Author: Melody Harrison Hanson

I’m an overthinker and incessant seeker. I’m grateful for God’s grace. I write poetic thoughts and offer original photographs. I hope you will stay and read for a while. All photography and words are mine unless noted.

This is year six.

Do you remember when I last saw Holly? It was around this time, six years ago, in late February 2018, and despite the challenges she was going through, she was determined to keep her kids’ lives as normal as possible. She drove over to Couer d’Alene,  ID, from Washington with her kids. We had about half a day, so we ate breakfast, let the kids swim in the resort’s pool, and hung out. It was inspiring to witness her strength, but I recall she was pretty depleted from all the adversity she faced with the divorce. Although I was feeling drained from our social commitments and meetings, I remain grateful for the last memories and Tom and I having had the opportunity to be there for her during such a difficult time.

I have been struggling with migraines for the past three years, which has been quite discouraging. Despite receiving countless recommendations from various individuals, I have tried many remedies with some success. However, my life has been heavily impacted and many activities have become difficult to manage with migraines, including travel, communication, productivity, reading, writing, creativity, work (both personal and professional), shopping, cleaning, caring for others, and taking care of my own well-being. According to my neurologist/headache specialist, the headaches I’ve been experiencing are likely a result of the chronic stress I’ve been under for the past decade.

I “retired” to tackle migraines head-on, not to mention it had become impossible to work. By now, I presumed I would be better at spending my time doing something fun and creative, but that didn’t happen, and I have a chronic illness because otherwise. I find myself once again nosediving straight into a mental health crisis. If you know my story, you comprehend how frightened I am.

Yesterday, I acknowledged to myself that I need a non-negotiable daily routine. I began with walking. Cleaned my study for the first time since Christmas.

I’m thinking, for self-care:

Sleep hygiene by setting a bedtime and wake time, getting sunlight first thing, movement, nutrition, eating breakfast, getting dressed for the day, limiting the people and things in my life that vex me, spending time in nature a couple of times a week, and stress management.

How do you manage self-care? What are your daily non-negotiables?

Melody

We are Blood.

I am sitting in my car waiting. As I have sat inside and outside of schools, doctors’ offices, and in cars, all these years.

Always sitting with my sorrow, I wait.

I wish my mother was here, I find myself saying out loud, welcome tears spring to my eyes. Also, I am still surprised by them.

My health feels like a constant betrayal, as if. Am I owed good health, not headaches, not body aches, not a loose stomach, not fatigue, not depression, not anxiety, not sleeplessness? How is it that I of all people “deserve” good health? I know that I don’t. But my mother would have had wisdom about it. I am lost.

The sky is as gloomy and dismal as my mood. It follows the grief of Palestine that is ringing in my ears, my heart, and my mind; abuzz with adrenaline from witnessing genocide. Don’t we remember Rwanda?

So many families, generations lost. I think.

How do I preserve mine? We’re fractured. My sister doesn’t speak to me, specifically. My parents are dead. Holly is dead. Our children are many including Holly’s and those that have joined ours. We are all a legacy.

We each and all matter.

Even though I feel lost, unmoored, untethered, and without roots, I feel my family lineage breaking in my body; I know that it is now my responsibility to be the strength that holds the generations together. Even though my sister has chosen not to be with me, we are vital. We are a link to the next generation. We are blood.

the hellfire of the mind

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“Grief and despair, heartache and humiliation, rage and regret — this is the hellfire of the mind, hot as a nova, all-consuming as a black hole. And yet, if we are courageous enough and awake enough to walk through it, in it we are annealed, forged stronger, reborn.” Maria Popova, The Marginalian

She’s not wrong but I couldn’t be reborn. I wasn’t enough. It has consumed me.

Grief is like a hard fall, to smash head-first into the cement repeatedly. Bruised and bleeding, utterly destroyed, but still getting up and on with life.

But what is there to get on to?

I made a grave mistake in the “getting on,” an amateur foolish error, believing I should be strong…

For the children, for the company, for my mother, for my sisters, and more children.

All these minutes, hours, days, months, years, and decades, I’ve been devoted (beyond what’s humanly possible) to those who needed me. I thought that was a good thing. I thought I was superhuman. I was lauded. I was built up as “amazing.” I had no boundaries. And I believed being superhuman was achievable.

But I’ve paid a price. I’ve traded for strength and lost my soul—as tragedy, suffering, and heartache collided inside me. And I’m left Empty. Hurting.

I’m done crying out to God who is all-powerful. Got it. YOU ARE GOD. I don’t disagree. But fuck it. Help already?

I tried the Church and a few people to tell my story.

And I found no one cared.

Where was a container wide or deep enough for the ocean of tears and heartache? No one could receive my fury, my destruction.

I have found comfort only in solitude and in the great cavern of nothingness.

My body, the vessel of nerve endings, hurts. My brain holds an ache. Calling it a headache is too benign. My brain was broken by pain. I can no longer think rationally. I told my shrink I won’t kill myself. And I won’t, I don’t (think I) want to, but sometimes I want to be there, with them, less alone. 

I live in the void where sorrow lives, where life has no purpose.

When others try to understand, reaching for me, I cringe and pity them. I am defeated.

One can’t get to me because I am gone. This physical vessel that you see with your eyes and touch with your hands, she is empty.

I am no longer courageous. I am no longer strong.

The void is surrounding me and those who know seem too frightened by my weakness. They leave me be. And I am grateful because my body, heart, soul, and mind are destroyed. It’s too late.

I was strong. It broke me. Now I am vapor.

Survivor’s Guilt and Finding Some Joy

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We want in fact not so much a father in heaven as a grandfather in heaven—a senile benevolence who liked to see us enjoying ourselves. And whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, “a good time was had by all.”

page 40 The Problem of Pain, CS Lewis

This is by far not the most profound CS Lewis thought, but it hit me today hard between the eyes. My thinking has been a bit convoluted so bear with me and I will try to come to the point.

I have been living the last five years in a coping mode, sheer survival really; and not “having a good time” not even close. Life has been hard. And it hit me after all this time I still have survivor’s guilt.

Holly deserved to live and by contrast I am less worthy of my life. She was so amazing! I’m a depressive, a recovering alcoholic, sarcastic, some (okay, one sister) would say mean, introverted, easily persuaded that life sucks to be honest, completely a cup half empty person and all the rest.  Whereas Holly took hold of her life like a storm, she ran toward life’s opportunities with joy and verve. She was about to go for her PhD for fuck’s sake. I have done nothing with my life by comparison.

She should be alive. Me perhaps not so much.

So, I’ve had this idea of getting all these chicks flying out of our nest and then fade into the proverbial sunset. Be the rock, be the strong one, be what everyone needs from me, until they’re off. And then, what does it even matter?

In my new church, the Black led one, I have found that I cannot stop weeping. I’ve got some deep, deep grief I suppose and well, having decided it didn’t matter what happened to me, a sadness, and a spirit of having given up or just surviving. One Sunday, not long into attending, the usher put us in the middle of the sanctuary – the 50–yard line. There was no hiding, and so I just sat there with tears streaming down my cheeks trying to stop or be invisible. A small, elder Black woman came over, and started praying with “a word for me, did I mind?” There was a word for me today in the sermon. She prayed a powerful, amazing, incredible amount. I don’t remember it all in my mind, but I am sure my spirit remembers. And I did hear something in the sermon – that God doesn’t want me to simply survive these hard years, he wants me to thrive! I heard it and I wanted to believe it. But it has been months and as I have slowly been weeping my way through services, I am starting to understand and believe.

I don’t know what next week, next year or the next several decades holds but I am not going quietly.

I haven’t been having a good time, back to the Lewis quote. I kind of felt that I was owed a good time in life, I have been quite entitled to be frank. But that’s ignorant shit too. This life is hard. People die. People are broke. Companies fail. People foreclose on homes. People can’t afford homes. People lose their jobs. People get divorced. People are murdered.

The problem of pain is that life is full of it.

And there is joy.

There is joy and that’s okay too! I know that it will be okay to grow a garden, gardens are hope. It will be okay to go on a trip. To celebrate 30 years of marriage. To build a study. To buy a camera, to see beauty again. Because even though I can’t promise myself that things won’t go wrong, as someone said to me recently, it might be great! I might find joy.

Thou has created all things and for thy pleasure they are and were created. That’s my core truth. Not my pleasure, God’s. And as I experience joy along the way that makes the creator joy filled too.

The Problem of Pain is Not Pain

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The problem of pain is not pain. It is that nothing and no one prepared me for pain. Nothing in my life taught me how to face my sister’s murder, especially not my faith, or community or parents or anything in my life up to that point. And I am not a particularly fragile person. In fact, most would say I am resilient.

We have faced hard things in our marriage, like all marriages, with our children, like most children, in my upbringing, the most dysfunctional upbringing, in our company with fraud. My approach was always to get stronger and stronger, if that was possible. Apply more grit. Dig deeper for more reserves.

Build more scar tissue. But nothing made the deep cut of Holly’s death less painful. And nothing had prepared me for the suffering.

My beloved sister, torn from this earth, from her beautiful children, from a life of service, from me. I needed her. She was my friend. A confidant. We laughed at life together. She coached me on raising a child on the spectrum, how do they learn in public schools? I coached her on being married to someone with depression, though I am no expert. I have just experienced depression, lived with it, lived through it, survived it though it nearly destroyed me. I fought back. And I was loved. I had something to live for beyond myself. My partner, children, mother, sisters. I fought back from the black dog that nips at me all the live long day. The dog that barks at me telling me “It’s not worth it, this living.” I know it is a lie. But a believable one on dark days. But I didn’t see clearly enough what they were going through.

The problem of pain is not pain. I suppose we all expect that life will bring some ups and downs. But nothing in my life prepared me for murder. The violence, the atrocity, the apparent hatred, the cruelty. Knowing my brother-in-law sits in prison only fuels my rage. He doesn’t deserve to live if she is dead.

The problem of pain is that people don’t know how to be with you. They grow uncomfortable with your suffering. They fade away. The isolation of pain is the problem of pain. I am left alone, inside my head, with my howling grief ripping and tearing me to shreds.

And I realized today, trying to express myself to someone, that I am afraid. I am terrified to live. I am paralyzed by the trauma of losing my sister. I’ve got my heart locked down so “safe” that I’m hardly human. Except in church – where without my permission – the grief is leaking out. It streams down my face in an embarrassing fashion.  And though I wish I could make it stop, a part of me is so grateful to feel a relief and a release.

I am not fit for humans, I am thinking.

Where do you want to get connected in church, I am asked.

I’ll do anything. But I don’t think you want me to I am so damaged.

The problem of pain isn’t pain. It is that people don’t like to watch someone in pain. Or be with you. Perhaps because they don’t know how to help. But today I sat with someone who just listened. Who without saying much communicated to me that it is okay that I feel afraid, anxious, sad, angry and alone.

The problem of pain is not pain. It is that we don’t know how to be with someone in pain.

On Aging, On Living.

We’ve returned from visiting my in-laws, who are 82 and 80. They are very spry. So alive though slowing. I admire them. They’ve traveled the world together. They’ve had such curiosity, such courage.

Siesta Key, Florida

When did I become so afraid? Life’s beat the courage out of me without a doubt. The deaths. My mother’s physical pain and suffering. My headaches. The mental health challenges in myself and my family.

Sobriety taught me not to trust myself. Or was it alcoholism? My family’s unraveling after our parent’s deaths. My sister who chose not to have me as a part of her life. The ultimate failure to be quite honest when your own flesh and blood rejects you. That pain is insufferable, on the daily, sometimes.

I’ve raised the white flag. I surrender to loneliness. Fear has me in a chokehold. I’ve been hiding out. I have never felt more alone in all the years of my life.

My therapist is frequently telling me that’s not who I am. I owe it to myself to be courageous, to be curious, to be learning, and to create. That I have something to say. That my creativity matters. The world is worse off for my muteness. What I see in the world is unique. I used to believe that. My father conveyed an idea that we all have something unique to offer the world, our mark. I’m just no longer convinced that we’re all special.

When you are quiet for such a long time, you don’t trust your voice. Clearing my throat before speaking startles me. It better be worth it. Fraught with doubt. Frequently, I think never mind. Who cares?

I have a partner that creates no matter what, no matter if no one’s listening. That’s bold. That’s brave. That’s also ridiculous to me at times. You wouldn’t believe how much time he spends toiling away alone in his studio with no clue as to what’s happening in real life, in my kitchen, with the kids, with me.

Everything in me, how I was raised, says that’s selfish. Perhaps the answer is somewhere in the middle. My therapist says I need my own space. Where I can shut the door and be. I’m finally making it.

“You must not fear, hold back, count, or be a miser with your thoughts and feelings. It is also true that creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself, and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave, which then carries you, sweeps you into experience, and into writing. Permit yourself to flow and overflow, allow for the rise in temperature, all the expansions and intensifications. Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, and instabilities, and it always balances them.” The Diary of Anais Nin, Vol. 4

Here’s to reading. Here’s to travel. Here’s to curiosity. Here’s to creating. I’m hoping for it all.

I’m just scratching the surface of being alive.

Author’s image in reflection.

How do I make life less bitter?

Why does life crush my bones, and
leave dust in my eyes, bereft of tears?
I blink painfully. Chronic headaches, and yet


I try to be normal.
I wake, breathing in <<live a normal life>>


But always

shards of glass in my lungs

shred me.


Some days,

I am glad for the constant pain.
Let go, I think. Be destroyed.
My spirit suggests sweetly in what would be a relief

to release the mental suffering.


But living is a requirement of life.
Living for others is enough, isn’t it?

Then, there are days

like today when my confusion is paramount.

What would it feel like to be happy?

What do I do if I have to be alive for a long time?

How do I make it less bitter?

Make each breath less painful, the shards less sharp?

How do I live with a head that hurts too frequently?


What is bearable?

How many people can one lose and still believe in this life?

I hate my brain.
I hate my head.
I hate my heart.
I hate each breath,
Some days. Not always.
But today.

The Monster was Caged & Resting

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I asked my son to write about his depression. I am trying to save him.

I want to know what it is like to be inside him. Him specifically because every person’s suffering is different. I know the exercise of putting words down on paper heals.

But I know depression only too well. It chases me. It’s never far. Though it’s been a good long while. The monster has been resting.

It’s been glorious to wake without it heavy on my bones.

If I’m lucky enough to live a while in peace, I fill my mind with other things, books, music poetry, and people who tell a different story one of liberation from the destruction, heavy, crushing demolition.

When I slow down now to remember – for I told him I would write, too and put down the words of depression – it feels like letting a monster out of its cage to play a while. A dangerous game. The monster only wants to kill. But if I visit, like in the zoo, perhaps I can view it from a safe distance.

Depression is dogged, relentless. It won’t let me sleep well, and the more fitful the sleep, the longer the dark days awake. Depression hurts me in my bones. It’s a deep ache, heavy, as if I’m full of sand. Each step, each breath, each thought more difficult than the last.

Yesterday, I heard it knocking, I learned I’ll be seeing someone, a family member, who has declared me unfit, unworthy of their love (and time), and the monster came to sit on my chest. Instantly, I was immobilized by anxiety. Meanwhile, it laughed deeply and ironically and climbed on top of me.

As I drove through the Wisconsin countryside, fighting to stay awake from a long day, a great big, emorphous tonnage of a monster crept up and pounced. I feel it now, the next day. On my ribcage. I can’t see it, only I feel it make itself at home on my ribcage. I can’t fling it off, too heavy, but also like water between my fingers, shape-shifting, magical but hideous.

So I am in danger right now. I’m at risk if i keep it to myself. I’ve never achieved anything important by myself when it comes to this monster.

I can distract myself, but that’s a dangerous addiction for me. I can retell my worthiness to myself, but the monster on my chest is about my value, and I’m no match on my own.

But pride always keeps me from speaking. I’m mute against the danger, the suffering which I know will come in the days ahead if I don’t speak aloud. “I am in danger.”

As I chase something truer than her lies, I’m already tired.

I’m already afraid.

I’m already beaten.

I know one of these times the monster will win.

Do I fight?

For now, she settles in. Ignores me. That is her superpower satisfied with scaring me close to death then slowly crushing the air from my lungs. I know if I don’t fight, she’ll more than ravage. Or maim. More than lay waste.

She will consume and kill me slowly, as asphyxiation finishes the job.

Right here, in this moment, being tired already, I don’t know. Perhaps I’ll go sit in the sunshine. That’s a microchoice toward life.

Just Tears

I’ve been on a winding path. One that’s taken me through valleys (yes, more than one) and to even lower places that I didn’t want to crawl out of because these days, just showing up for the people in my home is enough. I can’t be expected to be happy too.

I’m imagining a world in my daydreams where there’s no guns that kill sisters and no fractured families due to generations of anger. Where siblings don’t have to protect their heart by cutting off relationship with each other. Where friends don’t die of cancer. What children aren’t depressed. Where our body’s patience for our mental anguish doesn’t cause daily migraines. Where kids don’t have to think they’ve become adults via murder.

My thoughts are winding just like the path. I thought I’d stop living after I was done raising all the children in my house.

Not die physically, of course, but just lay down in a grassy spot by the path of life and see if it mattered that I don’t get up. Don’t think. Don’t feel. Don’t create. Don’t write. Don’t challenge ideas. Don’t be me.

I think the God that I thought had forgotten me has different plans, I don’t really want to hear them.

But as I sit in my first church, since before Covid, I’m melting. I can think of no other way to describe my insides, which were solid stone. I sit, and I feel deep inside me the flow of water starting. I sit in church and weep. Sometimes shuttering sobs threaten. Mostly quiet trickles, eyes closed, tears stream from me while I do my best just to BE. Open.

My church, this church, has a chorus of singers that makes me feel like I’m actually with Jesus. In a way never before in my life it’s just Jesus and me and I’m weeping all my rage, and disappointment, and fury, and exhaustion, and fear–oh my God so much fear that something terrible is just around the corner.  As if I’m a mole being whacked and each time I’m stupid enough to raise my head with any hop, whack. Whack. Whack.

Jesus does want me alive. For now, that’s enough.

Alternatively

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I have often wondered about my mind. How it plays tricks on me. Foggy, crushing, chaos, creating doubt, self-hatred, despair; dragging my life down into depression.

I have learned to fake it, to pretend. Everything will be alright. The pills work. I must be okay. What is the alternative?

Everyone has faith in me to survive. I ask God for help as everyone was slowly stripped away from me by death.

There is only me and God to wrestle this archenemy depression. The anger that sits inside me threatens. Every day, we win if I get up. Again and again.

To choose generosity, to be a good person, to see beauty, to love. There is no good inside me unless God resides there. That’s my life. That’s enough for today.

gray hair, bare feet and salty tears

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When I am old I will take long walks on a beach. I will stop dying my hair even if it ages me, as my sister says. I will be aged, I will stop trying to hide it. To be near a beach is a lifelong dream. But it may not happen. I am okay with that.

When I am old I’ll need sunshine. I will take up a camera. I’ll play more, especially with words. And in general I think I will try to have more fun.

When I am old, I will want my family around, daughters and sons and others, grandchildren. And if they aren’t near, I will travel to them frequently. All of this is obvious, I would think, when I retire.

There will be a convertible, because — it is a life long dream.

I have always thought Holly and I would end up living together when we are old women; both of our husbands being older than us.

What a hurtful thought now. It drags me down. I feel the familiar ache and dread. When I am old, there will be gray hair, bare feet, and salty tears.