The Brennens…

Originally written January 19, 2019

There’s a running joke in our family about all of the videos that Shane watches. He is a sucker for a funny, poignant, shocking, or ridiculous social media blast and the rest of us equally enjoy teasing him about it. In fact, we’ve even given his tendencies a nickname: the rabbit hole. As in, Shane’s down the rabbit hole of videos again. (The rabbit hole is generally the “More Videos” stream that shows up after watching a Facebook video. If you’ve seen it, you know we aren’t exaggerating about the title!) We tease my beloved hubby about his videos but all of that teasing has put that term, “the rabbit hole,” in the front of my mind.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about grief, specifically my grief. As a teenager I had a pretty terrible relationship with my dad so losing my mom at such a young age was a double shot of pain: now what? …omg, NOW what?! It was hard but my dad and I got through the hard stuff and established a strong bond that will always be one of the great treasures of my life. What a gift to be given a second chance at such an important relationship. Certainly it was not having it, then having to really work at the relationship that made it so strong.

Losing him is the hardest thing I’ve ever experienced. I thought, until that time, that losing Mom was the most terrible thing that could ever happen to me. In fact, I’ve even confirmed my suspicions via the book Motherless Daughters, which asserts that (and this is a complete paraphrase) losing your same-sex parent is the absolute worst. Don’t get me wrong: it is. But losing Dad…that put me in a bad place.

After we lost Mom, my role in the family (which was somewhat self-assigned) became protector. When it comes to Dad and Emily, I am like a piranha, mixed with a mother bear, mixed with…I don’t know but some kind of crazy. Anyone or anything that stands in our way or tries to come between us or tries to take us down goes down instead. I don’t tolerate much of anything. I take responsibility for pain or sadness or frustration in any of us; if anyone is experiencing the pain, sadness, or frustration I mentioned, it’s my fault. I didn’t do my job and hold up my end of the arrangement. I also have extreme radar for anyone with an ulterior motive against one of us. If I see or perceive that someone has an ulterior motive, I shut it right down. You want to know about Dad’s past? Why? There’s no need, especially if he didn’t choose to tell your himself. … How’s he doing? Why? What will you get out of knowing? … Don’t do that – he said no – don’t push him. … Leave my Daddy alone. Maybe that’s crazy but I can’t help it – and frankly I don’t want to.

It’s because of this, however, that I felt responsible for Dad’s death and the circumstances that surrounded it. Logically, I understand that I couldn’t save him from pancreatic cancer, but in my irrational mind, what was more important was that I wasn’t able to protect him from the pain or the sadness or the fear… I wasn’t able to save him from this despair, and that is my struggle, and what kept me in the dark hole.

The rabbit hole.

I noticed something about myself as I was reflecting on my grief and it’s that sometimes, I allow myself to go down the rabbit hole of sadness. Sometimes I need it because that’s where I feel the closest to my dad. Thinking about what went wrong, or words that were said, or pictures that we took on his last good day are DEVASTATING but they’re also where I feel him the strongest because it’s where I left him. It’s where I feel him the strongest. There are days and moments when I need to look at the video that I took of him pretending to play the flute with his nebulizer…the video that, when he watched it back, made him cry… I watch because I need my dad and I need to feel him where I left him. The rabbit hole kept me in a very, very, VERY sad place that got sadder and sadder after Liam was born; some days I couldn’t help being in the rabbit hole but some days I could – and on the days that I could crawl out, I didn’t because there, I could feel my dad and out of the hole, in the sunlight, the reality was that I was parenting without parents. It made for a really hard time for Shane, for our marriage, for my mental health but I didn’t care because I NEEDED my parents and that trumped it all.

But.

Once the clouds lifted and I crawled out into the sunlight, I still needed my dad, but I didn’t need to be in the rabbit hole. I needed to talk about him, I needed to tell people that I missed him, and I needed to tell Liam about Grandpa John, but I didn’t need to torture myself with guilt. Don’t get me wrong: I still have guilt about not being able to save him, but it’s different. It’s sadness but not depression. I still need to let myself go down the rabbit hole from time to time but I no longer need to exist there. I need to watch the video or look at pictures or think about his love for “Eugene” but I also need to think about our stories and our laughs and our trips and our fights and our fun. I need to think about how he and Emily were always the dynamic duo and yet they let me tag along and how much I love them for it. I need to think about how RIGHT ON his advice always was (and how much I miss it!). I need to think about how much he loved having sons-in-law (finally!). I need to think about how Dad and Emily and I were such a strong unit – and how hard we fought to get – and stay – that way. I need to think about how much my parents would have absolutely loved Liam…and not just a grandson, but specifically THIS kid because he’s the most amazing little guy…he is exactly the grandson that they would have just obsessed over. 

And so, we move forward – but grief is a funny thing. Just when you think you’re making progress, you find yourself back in that dark place with lots of tears and sadness. It hits at the expected times and it hits when we least expect it. Eighteen and a half years later and my grief for my mom still hits and takes me to a dark place…but now the darkness is mostly light and my sadness is mostly joy for the time we did have. As I cycle round and round through the rabbit hole, I’ll get there with Dad too. Ultimately, the good news is that pain like this only comes from loving deeply…and so…I’m thankful for the rabbit hole. 

One year ago today, we discovered a flood in our home that displaced us for six months and had us living in a construction zone for another four.

On December 23, a blizzard hit our area and knocked out our power and heat. We tried to stick it out here but it got cold – fast – and we had no idea how long the outage would last. We went to Shane’s parents’ house for the night and headed home in the morning once power was restored.

Unfortunately, when we got there, we found that the heat did not come back with the power. I put out a Hail Mary in our local Facebook group hoping for a plumber who could help us with our boiler system on Christmas Eve and found the kindest man who came to assess and said he would be happy to help but because everything was frozen, we were stuck until the thaw coming a few days later.

We shut off the water and prepared to go back to hunker down back with Shane’s parents for the holiday. We went back to the house daily to check on things – nothing changed from day to day.

Until the morning of the 28th.

Shane went back early because we were celebrating a re-scheduled Christmas Eve dinner that afternoon. He called me from the house and said I needed to prepare myself.

Yep, I guess so.

When the power went out, the boiler pipes had a chance to freeze. What we have discovered is that the pipes that heat our upstairs actually ran outside in our porch overhang – obviously not great for insulation. We also discovered that there had been other, previous repairs. Other, previous, non-disclosed repairs. Sigh.

The pipes broke across the whole front of our house, resulting in a flood in our bedroom, Shane’s closet, the boys’ bathroom, the office, foyer, living room, and down into the basement.

It was an epic mess. All of the floors, the walls, the windows – everything was destroyed. Our walls were open to the outside.

We were displaced to a hotel for a couple of months and then to a cabin at Punderson for four months, and then returned home…and THEN the repairs began. (Yep – nothing happened while we displaced our family for months.)

The big battles were exactly what you’d expect: insurance, contractors. Rinse and repeat.

The smaller battles were sometimes even more difficult: putting Finny in a big boy bed way earlier than we planned because he outgrew the pack and play in the hotel and we didn’t have his crib. Liam struggled to sleep alone in the hotel. As a result, we slept apart for almost three months. We couldn’t cook full meals for the months in the hotel. Laundry! Oh the laundry. I’m a small loads all week kind of girl – having to use a service or laundromat, or hang out at our horribly depressing house to use our own facilities just..sucked.

What we have discovered through all of this is that kids are delightfully resilient, roll with whatever, and find joy in the smallest of moments. We have discovered over and over again that we are an incredible team that works together fluidly. We worked hard on our marriage throughout. We had incredible support from our family – moving us in and out of the hotel and the cabin, taking the boys when we HAD to have a break, checking in constantly and being as invested in our battles as we were. We got amazing support from our coworkers and friends. My Bedford family raised money for us – enough to cover our deductible.

Don’t get me wrong. This was hard. But the blessings throughout are what I will remember.

I’m feeling 23… 23 years of heaviness and 23 years of weight on me and my family.

23 years ago today, we lost my mom. She left suddenly and left a life sized hole in her wake, one that we’ve never been able – nor that we’ve ever tried to fill. There’s no way to do so – mothers are critical components to their children’s lives and their shoes simply cannot be filled by anyone else.

Some days, the Mom sized hole is manageable. It has been 23 years, after all. If nothing else, we have learned how to cope. And we have found other ways to live life that do not involve our parents. They’re certainly not ideal, but they do work and they get us through the day and years.

Other days, I feel like I’m lost. I feel like I have no direction and like I’m treading water through life. I don’t know how to get advice, I don’t know how to make decisions, I don’t know how to be a mom myself, or a wife, or even just a functioning adult. In many ways, I’ve had to teach myself most of this. I don’t know how parents – specifically same-sex parents – do this with their children so honestly I’m not even completely sure of what I’ve been deprived. Maybe no one really gets the kind of “guidance” I feel that I’m missing. Or maybe there are parenting and adulting lessons that I skipped. I guess I’ll never really know.

I do know that I miss my mom. She broke my heart when she left me and I’ve never really recovered. I miss her for myself, for my sister, for my husband and brother in law, for my kids, for our family, for everyone who knew and who missed out on knowing her.

I’ll keep managing, like I always have. I’ll keep telling my boys about Nanny Pammy, like I have for the past five and a half years. I’ll keep on keeping my head up because – what choice do I have? But I’ll always keep missing her and keep trying to heal my 23 year old broken heart.

This one hurts. A lot.

When my mom was pregnant with me, she asked my great uncle to be my “grandpa” because she was sad that, because she lost her father years prior, I would only have one grandfather. Of course, Grandpa’s wife is Grandma, and thus began one of the most important relationships of my life.

Grandma Elaine and Grandpa Kenny lived right around the corner from us, a nine minute walk away, and we took advantage of the distance often. We were are their house probably twice a week, sometimes more. We spent many many hours over a pot of tea and a plate of cookies, chatting about life. Grandma was also mine and Emily’s first caretaker – she babysat us both for the entire first year of our lives so that Mom wouldn’t have to put us directly into daycare.

As I grew up, Grandma and I spent lots of time on the dog rescue circuit – running them from shelter to shelter, delivering donated food to foster homes, rescuing them from questionable situations, showing them on Fox 8 with Dick Goddard, and placing surrendered and fostered animals with new homes. When she and Grandpa moved to Ocala, Florida in 1996, it really rocked my world for a lot of reasons…but really my heart just ached for these two people who I loved so deeply and were now so far away.

They lived in Florida until Grandpa’s death in 2015, when Grandma sold everything and relocated back to Canton to live with her sister, my Grandma Cox. For me, it was like a second chance. She was at family gatherings again, she was there for the birth of my babies (who call her GG), and my heart that broke in 1996 was a little less broken. “The Grandmas” took care of each other and supported each other (and bickered with each other 😑) for the last few years, through COVID, and through lots of health crises. When Grandma Cox passed in October, I knew Grandma Elaine wouldn’t be far behind and unfortunately, I was right. She passed early Friday morning and with that, broke my heart again.

I’m thankful that she and I got to have a proper goodbye and that we both understood how important we were to each other. As she liked to say, Emmy and I weren’t hers on paper, but we always were in her heart.

Grandma, thank you for everything that you have done for me, for everything that you’ve been for me, and for being my person. Thank you for choosing us.

Obituary Link