More jottings from my grief journals.
1/13/14
R asked me about the term “bucket,” and Val using it as an endearment. Here’s what I told her:
To be honest I am not sure where she got it. But it seemed to spring up a few years into my knowing her (although perhaps folks who knew her earlier will remember an earlier incarnation). Whenever she couldn’t remember somebody’s name off the top of her head she’d use all kinds of silly nouns instead, like, “Hey, are Ping Pong and Heffalump coming over later?” Possibly in an effort to make me laugh – we were always playing spontaneous silly word games. “Bucket” was one of those (“I saw Cheez Whiz and Bucket earlier today”), and gradually it fell into regular use. Word-nerdy myself, I picked up this particular noun-riffing habit and I still use it when referring to the dog. (“Hurry up, Tinkertoy!”)
1/18/14
Argh. I am sad tonight.
At storytime I help the kids read the characters’ faces: how does the pig feel now? They say: sad. I say, yeah, sad. The big guy took her ball. How does that make her feel? They say: bad. Mad. These are the first three they always say. We work our way toward: frustrated. Disappointed. Scared. Picked on. Confused.
Tonight I am sad. My feet throb with pain. This makes me feel bad, sad, mad, scared, frustrated. Despairing. Stuck. There is nothing I feel like doing. I think if I could walk, if I could go for a long walk in the dark, that would help. But I can’t. I want to call Val and tell her my troubles, so she can distract me or help me look at them another way. I want to hear the stories of her day. I want her to remind me how to breathe through hard times. I want to gossip and talk trash and laugh with her. I want to be seen. I want my friend.
Sometimes when I am tired and in pain, and everything seems wearisomely hard, it seems for a moment that it would be easier to be done. Sometimes I think — not think, not contemplate, it’s just a moth that brushes my mind for a moment: what if I died right now? Then I would be done with this slog, I could stop trying, I could let go. It sounds okay, sometimes.
This is a new thing for me, only since Val died. It’s that combination of being tired, and not having very much fun, and being kind of comfortably familiar with death, and missing my friend and wanting to be where she is. It is much more likely to happen when I am in pain and unable to pursue the paths that comfort me. I am sad, mad, frustrated. Tired and lonely.
1/24/14
This is my first week not working. It feels like kindness and recuperation. I go out in the sun and wind, then lie with a blanket on the couch, watching the crystal rainbows on the wall and reading a book.
1/26/14
The last week I’ve felt engaged and busy, but today was another sad day. Nobody came to my choir concert, and when everyone else was rushing out into the audience to be congratulated, I just picked up my ukulele and packed things up. Lonely.
This dog saves me, every day.
1/31/14
I hang out by myself very quietly for hours and hours. I work in the yard, even though my mysteriously weak and achy body gets hurt within 15 minutes, and I cook and play with the dog and work on what S calls “adult homework,” like paying the bills and researching my health insurance options. I hang art on the walls. I sit in the backyard and watch the bushtits flit from the lilacs across the brick patio to the feeder.
I drink down this quiet time like tall glasses of water. I think it will be a long time before this thirst is slaked.
Sometimes in the evenings, though, I am tired and the best thing in the world would be to hang out and make dinner with Valerie, talking together. Other people wear me out so fast, but I long for really nourishing conversation.
I have been avoiding the videos, the old ones and the ones from recent years. Avoiding by forgetting about them. Why don’t I remember, why don’t I think to see her? It seems like nowadays I slide away from emotional disruption. I so very much want to see her, but it will make it more real that videos are all I get if I actually look at them, maybe. Or else it’s kind of a treat I’m saving for myself, like a birthday present I just don’t think about because I’ll get there when I get there. I can’t quite figure it out. It feels like I don’t have time, yet. Or it’s not rainy enough. Something.
All summer I’d find myself crying, off and on, any day, every day.
In the fall the line between crying and not-crying became more solid.
Now hours pass that I don’t specifically think about her. Days pass that I don’t cry, or at least I just tear up for a moment.
That’s all fine, I know. Resiliency and all that. We both want me to be living this life.
But I miss her. I miss the way the sharpest grief kept her so present with me. She isn’t quite present any more. She is no longer in the present. She is the past. She has slid out of reach.
2/9/14
Some of the many moments I felt the impulse to share with Val today:
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The way the icemelt was running behind the ice on the trunks of the hedge in the backyard.
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Tuley’s careful claws-out tiptoe across the treacherous ice surface.
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Finding the old “quote board” pages, reading all the hilarious things we said, remembering each of those moments.
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To gossip about Starbuck on Battlestar Galactica.
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To watch the winter Olympics together, being amazed by the athleticism and spoofing the commentators. I like being funny for my friends, but it’s more fun being funny for Val.
2/15/14
I’m reading C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed, about how he felt after the death of his wife. I’ve had it around for months and finally felt like reading it (oddly, in between watching Olympics last night – a funny mix but it suited my mood). Lewis and I had some pretty different challenges, but some of his phrases exactly framed some of my experience in these months after Val’s death.
He talks about how fear (in this case, the visceral, animal fear of dying) can’t be transferred. I was so aware of not being able to inhabit the same emotional space as Val, beginning abruptly at the moment of her diagnosis. Nor could she inhabit mine. It was a very sudden separation. Lewis says,
“We both knew this. I had my miseries, not hers; she had hers, not mine. The end of hers would be the coming-of-age of mine. We were setting out on different roads. This cold truth, this terrible traffic-regulation (‘You, Madam, to the right — you, Sir, to the left’) is just the beginning of the separation which is death itself.”
That’s exactly how it had felt to me at the time: that Val and I were suddenly on different, divergent paths. I wrote almost the same way about it. I’m not sure why but it’s so helpful to see that sentiment felt by someone else. Why is that always so helpful?
Reading his words I am suddenly remembering why I need to write about this.
Writing about it helps me crystallize all that vague unease into sharp-edged reality. It helps bleed meaning back into my being. I recognize myself in the corners and hallways of Lewis’s grief described. Sometimes I recognize myself in my own writing. Someone else may see their grief in my writing and find something to hold onto.
It helps me to locate the unwavering kernel of self in the middle of the fog.