We have done everything we know to do to raise the money needed: performance features, competitions, product sales, online cause campaigns, and pledge matches.  We have covered the airfares ($2,559) and some of the lodging ($850).  We can’t make this happen without your help.

 

The math is very simple:

 

Meals-

$10 per meal x 3 meals per day x 9 people x 6 days = $1,620

 

Ground Transport-

$25 weekly train pass x 9 people = $225

 

Remaining Lodging = $520

 

If just 125 people donated $20 a piece at our website (www.tywc.org), click donate button on any page [PayPal]), the team’s costs would be covered. Too many times we think someone else will do what needs to be done and, as a result, nothing happens.  We need each and every one of you to take the step.  It is the only way for us to make it.

 

We make this request on behalf and for the benefit of these girls.  Despite some of the very serious challenges some of them face in their lives, they all have committed to accomplish something bigger than themselves; a lesson that could propel them to success in their lives.  Please help us realize their goal and lift a child. We can’t do it alone.

 

Sheila & Ron 

 The 2009 Austin Youth Slam Team desperately needs your help getting to Chicago for Brave New Voices!!! The airfares are currently on my tab - yikes!!! Please consider making a donation today. If enough folks give just $10-20 we can make it! Or - stop by Kick Butt Coffee tomorrow afternoon, hear the team's feature performance and drop off a donation in person :) Or donate using PayPal through our website: www.txywc.org

 I wondered if I'd feel it.  That moment when she was struggling to break free and reach the surface.  A year ago Sunday the sheriff called.  The call we moms fear.  The call we warn our children about.  I used to tell her what my mom told me:  "I don't want to be that mother who didn't know where her baby was when the call came... don't make me into that woman the world looks on with disgust".  But... she was out on her own already when the call came.  I wasn't the mother in the newspaper who left her child somewhere or didn't keep a close enough watch.  The day comes when our arms can't reach far enough...  

There were close calls in her childhood when I wrapped my arms around her as tightly as I could to protect her from harm.  Walking through the streets of New York City or Milan, I would cram her growing body into a too small snugly, rather than in a stroller.  People used to tease me for it, but I was always so afraid that someone would come along and grab the stroller and her from me.  I had nightmares that her father would take her for a walk, get distracted by a conversation and not notice as someone ran off with her.  So I held her tight, straps securing her in safety.  If they tried to take her they'd have to take me with them.

There was the 1989 San Francisco quake.  Two years old, she was playing with her rocking horse when the building began rocking back and forth again and again.  Rocking strong enough to slosh water out of the toilet onto the floor, drapes swinging from side to side.  It was a hot day with no a/c and I was cooking dinner in my slip.  I raced over to grab her and sat with her under the door jam waiting for it to stop while her dad listened to instructions over the intercom.  They said "stay in your apartments".    Shannon said "naughty, naughty house" as she grabbed my chest.  When the quake stopped we got dressed and went outside to the park.  Seventeen stories up in a high rise apartment building felt too precarious.  I didn't trust her father's arms to carry her down the stairwell.  I clutched her to my chest and carried her every step of the way out into the street.  My legs ached for days.  We found an open area and sat there for a long time.  At least on the ground we thought we could run to safety.  We returned to the apartment as darkness set in.  There were looters in the streets and fires from gas mains breaking out.  I didn't sleep that night.  I lay watching the ceiling and a crack that was slowly working its way across the paint.  I prayed hard that we wouldn't find ourselves tumbling down seventeen stories and tried to strategize how I would block her fall with my body.  Supermom fantasies...

A few years later we were on an airplane that hit severe wind sheer.  The plane bounced back and forth... up and down a thousand feet at a time.  Turbulence so strong that EMS met us at the gate to help a man with heart problems.  Another woman was carried away with a back injury.  I braced my leg against the bulk head, fighting gravity to wrap my arms around her and shield her from whatever came next.  In cold weather I still feel the pain in my knee from the hits it took with each lurch in altitude.  A younger girl behind us was screaming and crying.  Her mom had gone to sit with a friend in another part of the plane before the wind sheer began and couldn't get back to her.  Shannon turned and said "don't worry, it'll be alright".  We finally cleared the turbulence and made it to the gate... safe again on the ground.

I was in Walmart last Sunday when it hit me.  Picking up some stuff for the house and not paying attention to the time.  First there was dizzyness and shortness of breath.  Then the sense of panic.  It was 1:53.  Ron took one look at me, got me out of there and home where I curled up on the floor with the two dogs while he brought me water and xanax.  My heart pounding... the shaking, and the sobbing wouldn't stop.  An hour later I was able to get up on the bed, while my mom sat next to me, reassuring me that I was living through an agony Shannon probably never felt.  She and Ron kept repeating that she must have blacked out before the mouthpiece escaped her lips.  I've always been afraid of drowning.  I love the sea from the safety of the shore or on a boat within sight of land.  I'll never know what her thoughts were in those moments and it kills me either way.  I may never know if that was the exact time.  But, if I back track from the sheriff's call, to the helicopter's departure, to the man who left her there to die resurfacing at the end of his dive, to the rescue and resuscitation... it had to be close...  

She always called me at the end of a long drive to let me know she'd arrived safely.  Her last voicemail to me said "Don't worry mom.  I'm diving with Jim so you know I'll be safe"...

I was always so worried about catching her from falling... I never thought to shield her from the depths...

 I

I think she'd like the idea of her Austin area gang gathering to celebrate her spirit...  
Please join us if you can.

So... I have to admit that I had yet to get my tattoo.  There was talk of a group of us going in on the day of the Memorial at Sea, but we couldn't get info on a good place.  Matthew and I actually went around to places when he was in town, but everyone was too busy and we really should have just made an appointment in advance.  My plan now is to get mine done on the anniversary of her accident, June 14th.  I've gone back and forth on where to get it - not the shop - but physically.  I'd been thinking about each ankle, but my vanity is starting to question that since I don't want my legs to look shorter than they already are.  My latest thoughts have been to get one line around each wrist. 

My drifting ship, I still believe in anchors
My heart, I still believe in God - Shannon

But, I'm still not sure whether to just get the text, or whether to try to get some sort of design made out of it.  So... for any of you who already have these lines (Karen), and those of you who have more experience than me (which would be zero!)... please send me your thoughts and suggestions...  I don't think I can handle getting anything big, but I really have no clue how to go about coming up with an idea.

Hugs