It will be seven months in a few days. Seven months since I was fired from my part-time job taking care of my disabled daughter. Seven months since I watched two elderly strangers put her body into a windowless white van and drive away.

When my mother died, I didn’t dream about her for a year. Then when I did, she was there every goddamned night. Just being her cantankerous opinionated self. I found these dreams very comforting, and I still do for the most part.

I was trying to explain to one of the two therapist that I see about an intrusive thought I have. The thought is of dream I have of Kathleen. When she died, I cremated her with the backpack she had carried on her back for the better part of the last 25 years. Smiley backpack. In this not-as-of-yet-had dream, she is holding up the chard remains of smiley backpack and asking me to fix it.

I had initially purchased Mr. Smiley backpack at a Kmart sometime around 1998. An innocuous purchase at the time. Just a backpack she could wear to school. I thought it was cute with big goggly eyes. She found it distasteful at the time and never touched it. Instead I gifted it to my son for preschool. And through the years it just hung around as so many of their childhood things did. Then did sometime around 2003 maybe 2004, Smiley backpack became Kathleen‘s obsession and she put it on her back and there it remained for decades. Who’da thunk? 

It is quite common for people, like my spectral daughter, with autism to become unusually attached to objects. And also unusually attached to the tv of their childhood. I’ve heard countless stories of children with autism, many times children who don’t use words to communicate, who spend hundreds and hundreds of hours a week re-watching decades old commercials on YouTube.

Both of my daughters were prone to carrying backpacks. Kathleen‘s twin walked around at all times with a tote of all of her precious things, knitting needles and yarn, whatever a YA book she was into, always a little notebook and 12 or 13 pens. If I’m correct, there was usually cheese related snack item like a Cheez-It or a little thing of Cheetos. Thankfully for her she ended up Wisconsin.

Kathleen traveled light. Just a backpack and either her baby doll, Rosie, or one of her cadre of stuffed animals. Then again, Kathleen was always the first to run. Couldn’t be weighed down.

Smiley backpack with her constant companion. I couldn’t imagine hanging onto it in my house without her. 

It’s hard to explain all this to a therapist, or two, in less than 12-13 years of weekly sessions. Unfortunately, our sessions are only 50 minutes long. There is probably a very specific word in German for what I am feeling right now. You know the word for the fear of the dream that you will have about your adult disabled daughters’ anger (specifically towards you) about burning her favorite backpack along with her body. What is the word for that?

When you have these intrusive thoughts, you can choose to entertain them or put them in a little brain cupboard. Where they can live snuggled up with all the childhood nasties. I couldn’t keep it in so I call my husband and they understood unreservedly.

“ Those useless thoughts are the tail that you don’t need anymore.” As if all of this worry that have about what won’t happen. That constant vigilance I held for 30 years for her wellbeing doesn’t serve me anymore. Just like a tail on a human.

I have no idea what I’m gonna do with the tail. For now, I’m wrapping it around myself and holding on.