My goodness…

It’s been five years since I abandoned this blog to the farthest corners of my doubtful mind. It’s easy to tuck dreams and ideas away when you just aren’t feeling good enough to achieve them. I started this blog at the urging of my sister, Kathryn. She thought that between the life I was living then, one of a scrappy and resourceful homesteader, and my love of writing that maybe I could somehow eke out a living with a blog. I had no doubts in my ability to work, that is something that always came naturally to me, born from tearful childhood training and the sheer desperation of trying to keep a roof over my son’s head for so many years as a single, undereducated mom in an almost impossible, overly demanding economy.

So, what brought me back?

Well, I’ve got covid for the second time this year, but that is more of the how I’m here than the why. The first time was in January (I tested negative then, but no one can convince me that wasn’t covid), and with all of that time on my hands, time I am usually never afforded – nor will the constant gotta-stay-busy-ness of my unresolved trauma ever allow me, I decided to see what all of the hoopla was about with the new Netflix series, Maid.

However, just one or two episodes in and I was so triggered by the domestic violence that I had to stop watching and decided to order the book instead. The book came with its image of well used rubber work gloves on the cover and then it just sat and stared at me from the top of my boyfriend’s coffee table, our coffee table, for the next several months.

In the time that I’ve been away from this particular blog site, so much has happened. I moved to an even more demanding homestead. I took on more work, more projects, more home improvement ideas to improve my quality of life. I also built a successful dog boarding business in response to both the need for people (myself included) to have a safe place to leave their dogs and the local failing cannabis industry that could no longer support the supplemental work I had been doing before.

“I really know how to polish a turd,” I said yesterday to my boyfriend as I continue my legacy by working on the less demanding townhouse we now share in the yawning acropolis of Garberville, CA.

But more than anything, more than any of these incredibly interesting reasons to write about in ordinary life that I let slip by, I lost my son and only child, Josiah, to homicide in June of 2019. It is impossible for me to put that story in any sort of neat little package like I can for the directions of a worm bin or my latest recipe for granola. And I certainly don’t want to make light of what happened, but the sheer mass of what happened to him, of the loss, of what in turn happened to me is so massive that it nearly crushed me in a way that even bringing up the topic grabs the center of my chest and shakes me, warning tread lightly, it’s still morning.

During the past three years, I have written plenty. I have written Facebook post after Facebook post, about my despair over the grief, but also blood curdling pleas for help to find him as his remains were missing for just two days shy of 14 months after he was murdered on a road trip through Washington State, on the Facebook page I created, Help Bring Josiah Home.

After the complex PTSD set in, which took a temporary time-off from my dog boarding business and turned it into a full closure, the pandemic hit, which shut down the world as we knew it. During that time, I started working with an old friend and writing coach to weave those posts, those cries for help, into a book to tell Josiah’s story, and in turn, tell my own. I worked on that project for some time. I was impassioned by it, driven by it, long before his remains were found on August 5, 2020 and later confirmed through DNA testing. Shortly after, I seemed to both run out of steam, beaten down by two years of grief, horror and a hyper-vigilant state of fight-or-flight, and run out of the pandemic assistance I was using to help fund the project while we all waited for the country to get back to normal.

And then last week, at the beginning of my second run with Covid, Stephanie Land‘s book was still laying there, staring at me, telling me that maybe if I read it, I might find in it the promise that someone ordinary, like me, could tell a story that other people might want to read. And maybe that promise would turn into my own courage to get back to writing, and more importantly, telling, my son’s story because it needs to be told. It needs to breathe the fresh air of what life has become as the dust is beginning to settle and most importantly because my son’s name, Josiah Michael Hilderbrand, and what happened to him needs to be spoken about in a court of public discourse because it is quite possible that it will never be told in a court of law.

I found what I needed in Maid through her prose, her proddings of what it means to live in the desperate state of single-motherhood, clawing at the world for some sort of recognition beyond the crumbs that fall off of society’s ever-widening table, but more profoundly for me, her showing that years of journaling and pouring her heart out through social media posts could eventually be woven into a book that people would want to read.

The real kicker for me, what I call my “Missoula Moment” in reference to Stephanie Land’s constant pull to Missoula, was that she finally revealed that her blog was once called Still Life With Mia, named after her first daughter, “Mia” – Emilia Story. And here I was, looking for some sign that I too was being called to something greater, that I was somehow good enough to tell my son Josiah’s story. The title stunned me enough that I blinked twice wondering how this could be so, but the words on the page did not change. I too had an old, yet abandoned, blog with a very similar name waiting for me, Still Life With Dharma.

I have to be honest with you, part of the reason why I haven’t been writing publicly about our story is because I feel like people are tired of hearing about it. There’s so much going on in the world with Covid, conspiracy theories, dreaded politicians, unequal reproductive systems and newer mass shootings that I fear that people don’t want to hear me talk about it anymore. Or that somehow, still talking about what happened to Josiah, and what hasn’t happened in the unjust world of our justice system, somehow takes away from acknowledging how much I have to be grateful for in the life that I share with my partner, Brian, and our dogs, Smokey and Dharma, who were brought into my life through their papa, Josiah.

I am hoping that by returning here to Still Life with Dharma, that anyone who wants to hear what I have to say can come here to read it and the rest can well, you know, do whatever they do to keep themselves afloat in this sometimes overwhelming world of what could possibly happen next?

If you’d like to follow along, I’d love to have you. In fact, it’s quite possible that I need you.

* To note: My blog was once called Still Life with Dharma. After making the commitment to return here and use it to tell Josiah’s story, I changed the name to Remember the Birds which is what’s inscribed on his urn. Those words came through an intuitive and I absolutely believe it was Josiah making contact. I had many bizarre and profound bird experiences within the first year of his death which lessened over time. I also always called Josiah “my love” – “Good morning, My love”, “Hello, My Love”, “Yes, My Love”. What came through when I met with the intuitive was “Remember the birds, My Love”, so I have found that phrase very comforting.