I Just got off the phone with my sister, talking about how mom's diagnosis and surgery was just 3 years ago today. Feels like an eternity and a blink. We robbed ourselves of time with mom before that day because we couldn't figure out how to effectively communicate. After that day, cancer was the thief. It was the play within the play, the poison on top of poison. It took our time, our energy, our hope, our tears, our strength. It took her. It presented itself like a gag gift - it asked us to be thankful for it even though it was stupid and uncalled for. I was not ever thankful for it. It was never a blessing in disguise. I don't believe in any God who would serve up a blessing like that. 
​
We could have found our way back to each other in a better way, under better circumstances. They gave her 18-24 months. She squeaked out an extra 5 because no one tells her what to do or when to die. I miss her every day. As an adult, I long for the type of love she gave me as a child. I wanted more time. I wanted our reunion to not take place in a hospital. Our relationship was a grassy playground summer, followed by a fiery red fall where no leaf was left unturned, then a thick and foggy winter blizzard. It was cold and harsh, but at least I could see it and feel it. I was banking on basking in the sunny reward of seasons changing. We were all looking out the window for a spring that never came. Instead weather just stopped altogether, and I'm not sure how a human is supposed to live in the absence of elements. It isn't fair and I'm still not done throwing a tantrum about it. To make up for the last three years, I want three straight years of my head on her chest and her voice saying something, anything soothing. I want three years, but I'd take three seconds. It's the only thing I can ever think of that would make me feel better. And it's not coming.

I think it's all stuffed down there somewhere. The pain. The little blind girl wearing handcuffs and a dog muzzle, choking on her own short inhales. The guilt. Shards of sharp scrap metal swirling in a tornado of time, ripping like bandaids off the roofs of shantily built memory shacks. 

DAY
There were several morning tears. Working, working, working. Stay busy. Stay distracted. They came as early as 7am. I was listening to Lights Out in my car, in a parking lot, getting ready to meet the people who were kind enough to help me shoot a music video. For a few days I prepared and conceptualized like it was any other project. Like it was any other song. I caught a glimpse of her name on my necklace. This isn't a song. This is HER life. HER death. A story told by the last person she would ever choose to narrate it. And she's not even here to tell me she hates it. She's gone. GONE. I have makeup on. I can't cry now. Push it down there, with the rest of it. That's a wrap. Onto work. Album promotion, the absolute worst part of it all. Hawking my own self-worth on social media three dollars and ninety nine cents at a time. A pre-order parrot who can't even stand the sound of her own squawk. Wondering what on earth made me CHOOSE this. I can only hit send so many times before I start feeling nauseous. Wife time. She says let's go to the movies. I agree because I get to eat chocolate, hold her hand, and most likely take a nap. Action scenes help drown out the noise I hear always. We meet up with friends after. More distractions. I'm tired but I'm into it because I get to eat tacos, drink beer, and listen to other people's stories, which also help drown out the noise I hear always. Ten minutes after we leave the restaurant a stranger gets stabbed to death a block away. A stranger who must have been someone to someone at some point. Just like her.

NIGHT
We do our bed routine. Go pee. Check locks. Set alarms. Sniff lavendar oil sleepy thing. Snuggle. Make plans for boxing class in the morning. Audrie drifts off in no time, and suddenly I feel it. The ache, like a current rising up in my lungs, my throat, my nostrils, my eyes. Carrying with it the pain. The little girl. The guilt. The scrap metal. In that moment I am the most alone and the most sad and the most scared. My sobs wake up Audrie but even she can't comfort me. The want for my mom is so strong I feel it throbbing in my teeth. I am suddenly two years old. I am suddenly ironed out by my own grief. I can't move my limbs. My eyes are closed but I see flashes of color. Neon purple. I see shapes that don't have names. I yell out mom between sobs, a low drone that scares me because it sounds like someone else. Summoning. I wait impatiently for her to come rushing across the universe to hold me. Audrie doesn't know what to do so she rubs my back. She rubs it forever until we both fall asleep. 

Dear Mom,

You would think 2.5 years would be enough time. Enough time to re-connect, enough time to heal, enough time to memorize, enough time to prepare. Turns out 2,025 years wouldn't have been enough time. Pre-grief is not a thing.

It's high tide in my mind, and there are so many childhood memories crashing back in. Driving. We sang along to Give Me One Reason by Tracy Chapman. You let me hold the steering wheel from the passenger seat while you prepared your next handful of sunflower seeds. Shopping. We took trips to the coast every summer and you bought us clothes for the new school year. You sat in the dressing room and re-hung items for me while I moved onto the next option. Mornings. We were in your bedroom where the smell of coffee drifted upstairs to meet us. You tried on 10 outfits at a time and called yourself fat.

I can't see your face, mom. I can see your legs in the drivers seat, separated by a paper cup filled with spit-covered shells. I can see your hands on the hangers and your purse on the floor. I can see your stomach suffocating at the mercy of your pantyhose. But I can't see your face, so I rely on pictures for that. I cut and paste you in according to whatever decade it was and whatever hairstyle you had. There's a picture of you in the bathroom getting ready. I use that one when I try to remember how you stretched your jaw long to apply mascara.

When you were sick, I never knew what to say. So I focused on actions. Clean your fridge, hold your hand, fold your towels, pay your bill. I baked you a German chocolate cake when you surpassed the 2 year life-expectancy prognosis. You blew out my make-shift match candles, squeezed me tight, and told me to never leave you again. I ate what I wanted to say along with half a cake I wasn't hungry for. I took a picture of that moment and I use it to imagine your face.

In one of our last conversations, you told me I wasn't the daughter you wanted and admitted you weren't the mother I wanted. It was more lament than insult, but it still presses into me like a dull knife. You said it like there weren't 47 more days left to do something about it. For the record, you were exactly the mother I wanted. You were exactly the person whose acceptance I craved. Whose pride I solicited. Whose strength and character and eye-makeup I mimicked.

Your last words to me were Annie-bo-banny. A pet name you gave me along with my real one. I might be lying to myself, but I took those words to mean that I was in fact the daughter you wanted after all. You wouldn't call just anyone that.

I never wanted a daughter until you died. Please tell God or whoever it ended up being to give her your face. I just want to see your face. 

My mother died on February 7th. Time marches on, and I find myself starring in a play of my own life. My character is busy. She works, records, books shows, pays taxes. She likes drinking coffee, boxing, watching Jeopardy. Her most impressive performance is when she puts on pants that zip and gets to work on time. A few noted differences, though. She eats a lot of lasagna made by people who love her, and she's always on the phone with strangers. I play her, but I am not her. I am just some chick who cries hard at night. 

I've always struggled to communicate with my mom, but now that she's gone the struggle is real, as the kids say. I do take comfort knowing she is no longer toting around a bunch of sick, traitorous cells. She is no longer in pain, and that fact picks me up off the floor every day.

But I am in pain. My thoughts on the experience of having then losing then having then losing my mother are too numerous and severe for my brain to accommodate. I feel them scratching my throat, eating my stomach, pinching my hips, melting my eyelids. So in order to sort them out, I've decided to categorize them (because I inherited a quite the organization gene from mom) and write about them. 

Disclaimer, there will be some negativity because, lest you've forgotten, I'm fucking sad. And when I'm not fucking sad, I'm fucking frustrated, or fucking exhausted. One of the most obvious reasons our society doesn't regularly discuss grief and loss is because we're actively trying to avoid those things. Unless it's wrapped up in a Muddy Waters song or something, no one is exactly thrilled to answer the door when sadness knocks. But we're missing a real opportunity here. Avoiding these conversations means avoiding a chance to better understand and peacefully accept the inevitable. It means avoiding a chance to better understand and peacefully accept each other. ​Hard as it is to stare grief in the face, I've found much inspiration, love, gratitude, compassion, and strength in her eyes. I will write about that as well, promise.

A few topics I want to write about off the top of my head (then sorted alphabetically, of course):

Anger, Apathy vs Ambition, Compassion, Empathy, Event Planning, Exercise, Expectations, Family, Friendship, God, Greed, Guilt, Loneliness, Marriage, Memories, Men, Money, Music, Peace, Politics, Possessions, Preachers, Privilege, Questions, Sisters, Smells, Songwriting, The Dead Parent Club, The Future, The Industry of Dying, The Nuthouse, Therapy, Traveling, Women, Work

 Age 11
“NO! We do NOT use that language! It is ugly and mean! It is ABSOLUTELY UNACCEPTABLE!”
 
I had never been yelled at like that by anyone, let alone a teacher, let alone from the driver’s seat of a moving vehicle. Her shrill words shot like an arrow out of her mouth, soared over a handful of my wide-eyed classmates, found me slumped in the back bench seat of the school van, and pierced my well-meaning middle school heart with mortifying precision. What did I, a smart young girl, probably en route to some honors math competition, do to deserve such an attack?
 
I loudly yelled “Chinks!” as an Asian family drove by us on the freeway, that’s what. Somehow in my sheltered little farm town life, I had managed to skillfully detonate a racial slur before I really even knew what a racial slur was. I had no clue the word was harmful or derogatory; I just thought it was an observation. Me. A smart young girl, probably en route to some honors math competition.
 
I will never forget how I felt in that moment. My body went from zero to full sweat in about 2.2 seconds. I was overcome with shame, yet I still felt a strong urge to defend myself. Unfortunately, I couldn’t use the whole ‘I have Asian friends’ bit because my one and only Asian friend moved away when we were in kindergarten. I quietly apologized and shrunk into my seat, thinking about what just happened. My internal dialogue went something like this:
 
Well, I guess that was a shitty thing to say. I don’t have a problem with Asian people. Where did I even learn that word? Shit. I feel really bad. Awful, actually. Am I a bad person? I don’t want to be a bad person! I guess I wasn’t necessarily being bad because I didn’t know better. Stupid. I was being stupid. I don’t want to be stupid OR hurt anyone. So a) I’m definitely never saying that again, and b) I really gotta start wearing deodorant.
 
Age 17
“That makes you sound ignorant. Either you don’t like gay people, which is ignorant, or you’re using gay people to describe things you don’t like, which is ignorant.”
 
My sister was visiting from college, and we were headed somewhere to do something in her car. (Funny how the unimportant memories fade and the stuff that matters sticks). At the time, the phrase “that’s gay” was a really popular way to insult something or someone you didn’t care for, and I had just flippantly used the phrase in her presence. She didn’t let me get away with it.
 
In the moment, I rolled my eyes at her sensitivity and fired back on the defensive. “Sorrrrrryyyyy,” I said with my highest level of sibling-grade sarcasm. “I don’t mean anything bad by it. It’s just a stupid expression that every single person at my school uses to describe everything. I would never say it in front of a gay person.” (At that time, I knew a total of three gay people: one cousin and two neighbors. It didn’t even hit me that I was gay for another decade or so. Oh, the irony!) My sorry excuse for an explanation tasted gross coming out of my mouth. I sulked silently for a while.
 
Dammit. It does make me sound ignorant. She’s right. I hate it when she’s right. I don’t have to tell her she’s right because she already knows she is. So I won’t. And I won’t say “that’s gay” anymore either.
 
Age 27
“It just really upsets me when people say that. It’s so cruel…I know you didn’t mean it.”
 
There was no defense this time. I just sat there in my own ignorance and immediate remorse as my girlfriend’s face winced from the sting of my words.
 
Dammit! I know better than this. I can’t believe I let such an ugly word come out of my mouth. My co-workers say “that’s retarded” all the time, and I ALSO get upset every time I hear it! Why would I say that? What kind of monster are you, Lindsay White?! Do better! Be smarter!

**********************************************************************************

​This is just three of roughly three million examples of my own ignorance. In these instances, I overcame the urge to be right and eventually swallowed the awful guilt of being wrong. It feels like losing, but in the end you’re rewarded, pinky swear. For the record, I don’t always seize (or even notice) every learning opportunity. I am a human after all, and we’re not the smartest creatures, despite our opposable thumbs and our position at the top of the food chain. For example, how embarrassingly long did it take us to figure out wheels on suitcases?
 
I definitely know I am not the sharpest tool in the shed, as demonstrated by the fact I just used that expression. I could stand to be more educated and make more informed choices regarding the environment, race issues, class issues, women’s issues, foreign policy, the economy, etc. I could go on and on.
 
So who was I to unleash my election rage like a hungry pack of snarling wolves onto anyone in my real or digital life who had the audacity to vote for Trump?

**********************************************************************************
None of it made me feel better (except the Disney song, a little bit) or smarter (except the Disney song, a little bit). I hardly even recognized myself. It was as if years and years of repressed anger came flying out of my fingertips. No one was safe from this verbal vomit. You can primarily thank cat-calling men, know-it-all men, men who call me sweetie, men who tell me to smile, men who have touched me without permission, religious people who don’t understand the separation of church and state, and my mother for that.
 
Trust me, I know expressing rage on social media is a colossal waste of human existence. Who did I expect to reason with on this forum? With insults, no less? I started having flashbacks to all the times in my life I’ve been scolded for saying or doing something hurtful. Using the same critical thinking skills that I’ve learned in those crucial moments, I momentarily dropped the case I’d built for myself, scanned my sensibilities, and tried to put myself in the shoes of those I riled against. These were my findings:
 
I meant what I said
I couldn’t find an emoji that quite encapsulated my emotions, so I went to town with my favorite coping mechanism: words. I was outraged at, hurt by, and scared of those who "at best dismiss — or at worst, celebrate" the blatant and strategic racism and misogyny of Trump’s campaign. I wanted to express my gut-wrenching, binge-eating, bowel-moving blend of anger, disappointment, and fear. You know that one breakup you have where you think life as you know it is OVER? It was like that, only about a million times worse. By the evening of November 8th, it felt like America abruptly dumped me allowed a new rapey boyfriend to grab her by the pussy on national television. Suddenly I was the personification of every Carrie Underwood song, slashing all the social media tires I could find. Maybe next time the electoral college will think before it cheats the popular vote. I know I offended people, and I truly take no joy in that. But I kinda just needed to rage against the dying of the light for a minute.

​​I’m also not entirely sorry about questioning the collective intelligence of Trump voters. When I cursed the white uneducated masses, I wasn’t talking about people who lacked the ability to earn a diploma. I was talking about all the frosted flakes out there who lacked the ability to discern that Tony the Tiger would make a better presidential candidate than Donald Trump. I mean, if you’re into the idea of an orange president who is obsessed with the word great, why not pick an affable cartoon cereal mascot instead of a despicable buffoon serial narcissist?

​Okay, I’m doing it again. I know people don’t like being called bigots and/or ignorant. But I just can not for the life of me wrap my brain around any door number three explanation that excuses HANDING DONALD TRUMP THE KEYS TO THE FREE WORLD UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES WHATSOEVER.

But I also meant it for myself
Sorry. I almost blacked out there for a second. That was like the scene in Wayne’s World where Wayne scares the camera away with his self-pity and frustration. “OK, things aren't that great, but I'll get 'em back, OK?”
 
Referring back to the breakup analogy, I had to give myself one last snotty-nosed, puffy-eyed look in the mirror. I was livid at my country, but eventually, the only thing left to analyze was myself. Why did America dump me? Where did I go wrong? What did I do to deserve this rejection?!
 
A sudden realization came over me.
 
Duh, Linds. This is how SO MANY people feel 24 hours a day. Rejected by the very country they love. So you’re just going to sit here and throw an online tantrum? Sorry, friend, that’s not gonna fly. You can’t just throw a safety pin on your black lives matter T-shirt and call it a day, boo. You can’t just wear your protest like a trendy fall flannel for election season. A lot of people don’t have the luxury of taking off their otherness. They don’t blend in like you. They’re used to this. This is why your Mexican wife is more upset by a Lakers loss than a Trump win. She’s used to the folks in charge not giving a shit about her. You’ve been throwing around the word bigot, but you’re also kinda racist in your own complacency, aren’t ya? Eeeshh, you don’t look so good. Now you feel even sicker to your stomach because you just realized you could have been doing more this whole time, huh? Ain’t that some Schindler’s List shit? While you’re reaching for that barf bag, I might as well just get something else off my chest. I’m just gonna go ahead and call you ignorant too. Spending all your time berating people for their vote on Facebook like a damn loser. SMH. You’re just like them. Scrolling down a random abyss of cute cats and lunchstagrams and hilarious Biden memes, peppered with haunting images of child refugees and fancy profile pic filters for the latest mass shooting. No wonder you can’t process shit. It’s already a jumbled mess by the time it hits your brain. You ask what you did to deserve this? It’s what you didn’t do. It’s what you aren’t doing. So stop staring at a screen and fucking do something. Call your representatives. Do your research. Don't fall for the shock headlines. Donate. Volunteer. Make art. Peacefully protest. Speak up. Talk to people. Listen to people. Write your ass off. Own your shit. Do better! Be smarter! 
 
Age 33
Hopefully those who felt insulted by my words can take comfort in the fact I also have no problem ripping myself a new one. Which, I guess is the point I’m not-so-eloquently trying to make. If we hope to clean up our collective mess, we all need to stop treating Facebook like a sloppy, silly cafeteria food fight and get to work on ourselves.
 
I know I can only do so much to hold government officials and the media accountable. (Mostly just using my vote, my phone, my wallet, and my brain). But I could be doing a LOT more to hold myself and others around me to the very standards I seek in a president. I see how I've fallen short at that even in this very post. I’m still trying to adjust the dial somewhere between “shut up and don’t cause a scene” and “let ‘em fucking have it” so bear with me as I learn my lessons and find my voice. And I’ll try to bear with America while she does some learning of her own.

As most of you know, I've been struggling to process the difficult relationship I have with my mother in the context of her battle with brain cancer. I woke up this morning and the words to this song just fell out. I wouldn't normally choose to write a song alluding to tourniquets since that's been done about a zillion times before but this particular song didn't really come from my own brain as much as it did my subconscious so I felt it was important to deliver in spite of the cliche. I wanted the song to be relatable from all aspects of the situation- from both my perspective as well as my mother's. 

Lyrics:

1. she, shiny, exciting, and new
me, comfy, safety, old news
we barely escaped from the noose
so please if you need to run
at least wear my shoes

Chorus
i know what it takes to communicate
trust and truth are always used
courtesy, it's all i need
to keep walking these miles in your shoes

lyrics:

i find myself crossing a pair of my fingers
could it be a wish or a lie
is it oncoming peace or despair that lingers
in each breath of a chest-heaving sigh
the tremors that shake me after the quake
break me down cause they signify
that last little shift in a continent drift 
the moment the end just passes you by

CHORUS
why does the whiplash hurt more than the impact
the ache in your head makes you realize the glass cracked
life flashed through your eyes, but you're alive, still
if the crash doesn't get you the whiplash will

the sight of your nose throws me back in my chair
i only knew noses could smell
jumped Geranimo style from way up in the air
it might have been brave, but i'm still scared as hell
the parachute pull has rattled my skull
i fumble for ways to propel
will gravity greet the ground with my feet
it usually does, but you never can tell


CHORUS