More jottings from my grief journals.
12/8/13
I am not so easily overset as I was. My cup is no longer full-up, sloshing, to the brim. So I am not constantly spilling over at the merest additional drop.
On the other hand, I am able to push real recognition away. When I get close to thinking of how it really was with her, I am able to veer, and go in another direction. Used to be I was careening too fast to veer, and my pinball self was always bouncing off thousands of bits of wreckage of ordinary life anyway. So I had no choice but to be fully present with my loss.
Now I put it off and put it off, waiting for a moment I can afford to immerse.
It hurts to remember how much myself I could be with her. So I try not to think about it. It’s easier not to think about it than it was. It’s been a while since that reality was my daily reality – being seen, the meeting of minds. The absence is not so fresh; I become accustomed to duller times.
12/22/13
Without Val around, it sometimes feels like I’m the funniest person I know. What fun is that?
Also, remembering again that last year she said, I love it that you call the dog Pinkerton.
12/28/13
I’m totally interested in continuing to live, don’t get me wrong. But now and then an image flits through my mind that eventually this beautiful but kind of hard long day will be over, and that’ll be nice, because then I’ll be with Val again. One way or another.
12/29/13
I miss Val all the time. The ache is less sharp, but I think my brain has decided it is now waiting. Patiently. For her to come back or for me to go where she is. So it is sitting very patiently in the waiting room, reading Highlights magazines and trying not to get sneezed on and letting the time pass.
12/31/13
It’s New Year’s Eve and I have a cold that’s put me in a fog. Dropped A and M off at the airport this morning after walking in the misty rain at Reed Canyon. Came home to watch hours of Downton Abbey on the iPad, interspersed with moments of cleaning up, walking the dog, doing laundry. I even did half an hour of pruning the marionberries and Val’s grandmother’s thorny yellow rosebush, but after that I had to come in for a lie-down. It wasn’t until this evening when New Year texts began coming in and the fireworks began going off outside, around 7 or 8, that I realized this is supposed to be a Momentous Night. The end of 2013, a year of enormous sorrow: the year I lost Val, or at least the year she left this perceptible world. I tried for a moment to remember where I was on other New Year’s Eves, but it didn’t feel emotionally pressing to go there. There was the party at C’s; and the dressed-up one at Ben-Eve in Boston; and the year we banged pans together on the porch. I can’t remember for sure where I was last New Year’s, but I was probably in bed with Val, waking up at 2:00 and 4:00 to help her breathe. Maybe reading her stories. We were reading Moomintroll Midwinter around then.
One or two people have asked me how I’m doing during this, my first “holiday season” without Val. B sent me a card, and so did C: good people, both of them, and conversant with both grief and epistolary correspondence. K asked us at dinner this week, too. And my answer is simply that I miss Val every day, but it’s not any worse this week. For me the holidays aren’t turning out to be more poignant or difficult. I’m happy, I’m hungry, I’m stopped-in-my-tracks grief-stricken, or I’m merely sad — all of these and more, but they are part of the ordinary flow of my every day. I know the heat turns up at Christmas for some, but it hasn’t for me.
The imposition of New Year on the arc of my week just isn’t sticking this time. It’s like trying to stick a magnet to aluminum. What feels real and is the woven cord that pulls me along is the dog, and the clouds, and the smell of mud at Reed Canyon. Food and books and Val’s ring on my finger. The little Lego pieces of mundane life. Lovely life. Confoundingly reshaped, sometimes emptily tinny, sometimes robust life.
My feet don’t hurt too badly this week. I have a stupid-making cold, but that will pass. I’m glad to be alive. Tomorrow I get to wake up in this gray-and-brown, winter-muddy world, and I’m glad about that too. New year, new day, new morning. I don’t feel a big bang. I feel a small green shoot of tenderness, chin-up resolve, and interest in going forward.
I wrote to my friends:
All right, I’m in. I’ve got ukulele calluses to rebuild, a dog to scratch, some more words to write. There are good people around me brimful of rip-roaring stories I haven’t heard yet. There are still some carrots to dig up. I need to make that soup again, this time with the two cups of parsley. The canyon mud smells good, and I might get to see the otter again. Let’s do this crazy thing for another 365.