On the flip side

Since December, since Montana, since hair and energy and a new year, Val has been doing great.  Or so it appears from my (front row, but still audience) vantage point.  She sings silly songs in the mornings, she styles her thickening hair into tiny swooshes, she’s making music and thinking about art and bringing home the bacon.  She’s social and funny and hopeful about her wide-open life.

Sometimes her back hurts, as she gets more and more active and her body works out its kinks.  The trial drugs she’s on make her nose bleed a smidgen – only when she blows her nose, the way you get when the air’s dry for too long.  Surprising things can bring on mini trauma flashbacks (for both of us, actually), like the smell of the hand soap in the kitchen (I donated it to the office).  There are little cameo appearances of fear.

But mostly Val seems fine.  Happy.  Even great.

I, on the other hand, seem to have fallen down a well.

My theory is this: after more than a year of worsening anxiety — beginning with my dad’s liver failure and transplant, and going through Val’s diagnosis and treatment — things are beginning to look up.  My dad’s doing great (I’ll tell y’all that story another time) and Val’s really beginning to feel well again.  For the first time in a long time, it is not absolutely necessary for me to cope.

And so I’m not.

Coping, I mean.  I seem to be all coped out.  As Val began to feel better in December, I began to feel worse.  Moody.  Teary.  A headache that wouldn’t quit.  Driven to prostration by simple things like taking the recycling out or returning phone calls.  Just before Hanukkah and Christmas I caught a crummy cold, my first one in a year.  I snorfled and slept and hacked and when it was all over, I felt worse than ever.  Couldn’t stop crying.  Couldn’t write.  Surviving on one-stop concoctions like steamed kale, eggs from my chicken friends and the weird cereals Val’s been bringing home from the organic surplus market.

I felt boneless with despair.

This has never happened to me before.

I’ve been gloomy, I’ve been depressed for weeks at a time, I’ve been pissed off or premenstrual or seasonally-affected.  But I’ve never come completely unstrung.  And that’s what the last few weeks have felt like.

There were stretches where I could function okay.  I was able to ask Val, my family, a few friends for help.  Folks had me over for dinner.  Sent me a mix cd from far away.  Walked with me and talked with me.  Val rubbed my head and danced silly dances for me.  I made sure to eat, sleep, walk the dog and myself, get out into the world.  I’ve been trying to keep in the swim of things.  And I sleep in, watch back-to-back episodes of 30 Rock, stay up late reading: whatever sounds comforting.  I’m being kind to myself.  And I’m trying to be patient with my own breakdown.  I’m trying to make room for grief.  Not that I seem to have a choice.

I think this collapse of sorrow has been waiting for a long time till it was safe, and now that it’s convinced I’m off-duty it’s washing me away for a while.  I think it will ebb.  But I don’t seem to be able to gather it up myself, corral it in the bathtub.  It’s too big and permeating and trickling out of all my cracks.

There is something confusingly translucent about my role in this blog-story.  Am I chronicler of Val’s well-being, or is my voice my own?  Am I telling/living my story, hers, ours?  If Val’s got hair but I’m falling apart, and all you beautiful people have been helping us and listening to us for months… I’m not sure how to ask for help.  Or what help to ask for.  Or where.

For months I’ve been meaning to write a post about the densely layered nuances of help: asking for; accepting; offering; declining.  Really truly needing.  Etiqutte of; fear of; direction of; serendipity of.  Its implications, grace, magic, mysteries.  It’s too much.  I haven’t been able to tackle it yet.  My sister, Abby, lived in New Oreleans until she was Katrina’d out.  She is still untangling her experience of help and loss and community in all their myriad meanings; it will be the heart of her MFA thesis show this spring.  Art transmogrifies.  I am glad to be writing tonight.

And there has been sun this week, actual Portland winter sun.  The messy fog of grief, exposed to air for the last couple weeks, is patchily beginning to disperse.  Small things seem mostly do-able again.  And the fabulous Tuley still makes me laugh out loud.

I’ve been listening to a lot of music lately.  In the land of Facebook I put up a question yesterday, and I’ll ask it here too.  What music do you listen to for rescue?  When you have the blues, what songs reach your heart?  One person answered that it depends on the type of blues, and of course that’s a vast and varied territory.  But I’m interested in all answers: Music that touches the raw nerve and echoes the exact melancholy you feel.  Music that rocks you and croons in your ear, reminding you of summer sunlight.  Or songs that flip off the sorrow and get you dancing around the house.  Any of it.  What’s your musical snake oil of choice?

Thanks for listening.  It helps too.

Deborah

p.s. In case you were wondering, here are some of the songs or musicians that help my Facebook friends dance with the blues:

• Amos Lee, Joshua Radin, Gary Jules, Patty Griffin, Govinda, Buena Vista Social Club…and the Jackson 5, to name a few.
• I like Alanis if I’m pissy AND sad and I still resort to musicals sometimes. Evita is a favorite.

• Radiohead’s “Hail to the Thief” always makes me glad I’m not as depressed as Thom Yorke!
• Jack Johnson is always a sweet one. Lunasa has been a favorite lately, too.
• Pink Martini – Let’s not stop falling in love and Hang on little tomato
• It really depends on the depth & quality of the depression…

  Indigo Girls – Tangled Up In Blue
  Michelle Shocked – Anchorage
  Coyote Shivers – Sugarhigh
  Ben Folds Five – Rockin’ the Suburbs
  Pink – Trouble
  Scissor Sisters – Take Your Mama Out
  The Subdudes – Papa Dukie and the Mud People
  Mike Doughty – 27 Jennifers
  The Grateful Dead & Jimmy Buffett – Just about anything…

• Any of my favorite 80s dance songs for dancing around the house. it can change my mood instantly
• Rodrigo y Gabriela
• Toots and the Maytals always makes me smile and shake my bootie:)
• The Blues are the perfect antidote for well, the blues.
• the music list is immeasurably extensive however, jeff buckley (for everything), patty griffin (comfort and 1/3 sorrow), lhasa de sela (for magic), dead can dance (for vitality, spiritual attunement, + rhythm), senayit (passion, a dose of magic, truth, fire + magic), pj harvey (for power), daniel lanois (for alignment in the etheric + astral body), wolfsheim (my love affair with gay german men 😉 boards of canada (digital electro subtle beats), faryad masters, nustrat fateh ali khan, & gregorian chants (to remember), bon hiver (for allowance), beirut & devotchka (to create new shape), kate bush & andrew bird (to understand the space and relationship between two points).