I still dream about the band room at Paul Revere Junior High, sixty years later. I see you now, sitting at the cluttered desk in your little office. The new school just opened and my mother insisted I join the band, even though I had been playing the clarinet only a few months. I was thirteen and in the eighth grade, a porky, insecure, introverted kid.

You remember your father’s fingers curling around the head of your new born baby. They are long, the nails rectangular and pared, clean pink and white, like the baby. Her head fills one of his hands and he uses the other to cradle her body neatly to him. He has his hands full, which is why, when the tears start to leak out of his eyes, he has to turn away, towards the window in the corner of the hospital room.

I’m sixty-three years old and in unchartered territory on this day of my birth.

• Old enough for Social Security, not old enough for Medicare.

• Old enough to be called “retired,” not old enough to be considered “an elder.”

• Physically (i.e., how I feel) too old for the Iron Woman Triathalon, but not too old for Advanced Yoga.

I have always been terrified. Jumpy. Unsettled. Waiting. Expecting something to go wrong. The scariest place for me has always been my own mind—its ability to morph something ordinary into something terrifying.

The problem with sleep paralysis is that no matter how much you know about it and how easily you can dismiss the things that happen as a side effect of coming out of REM sleep the wrong way, when it’s happening it can still feel like a ghost attacking you.

Officially, I do not believe in ghosts. Unofficially, I eat that stuff up. If someone has a ghost story to tell, I want to hear about it. Tapes of ghostly words? I’ll listen! (heart pounding, head under covers). Pictures? Yes, please. It is perhaps true that I have seen every episode of Paranormal State.

My midlife crisis arrived like a midnight locomotive a decade later than expected. I gazed at myself in the mirror and realized it was time to face reality. I looked just like the woman who had given me advice all my life. Make room for Mama!

A well-worn path leads straight to the back door of my ninty-eight-year-old neighbor, Rose. When my family and I planned a move to the area, she was the first person I met. Earlier that day she had returned from her final visit to the doctor who performed her hip replacement surgery.

“I am Woman. Hear me roar, in numbers to big to ignore...”

How very blessed I was to be eleven years old when Helen Reddy launched her emphasise anthem to the world. With her pageboy haircut, knitted vest, and high waisted, flared jeans, she was everything I aspired to be.

My name doesn’t matter. It’s not as if you’ll remember it anyway. My name could be Finn or Lotte. Kate, Marissa, Matthew, TJ, James, Victoria, Adam, Grace, Ashley, Claire. We are not mothers. We are not fathers. All we are are brothers and sisters. Siblings. We are the forgotten mourners and those left behind in the wake of a child dying from cancer. Our grief does not matter.

It was a good thing.

No, in fact, it was the best thing that could’ve happened.

I know that.

I was in an abusive relationship—eighteen years old—and the stick said positive.

I cut potatoes for my visit to Sunnybrook hospital. I’m making potato and leek soup. It is full of minerals and fits the food restriction list for those undergoing chemotherapy. I hope he likes it. I hope it brings nourishment and love.

My Facebook feed brings me an Orca carrying her dead baby, her tears spouting upwards, salting the already salty ocean. I am like that Orca, carrying my bundled grief, attached to my heaving chest, refusing to let go. The sudden loss of marriage, child, parent, even as I came back from the brink of death, has become my bundled grief. I clutch it, like that bundle of celebratory, baby shaped rice Japanese mothers handle with so much care, as it is supposed to hold the child’s future.

Every now and then, old memories appear when you least expect them.

Fastidious footsteps on the pavement leading to Painter Hall on the historic campus of Mississippi University for Women in Columbus, Mississippi. You’re late. As you take the brick steps and walk towards the door, your mind falls back to a time when Santa Clause was a real man who slid down chimneys with tons of gifts, and life was centered around nursery rhymes, coloring sheets, and recess.

There are great concrete buttresses at my back holding up a lantern of light in the church behind me. I’m sitting on concrete steps, staring at one resilient weed working its way through a crack. Little survivor. I come here for the huge sky: tall river-meets-sea light, gulls wheeling and screaming, silvering the air, and the smell of all those far-off places I’ve never been to, swept briskly up here by the winds off the huge river. Close your eyes, you could be anywhere. It’s magic.

Is grief supposed to feel so much like shame? Mine does. Telling my story seems dangerous. It is something I hold close to my chest; I hesitate to reveal even the smallest details unless I have to. To speak of loss and pain out loud makes me vulnerable. It shakes a carefully crafted persona. It could mean people will think less of me, people will not like me. It could mean I get fired from my job, because I am someone who can’t cope. It could mean I will be left, once again, utterly, unbearably alone. That is too high a price to pay.

I’m an editor for a Christian press. I have two degrees in religion, both with a focus in biblical/textual studies. Most of what I edit is Bible based, and I see a lot of my role as helping my theology-focused authors do good biblical interpretation.

Yesterday I just so happened to share a picture of my dad and me on Instagram. It's one of about six photos I have with him. This particular one was was taken on May 25, 1997 on the day of my First Communion. We sit in the front room of the house, the good room or Santa's room as it was called from time to time, because it was also the room where we kept the Christmas tree. My Dad loved Christmas, or so my Mom tells me.

He called me. Me. He picked up the phone and dialled my number. Not the favorite daughter who, admittedly, lives farther away, or the “son and hair” as he was known by his flowing locks in the ‘70s, who lives closer.

No. The bane of his life. The thorn in his side. Me.

Dear Past Me,

It’s been what seems like an eternity since I last thought of you. The memories of you terrify me to the point of disbelief. Perhaps, it’s because I’ve told myself it’s nonessential how our life started out, so why dwell on the past?