pieces-parts: October-November

More jottings from my grief journals this fall.

Writing, talking about it feels like rooting around, scratching out a depression in the earth, trying to make a place to fit myself and curl up.

*

OCTOBER PIECES-PARTS

“How are you?” (early October)

I went to a large event with a lot of people I know. Got a little panicky trying to navigate crowds with the walker. Plus so many people haven’t seen me in so long, they all came over to hug me and ask, “How are you?”

And I can’t tell if they mean it in the sense of, “Hello, this is a friendly greeting”; or “I don’t know you very well but I haven’t seen you in a long time so I’m wondering how work is going out at the library”; or “I heard about Val and I wish to express concern but won’t know how to handle a genuine answer here and now”; or “I know Val died, I’m concerned about you, how are you really doing?”

Person after person asked. Of course they did; it’s how we greet one another in this culture; but they give it a little extra oomph with me. And of course, I know I’ll be asked, but somehow I still can’t figure out how to answer. I stop short, tongue-tied, poking a funny little accidental hole in the conversation. Most of the time I just can’t bring myself to say “fine,” it’s so blatantly out-of-sync with my complex state. I finally worked out that I should smile and say, “It’s nice to see you!” without actually answering the question. But I got very unsettled.

I wonder if I’m transitioning into a phase where I actually don’t always want people to ask how I’m doing. Nowadays I can sometimes find myself absorbed in the ordinary work of daily life and it can be jarring to be reminded of the great gulf of grief at my feet. Before, I was so thoroughly enveloped in grief that I was grateful for anyone to try to meet me there. That is still often true. It didn’t used to matter if I was at work or anywhere at all, but now when people ask, sometimes it pushes me off the stump of normalcy I’m balancing on. At home, though, I’m still glad to go there most of the time; at home I’ve got enough room to go emotionally wherever I need to go.

*

foursquare and other metaphors for home

It’s hard for me to know the shape of myself without Val to talk to. She was my home ground, my hearth fire. We cracked each other up and bounced ideas off each other in an endless game of philosophical foursquare. Our conversation conjured a topography of shared space. I can’t get there by myself, and I miss it.

I miss talking to her.

I miss teasing and talking and joking and thinking with her.

Bouncing ideas off each other helped us both shape sense and meaning from the bewilderments of daily life and cosmic uncertainty. Now my echolocation is on the fritz. I squeak forlornly but the sound waves falter and dissolve and lose their way home. I have to stumble gingerly forward, hands floundering, into the dark.

*

reading

I re-read The Secret Garden for the first time in decades. What a strange, great book, crackling with personality! I loved it all over again. But sometimes I had to put it down to breathe through the sharp pangs of wanting to read passages aloud to Val. Just a few chapters in I had that delighted realization I sometimes have that this will be the next book I read aloud to her… and then half a second later realized I won’t. And that sequence kept happening. Sometimes I had to stop reading.

*

having come loose

I went to visit family and then flying back to Portland I felt a sense of disorientation, of having come loose from things. I used to like coming back home: home to Val and the dog. Now I was coming back, but it didn’t feel like heading toward the warmth of a “home.” Just a house, and a pile of commitments.

Going to work feels like days racing pointlessly by, days cutting ahead of me in line as I wait urgently for a chance to figure things out. It feels like another kind of loss — the loss of time to inhabit transcendent grief.

I yearn toward unvarnished moments of connection. An old friend talked with me about how some days he lives at ease with the slow stiffening his Parkinson’s brings, and other days he sinks into a darker place. Another friend said that her marriage almost came apart this summer, but they are putting it back together. These are small gifts people have handed me: glimpses of lives struggled through. My story for theirs. These are the moments I lean toward right now.

Of course I want to tell Val about all these things, and see what she makes of them, what she makes them into.

I often think of her saying that the part she hated was not getting to find out what happens next.

*

stagger breathing

I’m supposed to be going to work right now but I called in two hours late. My body hurts and my heart hurts and I’m all-over exhausted.

It seems crazy how we appear and disappear from the discernible time path at irregular intervals. It’s seems like a terrible plan. How can the people who make up my world arrive and depart at different times from me? I need them for my world to work.

I can see how a tapestry became such a popular metaphor for time; it really does feel like threads are being pulled out of my pattern, leaving ragged holes, and the ends of things all unraveled.

But.

Maybe it can be more like the breath of singers.

In a choir, when you are singing an intricate piece full of notes with no gaps, you have to catch a breath whenever you get a chance. The trick is to do it when the people closest to you are still singing; they keep the sound whole while you drop out to gulp more air. It’s called stagger breathing. Maybe that’s how it is with these little gulps of life we take. One of us drops out, another slips in, and all the while, those still breathing hold the music aloft. We stagger a little; we breathe. We help make the music.

*

NOVEMBER PIECES-PARTS

flare

I had a tendinitis flare-up yesterday, from going through pictures online. (This desk has never quite worked out to ergonomic perfection. I need to fix that this year, maybe get a new desk. Or new elbows.)

So my arms were hurting, throbbing enough that it occurred to me to get out the wrap-around ice pack for the first time this season. I opened up the freezer and there it was in the door, curled up like a blue varmint hibernating under a ledge of Abby’s homemade cookie dough, and suddenly I was engulfed with the memory, the actuality, of Val taking care of me. Tears sprang to my eyes. Val knew my joint pain, lived with it for years; and one day she brought me home that ice pack, in its fancy blue sleeve with the velcro fastening that lets you to wrap a cool healing hug around sore joints.

It was like some old magical slapstick cartoon where somebody opens the refrigerator door and a wave of yellow-lit music rolls out, like somebody’s having a party in there, and they shut the door quick, looking surprised. And then they reach out gingerly to open the door again… and as soon as they do, “Laaa!,” there’s the music. Only when I opened the freezer, right there on the door was Val’s loving concern, and my sister’s loving concern (in the form of cookie dough), waiting dormant all this time in their nest among the bags of blackberries. I opened the door for humdrum first aid, and all this love came rolling out.

In that moment of reaching for the ice pack Val’s sense of concern for me was so immediate, so perfectly present and intact, it felt like she was standing in the room behind me. Taking care of me, the way she used to do. And her simultaneous absence knocked the breath out of me. But I stood there for an immersive moment in gratitude, breathing in the dissipating smoke left behind by the detonating memory. It was just a little bit of flash paper, something delicate that reacted with the inrushing air to combust and flare up — and then it was gone, leaving me dazzled, blinking back tears.

*

Thanksgiving Eve, at the ranch in Montana

It is beautiful here. Even in the dark.

I love these people. Including the ones who are gone.