pieces-parts: September

I wrote about living with grief this summer. I’ve been jotting down what I could throughout the fall, too. I haven’t been able to shape it into a whole essay yet — it’s more piecemeal, as the experience of my grief itself has become a little more piecemeal, the dough breaking apart in clumps.

So when there is time, I may yet gather up these pieces-parts (as Val might call them), and add butter and sugar and bake a whole pie. For now, since time keeps rolling along and along, I just want to pin a few fall notes to this wall for future decoding.

I’ll begin where I left off, with September.

*

pieces

There was so much rampant serendipity this weekend, and goofy things I wanted to tell her, and important things, and a falcon in the backyard. And Tuley watching for mice. So much stuff she would’ve wanted to hear about.

The sharpness of the grief is changing. I swallow and swallow and the broken shards in my throat are getting tumbled rounder.

Last night I walked around the block just sobbing. I want so badly to talk to her and when that need hits the impossible wall there is nothing to do sometimes but crack into pieces.

—

quiet nights

I plug in my phone to recharge at night and it’s such a simple act. I just plug in the cord: without steeling myself; without dread of a 2 a.m. call for paramedics; without lining up my kegs of courage on the railing, ready to to be tapped.

—

maritime

This phrase:

it doesn’t make any sense, it just doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t make any sense

still rolls through my mind, still circling the edge of the blank space where Val used to be. In the summer it coursed through my mind on a loop all day, and that’s changed: now it just swims to the surface a few times a day, flashing its irrational scales and then undulating back down to the depths.

That whole “waves of grief” thing turns out to be an apt metaphor. There are hours and days when I am wading just along the shore of grief, wet to the knee; and other times the sneaker waves rise right up from peaceful seas and suck me under for days.

—

this isn’t hard

During the time of her dying I found myself thinking: This isn’t hard. We can do this. I can do this, when it’s my turn. And it won’t be that long. No matter how long I live, it felt very close, the release from this existence. Like wherever Val is, I’ll get there soon enough, and I hope our dancing molecules rejoice in some kind of reunion. And I kind of wanted to go ahead and die. Not at all because of feeling suicidal; but just because I felt like I could almost see how — and it wasn’t so hard — and I wasn’t scared — and I so much wanted to keep hanging out with Val. Simple things. It just seemed like I was so close to the place where the mists start to shred and the sun breaks through. And that’s where we were, so it seemed funny to turn back into the mists of living, and not just push through right then.

—

pieces

There is a story about cancer in the paper every single day. The word is unavoidable.

I am surprised at how many songs I have to skip over.

I cut the dog’s nose fur because I knew it was getting long enough to bug Val. She’d say, she has to see out!

—

feeling better

People who haven’t seen me for a week or two or three ask: Are you feeling better? As though I had had the flu, and not an amputation.

Feeling better now? That’s what somebody said after choir tonight. I said: Not exactly. She said: But getting there, right?

—

double track

She comes to mind a hundred, two hundred, five hundred times a day. Like those micro-expressions that zip across people’s faces, I have micro-Val-moments where something about my circumstances twitches my thoughts out of one groove and into the Val groove, quick as a snap. And if I am, for example, in the middle of an interview panel asking a nervous candidate a question, I do my best to quick skip back into the groove of professional life, before my Val-flash can seize my imagination and heart and tear ducts. All day, endlessly, like there are two tracks playing at once, one in the background and one in the foreground, and they switch places all day long.

—

the forest will change shape

A tree is cut down, and eventually, the forest will change shape, shade plants will die back, sun plants will encroach, a new balance will be found — but it won’t be as it was, and it will take years. Like the pin-oak in my backyard that grew large, shading my house’s summers for thirty years; and then one day it split — and just like that, with chains and saws and some collateral damage, it was gone. Three years later and the yard and I still mourn the loss; and that was a quiet tree I’d known for only eight years.

—

fizz

I’m gulping back small jolts of adrenaline all day long. They keep sizzling up like fizz off of Alka-Seltzer. That sense that there is something stressful or awful or looming that I’m putting off. Only there isn’t. I think it’s just all the Val emotion that I have to keep shunting to the side to navigate the work day.

—

under the table

One thing I notice about being inside big grief is that I am more easily able to look into other people’s sorrowful faces without flinching, and wonder about their stories. I think so many of us have big sorrows, and so few of them get generally aired. It’s like we are all maintaining a bright, measured conversation around the table, while underneath all our feet are tip-tapping around, trying to find another toe to touch.

—

to be tender

It would be so helpful if our culture had rituals associated with mourning, something like black armbands or a proscribed mourning period: rituals to acknowledge grief and to make it visible. Make us visible, so people know to be tender with us.

—

dispossessed

Sometimes my stomach clenches up in a jolt of anguish and I think, Where are you, Val?

I forget things. I worry about all the things I will forget without her memory propping up mine.

I talk to all these other people, I make friends and exchange stories and I sing, and then I’m driving home and sometimes I feel empty, like tonight, just a little hole in the guts with meaning draining away and I just want to see her. She is the one who knows me the very best. She is the solid meal. Talking things over with her is a way for me to become still, to dig up the earth for planting. Her heart and mind were my home; now I feel disjointed and homeless.

All day long she pops into my mind, or my time with her does, in a thousand fragments. I jump from the cremation to throwing peas for the dog in 10 seconds. It’s all shoved to the side during the work day but it’s right there, ready to cascade out, even on my shortest breaks at work. It’s like my brain is so relieved to stop leaning heavily against that closet door; it’s just waiting for the chance to try to reestablish equilibrium.

It is very hard for me to remember the days before cancer. She was afraid that’s how it would be. She was so worried she’d be remembered as a trauma. But it’s just that remembering the days before cancer is remembering much younger people we used to be — it’s not remembering who we are/were now. I miss her from now. I miss me from now.

I try to fill my heart up with the realest interactions I can make happen, with dear friends and my telephone-family, and all the lovely people I know. But none of that quite satisfies, and after a while a desperate little voice in me says, Can we stop trying, now? Can we go home where it’s real? Meaning, can we go talk to Val? And I have to tell her: I’m sorry. We don’t get to do that anymore.

It seems strange that the person I know the best is the hardest to hold in my head. I haven’t seen one of my oldest friends in a year but I can imagine her so clearly. But Val, so deep in my heart, is so much harder to get a fix on. She was so quicksilver smart and funny and charismatic, I never could conjure her up right. I learned to be patient, not even to try imagining her really, until I could see her in person and she could spring alive and fill the air with more dimensions and senses than I had even remembered. And now I wait and wait, so patiently, and I never get to see her any more.

How can that be? It doesn’t make sense.

I wonder so much where she is now.

I want so much for her to be free and joyful somehow.

I want to see her again.

It’s like the last person who spoke my native language has died. I am the only speaker now, and there is no one left to talk to.