She was beautiful, smart, funny, friendly, and kind. She was in theater. She loved Dr. Who and ugly sweaters. She was creative and artistic -- unique. Meeting Corey was like meeting her mother from thirty years ago.
It's funny how, when you try to measure time by a specific memory, it always seems as if you've gone through a wormhole and skipped a few decades. The years speed past us, leave us wondering where they'd all gone to in such a hurry.
It seems like one day Corey's mother and I reconnected on Facebook, and in the next moment Corey's Senior pictures were posted on her proud mother's wall.
And then Corey was gone.
Her passing rent a great, gaping hole in the fabric of our universe, the balance of our world. I like to think of her knocking around in some alternate universe with The Doctor, with lots of planets and people to save. A good mother's child is generally a good child, and I know no better source of compassion than to have a kind and understanding mother. So Corey, she will be very kind, and clever, and brighten the very souls of every living being she meets. But in this universe, there is still that empty hole, and what do we do with that?
Corey would want us to fill it.
And so I find myself with a whole awful lot of running to do.
Corey was seventeen when she died, as she will always be in my memory.
And in the heart and memories of her mother, Corey will always exist as the infant, the toddler, the elementary student, and the happy teenager. For her mother there was so much more to lose. As each memory, each anniversary, each holiday and every birthday without Corey multiplies in the two years since her death, I know another little piece of her mother's heart gets torn fresh. It's hard to know how to comfort someone when they have lost their only child. I heard or read somewhere that Rose Kennedy, upon asked about her sons' deaths, said something about how unnatural it is for a parent to outlive their children, and that's a level of pain I can not fully even comprehend.
I think of how much it hurt when my ex-husband got physical custody of my children because I had no home to take them to, how the pain was so bad that I scarcely got through it alive. But to lose them altogether?
I think back to the days after I had to give them up, to the unnatural quiet in the house, to the empty rooms and unused toys mocking me every time I walked past their doorways, and most of all just how pointless my life had become all of a sudden. It had revolved around them, and now it felt as if there was nothing. I remembered I cried. I screamed at the relentlessly cold universe.
But I still had my children to live for. And this is the thing not everyone understands about being a mother, being a parent: You are
always a mother (or father), whether your children are with you or not. I hadn't lost them, and I was still their mother. They needed me to figure out a way to live, and to thrive, so that someday I could show them how. You will always carry your children with you, in your heart and in your head. They're in your face and they're in the sounds, sights, and smells that accompany every day of your life.
"Lucy loves that flavor of ice cream."
"I remember when I watched this with Stuart; He cracked up at that part."
"That sounds like Lucy's laugh."
"I haven't been on this street since that time Stuart fell and skinned his knee. He carried on so much you'd have thought he was going to die..."
It was Corey's Mom who started it, my cherished childhood friend. At Christmas she mailed me a card and a packet of smaller-sized business cards with encouraging messages on them, to hand out to random people I meet, especially anyone who worked a thankless job, seemed in any way sad, or simply because my heart wordlessly led me to them.
Because Corey's mother still has her daughter to live for, as she will always carry her with her, always see and feel and hear her with all of her senses, all of her memories, because their hearts and minds connected in a way that only a mother can know. In this sense, Corey has not left us at all. How much the rest of us mothers take for granted! All the little things that could at any moment be subtracted and replaced by a huge hole.
One thing I learned being without my children was that there are a lot of these holes out there in this tired, cynical old world, more than any one person could ever fill.
But as Corey's mother, my friend had to do what Corey would have done.
In August, she challenged her Facebook friends to come up with seventeen acts of kindness, one for each year of Corey's life. If enough of us did that, those little good deeds would add up to something like the number of things Corey might have done, or would have us to do.
I promised that I would meet that challenge, and set out to work at it. I don't need accolades for anything I came up with; I didn't do them for that. I'm writing because I promised Corey's Mom that I would share these things with her, and then later it seemed that as many people as possible ought to know, and to do at least one small kindness -- for Corey.
My first kindness with Corey in mind was for a man I met at work who had served our country in Saudi Arabia. He had done his duty and then returned to the states using a walker, which he has had to use ever since. He was one of the nicest men I have ever met, and I think Corey would have liked his quirky sense of humor his liberal-mindedness, and what a really good artist he was.
While I stuck to coloring mandala coloring books between calls at the center where we both worked, David created scenes and stories with pictures he drew from memory -- A place he'd once lived, a man he once knew, a soldier, a desert -- This sailboat, which he gave to me on my last day at work. While I had an expensive set of 72 watercolor pencils, David worked with three #2 pencils, a couple of highlighters, three colored pencils in primary colors, and a charcoal pencil. He often stopped at my desk and told me how much he envied me my fancy "art kit," so I decided to go out and buy him a set of his own. I was curious to see what he'd do if he had a wider range of colors and a better quality pencil. The plan was to leave the pencils at his desk on my last day at work, so that I could slip out without having to endure the embarrassment of a "Thank you." I don't know why they make me feel that way, but they do. I want to do something really nice, but I don't necessarily want to be complimented for it. Go ask Freud.
One day David got to work three hours late, looking harried and upset.
"What happened to you?" I asked, feeling that vague but fearful empathy of not knowing more than the expression on someone's face.
"I had an appointment at the VA hospital this morning," said David grimly, "The appointment was at nine, but I just got back."
I checked the time on my monitor. Three-thirty.
David was about to elaborate, but it was time for an impromptu meeting that had been called. Everyone shuffled out for the conference room and settled in, a buzz in the air about how this was the time of year when the call center started laying people off. We were all there on time, but the person from Human Resources was late, so David continued his story:
"I stood there in line for awhile, but then had to take a number and go sit in the waiting area. It was like they just forgot about me. Three hours later, when I went to ask the lady at the desk what the hold-up was because I had to get to work, she looked at me like I was trash and accused me of being some kind of a problem. She said, 'Maybe if you had any kind of patience people would actually want to help you. You need to go sit down.' And it was like someone was going to escort me out of there if I said another word."
"Wow," I said. "It's terrible how they can spend so much money to send soldiers out to die for this country, but then they can't come up with better services for people after they've come home."
"You're telling me," he said glumly.
"If it isn't too much to ask -- What did you have to go in for?"
"My eyes," he said, "I noticed some blurriness, and I thought that it was just that I needed a new prescription, but turns out I've got cataracts."
I didn't get a chance to do more than shake my head before the meeting started, and it turned out people were right -- Tomorrow was our last day.
David had been hoping he could stay on because it was the only job he knew of available to him.
I had already interviewed for another one and gotten it, so I was only sorry for his sake.
Corey didn't have to nudge me very hard.
The next day, when David came back from his break, I was on the phone with a customer, but I listened nervously for a reaction.
There was a box of 150 colored pencils sitting on his desk.
I heard the box open, and the sound of him riffling his fingers through them all. He settled himself into his chair, paused, and then I heard the gentle rustle of paper as he unfolded his note. After a few minutes of silence, I heard him draw in a deep, sniffling breath, and then release it.
It occurred to me that this had actually all been a terrible mistake, that the man still had four more hours of work to go, talking on the phone with one customer after another, fighting back tears.
I hung up my phone.
David tapped my shoulder, so I swiveled my chair around to face him.
"Did you do this?" he asked solemnly.
Sensing some strong emotions, I was almost afraid to nod my head. David clutched the note to his heart and mouthed "THANK YOU!" through his tears.
And then all I could do in return is mouth the words, "You're welcome," because I felt as if I might start crying myself.
"She was her only child?" he asked.
I nodded again. I'd been worried about what I might do if he were too proud to accept the gift, so I'd written explaining that the pencils weren't from me, that they had nothing to do with me at all.
The next day, he came in and told me "You made my wife cry with what you did."
As a general rule, I don't think it's a good thing to make someone else cry, but the way he said it expressed further gratitude and a desire to let me know what a profound thing had taken place here. In David's smile and the warmth of his voice, I felt something more than just a "little" act of kindness, and that as soon as they could do so, the couple would pass that kindness on to somebody else. David would be sure to explain that it was for Corey.
We tend to get caught up in the idea that doing something important for someone else requires a lot of time, work and money. It's overwhelming how big we think it has to be when we reach out toward another person. I didn't have time or money, and simply doing my job from day to day was exhausting, so I'd had to come up with something more manageable. But how many acts of kindness does it take to fully represent seventeen years of life? Some of the things I thought of were things I know I would have done anyway, just little things, but it was kind of nice to think of myself as having Corey for a partner in this venture. I would stop and consciously try to decide 'How can I brighten the day, or maybe just one important little moment of the life of the average Joe out on the street?" What would the creative, thoughtful young woman have chosen to do?
And so Corey...
- Gave me a pat on the back for helping David and then pressed me to move on, to
- send a special picture to another of my grieving friends,
- Give a painting to another of my friends who was worried about losing her job,
- had me tell my daughter Lucy all about her and the project she had me working on, and how I could use some help carrying out her work.
- helped us come up with the idea of donating money to a dying child around Lucy's age who wanted to swim with the dolphins,
- pressed us to help someone clean up a mess that wasn't actually any concern of our own,
- told the man washing the windows at the restaurant that he was doing a beautiful job helping us to see the flowers, and he was so pleased and astonished that we were pretty sure no one had ever taken the time to tell him before,
- which prompted us to stop and make contact with every janitor we came across, to really see them and tell them how much we appreciated their hard work,
- had us read a story to a crying child in a waiting room until the little girl laughed instead,
- found something special for me to post on the wall of each of my Facebook friends, one for every day of the month,
- made certain that I stopped and stooped down to pick up litter wherever I walked outside that month,
- helped me contrive something nice to do for my mom on her birthday by cajoling one of my rides to stop at Meijer for us to buy her a cake,
- had us talk to people in waiting rooms about the lives of their families and their friends instead of staring down at my phone,
- reminded me to slow down for the rest of the summertime I had with Stuart and Lucy, and work extra hard to look them in the eyes, listen to what they had to say, and then find the right responses,
- Gave my boyfriend a little shove to help an elderly woman get something off the top shelf at the store instead of standing there muttering to himself about her being in our way,
- encouraged me to leave my phone downstairs, on mute or in silent mode, and instead of feeling badly about our time together not seeming long enough and not being ideal, focusing instead on the quality of the time that we had left.
- and asked me to stop feeling badly about myself when the kids were away, stop focusing on the hole I felt inside myself, and instead to spend that time apart from my children filling in holes in the hearts of others.
I had set about trying to heal the world's hurts
one person,
one small act of kindness
at a time.
And I discovered
that there is no "small" act of kindness.
Corey taught me that.
