My friends,
I think I have a different face now. My eyes feel sad all the time. My face at rest is a sad face. When no one is looking I can feel my mouth sloping down at the corners like the limp slats of old window blinds.
I can’t figure out if this is the place to write about my grief. This grew as the place for both of us to write about our lives with cancer, Val’s cancer. And now Val’s cancer is gone, and Val is in crucial ways gone. The shape of her absence marks the place my grief fractures and foams up into whitewater; but the storyline has veered. I don’t know what to do with myself. I need to write about this, but I’m not sure where, or to whom, exactly. Maybe somewhere else.
But for now I will tell you this:
I am terrified I will forget her. No, not terrified: devastated. I am already forgetting her. I can’t understand what it’s really like to be with her, it’s like trying to remember being cold or hungry: a snapshot of a sensation. It feels impossible to conjure Valerie without Valerie.
I went to the Taj Mahal once. I wondered if it would seem familiar and ordinary because of course I have seen countless images of the Taj Mahal. But it turned out that entering the grounds of the Taj Mahal was like falling into a genie’s bottle and finding myself in an enchanted otherworld: it was breathtaking, luminescent with its own kind of daytime moonlight. It was like nowhere I had ever been.
The thing was so very much more than the picture of the thing.
Now, five and a half years later, I can remember being suffused with delight, walking among the reflecting pools and the laughing women in their holiday sarees. I have pictures. But it is not the same as being there: touching the white stones, the smoky air soft on my skin; feeling awed by the architectural precision, the audacious vision, the beauty.
Remembering the thing is not the same as living the thing.
Remembering Val is not the same as being with Val. After fifteen years Val could still, always, take me by surprise. I can’t do that part, the wonderful surprising part, on my own, from memory. The loss feels staggering.
Then I try thinking: maybe I need to rewrite that story. That’s a story I’m becoming stuck in, the story of the fear of forgetting. Maybe that isn’t how it has to be. Maybe I don’t understand correctly, maybe it isn’t about forgetting or not forgetting. Maybe I’m asking the wrong question.
I so very much want to talk to Val. I want to ask her, “How is this for you? What is it like?” I want to ask about all those last weeks and months. I wish I had interviewed her the way we kept saying we would. But the days were so fraught and painful, there was so much coping to be done, breathing was so hard. We didn’t find the time, except once. I didn’t. She didn’t. I came over expressly to interview her several times and it turned out not to be the time. It seemed like we’d stumble upon a few unneeded minutes, but we didn’t. We needed those minutes for other things. Stupid hard things, and nourishing good things. And everything kept speeding up and speeding up.
But at last I am rested a bit. I am caught up a bit. Caught up to a few months ago. And every day I find myself wanting to ask her, “What is this like for you? This dying?” And maybe I want her to ask me what it’s like for me, too. But mainly I want to hear her thoughts: my favorite philosopher, my life puzzler. I want to hear more about what it feels like to be approaching such a big unknowable change, and for one’s body to be slipping its moorings. And I want her to know that I want to see her.
Each of us had to carry her part of this a little bit alone. I think I am still trying to bridge that. I don’t want her to be carrying this alone. This death. This dying.
I want to say, “Tell me, Val.” Please tell me.
I wasn’t done with this part of the conversation.
I suppose now I am trying to carry on my side of the conversation.
What is this like? What is it like to be us, living with implacable death and gorgeous life all mixed impossibly together?
Here is what I know tonight: the dahlias in my garden are beautiful. They grew from tubers passed along from my grandfather to my mother to me. My grandpa loved growing dahlias, but these weren’t any special heritage favorites: they were just dahlias he got from the guy down the road. They grow tall and make fat fuschia blooms. We ship them around the country in boxes so they can grow wherever we grow. They feel like home.
Thank you Deborah; that’s such a beautiful and honest portrayal of grief.
please keep writing here Deborah. We all feel you, feel it too, in our own ways, and in common ways…
and so much of her still lives in you. For real.
I love you so much. so much.
Deborah, I don’t know what to say……..
except we love you.
It is a giant hurt. Suffocating.
(The dahlias in our garden that came from Val’s mom are struggling to survive but I have faith that they will bloom yet this summer.)
Deborah, At times I feel the same way. I was just thinking of a question I had asked Valerie and now I can’t remember her reply. It’s not like I can just pick up the phone anymore. But I think we can find solace in our memories. You are blessed to have so many of your friends there who can jog those memories and keep them somewhat fresh in your mind. When you live here in Gillette, no one knew our precious Valerie and so you just mention her in passing as “my sister”. I can feel her presence when I think about her and I know she’s happy and breathing heaven’s air without problems. That makes me a little less sad.
This feels like the perfect place to write about your grief, Deborah. And thank you for putting it down in words. I hear you. I feel you.
There is the dying part and there is the death part. Nothing really prepares you for the latter part — of being alive when the person you love so dearly is not. But there a bunch of us who’ve got some practice at that part and we are all here for you.
In Tom Perrotta’s book “The Leftovers,” about a rapture-like occurrence when a large part of the world population just disappears, every character is dealing with the grief of people just being gone. The character I remember the most had both her children and her husband evaporate. She was deep in mourning, but she never looked at family photographs, or watched home movies (or whatever we are calling their modern counterpart) because she was afraid she would only remember those parts of her life with her family. Instead she waited for random memories to surface and treasured those. I found this very interesting.
I have no advice for you, but my thoughts are with you and I love your writing. I think this is the perfect place for it. If it helps you, keep it up.
Oh Deborah. Tears in my eyes. I love you. Thank you for writing about this. What you say resonates in me too.
I love you guys.
Thanks.
Remembering the thing is definitely not the same as living the thing. In my case, it has taken the memory to better understand the dying. And for that, I am both pained and grateful. Thank you for sharing, Deborah. Keep writing… I’m certain it’s what Val would have wanted.
Every time I drive on Foster I think about Val and about you. I check this blog all the time in hopes of more writing. It is healing and enlightening for me. I hope it is for you too Deborah.
Today is the first day I have looked at facebook or this site since sometime shortly after Val’s memorial in Eureka. I found I was getting stuck each time I logged on and I couldn’t move forward. And then I finally started to think of Val and her approach to living. Which she did. So well. And for me, that’s what Val would want. For me to live. Really live.
And I suppose that is easier for me to do without her, Deborah, because truly I have lived without that daily presence since we were 17.
And like you, Jane, I find a certain sadness in not being able to share with anyone here because no one here knew Val. But in a way, it forces me to live, to get on with seeing what’s right in front of my face. Because sometimes I don’t.
And I ‘m not great at writing things down because I start to think and then I’m stuck again inside my head and heart. I don’t like that feeling of being stuck. So I get up and I go out the door. Remember what she taught you . . . no matter how bad the day . . . go outside. It will get better. You will feel better.
I just spent a week in Eureka with my kids and as much as I had totally planned to go over to see Miles and Sandy, maybe ask if I could take the kids floating on the big ditch like Val and I did so long ago, I didn’t. I didn’t do any of it. And I kept chiding myself that I really should but I couldn’t seem to. I shared those thoughts with a dear friend of mine in Eureka and she said to me “there’s a reason for that. Just follow your instinct. There’s a reason”. So I tried to take those words and just accept it as true. It worked. I have no idea why and I’ve decided not to dwell on it because sometimes things just work.
Each of us will find our way, some of us through sharing with others, writing, reflecting. Some of us will do it alone. It will take some of us longer than others. But we will all do it.
There’s a place I want to tell you about that I kept thinking of that last day in Eureka in June before I flew back. It is down by Missoula. There is a place called Fish Creek that flows into the Clark Fork River. Years ago I used to go white water rafting with a group of friends and when we did the Clark Fork run we would always stop at Fish Creek for lunch. It’s a beautiful little spot and there’s a swimming hole if you choose. But it’s a funny swimming hole – in fact it’s what we called a ‘suck hole’. You could walk out onto some rocks, jump into Fish Creek and then it would suck you under the water. As long as you relaxed and let it take you, it would spit you out downstream and you were fine, exhilerated in fact. At least that was my reaction. But if you fought it, the water would keep pulling at you and it was quite frightening and next to impossible to swim against to get out.
And I kept thinking of losing Val like jumping into the suck hole at Fish Creek – just relax and let it take you and somewhere downriver it will spit you out and you will be fine.
That is what I have tried to do for myself. And if any of this writing can help you or anyone else, I am glad for that.
What a moving reflection. If there is any healing for you in writing here, please continue. I can assure you there is healing for me in reading.
I appreciate Patricia’s reference to the Tom Perrotta book. I do not know the story, but the synopsis resonates with me. Having lost one of the great loves of my life late last year, I have been surprised by my desire to put away photos, journals and documented memories, even though it seemed so critical to capture those moments at the time.
But to love another human deeply and without condition or reserve is an experience that cannot be easily contained and held up for later observation. Over so many years and tangled with so many feelings, your spirit/soul merged, shaped and reshaped itself with Val’s. Your cells are marked permanently, intertwined forever, and new cells develop from that foundation. There is no limit to what you will feel, remember and appreciate, nor a time structure, rule or measure with which to navigate. And I also know that it is a nearly unbearable experience to let that be true, at least at times.
The heart is an organ of fire.
I appreciate how much space there appears to be in this community for grief. My own life experience tells me this is uncommon. I do not know any of you, really, but the wisdom and compassion I observe here is beautiful. For this, I feel gratitude.
Write on, as they say.
Everyone, thank you so much for your vulnerability, thoughtful observations, and supportive words. And Val stories. This is all so good.
xo