Chestnuts and the future...

It's that time of year when every time we go out to our car, we can find another large handful of chestnuts on the ground that have fallen from the tree since the last time we headed out. Jason has been collecting them for a number of days to use in a "recipe" and yesterday was the day to do it! Jason and I are pretty different when it comes to cooking. He enjoys finding a new recipe to experiment with and following it exactly the first time (otherwise, he tells me, you really don't know whether you like the recipe or not...). So he found a recipe for "chestnut roast" online and set to work. He "set to work" on it hours before I got home from work and when I arrived around 6:30pm he was still peeling chestnuts. Needless to say, the recipe became dinner for tonight instead, and was to be savored. He came out to me this evening when he was getting ready to put it in the oven and confessed that this was indeed a lot of work. So we sat down to our chestnut loaf dinner tonight, realizing in front of us was most of the chestnuts from one of our trees. And we did savor it, more or less, though Kali said it did not taste like chestnuts. I guess she didn't recognize it wrapped in garlic, carrots, lemon juice, etc... Jason was immediately thinking of all the ways he would modify it in the future to make it tastier. I was just thrilled to come to the table and eat the work of someone else's hands. We also learned something else new. Presentation is VERY important to our 5 year old. She gobbled the green peppers that Jason had cut up in circle rings, rather than the "boring" strips I normally do. Same food. Different effect. I should know this by now...

Speaking of our 5 year old, I keep wondering how Kali is doing and analyzing her behavior for signs of distress or a grief process gone awry. Many ask us how she is doing and sometimes I just don't know what to say. She almost seems to be doing "too good." Is that possible? On all accounts, she seems to be healthy and enjoying life immensely. She is eating well, sleeping well, playing well, etc... She talks about Nora freely and openly and happily. She has outbursts of emotions but I have yet to connect more than a handful of them to Nora, and she has connected none of them to Nora other than the very first time when we shared with her that Nora had died.

Several conversations this week have been helpful for me, giving me both reassurance and insights into Kali's process. The best analogy that I have for how Kali is now relating to Nora is that it feels familiar to how she related to Nora when she was still in utero. She talks about her and expresses affection appropriately for someone you can't see or touch. It's like Nora is still present in a form other than what we had for 7 short months. Kali talks about her like other loved ones who we don't see very often.

I think that Kali understands that Nora has died and that that is a permanent condition. I think she gets that Nora isn't coming back. But the difference between Kali and I is that Kali can't comprehend exactly what that means. It has been helpful for me to think about the fact that when Nora died, we didn't just lose Nora as our 7 month old baby. We lost her future too - our 2 year old, 10 year old, 16 year old... Some days that is the hardest thing to let go of.

Kali is such a great example of living in the present moment. So the moment of learning of Nora's death was excruciating and it seems she felt that loss keenly. And while I think she loved Nora and was a loyal big sister, it will likely be much later on in life when she fully realizes what she lost on June 4th. Until then she continues to live each day and make the very most of life, drawing on her incredible imagination and wealth of creativity. And I'd like to relax a bit and stop overanalyzing her, so I can enjoy this stage and possibly even glean some lessons from it.

We are grateful for the ways she has been part of our process and contributed to it. We are thankful for the many pictures we have of her with Nora for her to come back to. And I hope that we have the strength and grace to journey with her through all the many developmental stages coming down the pike.