time zones

noticing the strange ways of time this summer of grieving

folding and expanding

I might have seen the Northern Lights, once. I was on a walk late at night by myself in southern Indiana, when I looked up — I was always watching the sky — and saw my bright suburban stars washed with an incandescent spill of red ink that I absolutely couldn’t explain. I am sure I glanced over my shoulder like a person in a movie, looking for someone else to verify that this impossible thing was happening. It felt like I was the only person in the world looking up, and the sky was suddenly a different kind of place than I had understood. I went still, not wanting to scare it off. The translucent red light flowed and billowed and wrinkled and ebbed, undulating through its own inexplicable dimension which for some reason, for a few minutes, I could see… Then the sky and I were alone together again. I walked up the hill in the dark toward home, awestruck and lonely, unsettled and peaceful.

This is the memory that comes to me when I try to describe how love and grief and time have moved in their strange ways over the sky of my summer.

*

the door to before

Soon after Val died, I had a long talk with a friend. She said it all felt unreal, and she asked if it seemed real to me — the fact that Val was actually gone; and I said to me it seemed absolutely real. Unwaveringly real. Right from the start.

Another friend said that for a long time it’s been hard for her to understand that Val isn’t just on a trip somewhere. That she isn’t just across town, and could pop up any minute she wants to. But from the first days after Val died I have registered it somewhere visceral: there is no opening the door to Before when you are in After.

When I go on a trip — say I go visit my parents for a week in Mexico — I always have a heightened sense of multiples selves, all existing at once but at different spots in time and not able to reach each other. I’m excited about the upcoming trip, but it’s so short that I can see the end of it from where I’m standing, if you see what I mean. Before I embark I can see three of myself at once: there’s the me now, packing the suitcase, poised anticipatorily at Before; there’s a me just ahead, already having fun During; and there will be an After me when it’s over. And when the trip starts I think, Here I go! Unknown fun lies ahead! But I know already that there will come a day when I’ll be watching out the airplane window as the megalopolis of Mexico City diminishes to a scramble of circuitry below me, and it will be over.

And what I do before a trip is, I send a mental postcard to the future me, the After me whose adventure is already done. I can’t help it; I know she’s there waiting. Then every day I think “Not yet; I am still here” and the days are long and full… until the day that it’s over. And over is so comprehensive. I was in the adventure just minutes ago, but there is no way to go back and touch those minutes. There I am in the airplane — or lying in the dark in bed my first night home — and I think a little wryly, “Well, hello there, prodigal me. Welcome back from the adventure. I knew you’d catch up.”

And that’s how it was for me with Val’s dying. I lived very intently in those days of Not Yet. I didn’t waste a minute. But I knew, I knew knew knew, that there would be After. And I finally caught up with myself. I ushered myself into After, and there’s no going back.

*

dreamlines

In June I didn’t dream about Val at all.

In July I dreamed about her every single night.

*

dulling the blade

People tell me that time will help ease the pain. They say in time the good memories will eclipse the recent hard times. They mean this as a comfort. But what I hear when they say it is: “She will recede from you.”

I don’t want her to go. I’m not eager to let go of the hard times. I mean, it’s been wretchedly, heart-breakingly hard; but it’s been life, the life we were living now. The glorious, awful, beautiful life we were living. Full of a real Val. I don’t want the complicated, tangible Val of now to fade into a painless, pleasant, static memory. When people say, “Time will ease the pain,” I hear, “You will lose her.”

*

tar pits

I went back to work after three months away and found that all my daily work-realm interactions with Val, from the time when I suddenly left, were lying there, preserved in the tar pits of memory, fresh as the day I left. All week I tripped over the moments I would usually call her, or the stories I’d save to tell her, and had to realize with tiny shocks all over again that I couldn’t. And there are the pictures of her cycling through my screensaver. And my password, which includes a version of the phrase “love lives.”

It does. But I wanted her to live. And I can remember selecting that password back when she was alive, something to get me through, a talisman to pull me through the day, every time I had to type it to unlock the keyboard. It’s a message in a bottle to myself from before, bumping against my sad new shores.

*

a time to mourn

July 6.

Val had 47 days to mourn her mother, and she was busy that entire time dying herself.

I’ve now had 48 days to mourn Val, and it feels like I have barely begun.

I am so sorry she had so little time with her grief. I think she would have done something strange and lovely with it. Grief was a medium with/in which she had learned how to work.

I promised her I would carry that grief forward for her, her grief for her mother, as best I could from my position alongside. I will try to make room for that too.

*

a time to be old

July 10.

I took the dog to Reed Lake at twilight. In the parking lot a big raccoon loped away from us. We were walking along the trail and I was thinking how Val would get pleasure out of my interest in looking at the leaves and ducks and everything. So I was trying to look, but I was sad and distracted. Got to thinking about how much Val wanted to be an old person. Not just to live long but to experience being elderly. I was thinking about my body, and how achy it is nowadays, and wondering if it will only get achier, wondering if I have some implacable degenerative disease that no one has guessed yet. Thinking that it behooves me to enjoy what I can now, even in pain and within my frustrating physical limits, because maybe I will look back with nostalgia on how able-bodied I was in 2013. And I thought: there in the kind-of old-folks’-home (the hospice house), Val did get a few days of old age, like she wanted. Or maybe she got a few years of accelerated old age, old age mingled with robust mid-life all at once. I’m guessing old age isn’t so different from where my friends and I are now. Just another way of being ourselves, while our bodies continue caving in slowly around us like barns in the countryside, all silver and splintery and weathered. Val got to do that. She got to cave in. She just didn’t get to do it in much elderly company. But she got to do it in the company of friends, and perhaps that’s one of the luckier things about dying young. Val had to walk on ahead of us, but a lot of us were still here to walk with her as far as we could.

*

work week

July 17.

I’ve only worked two days and it feels like five. I worked Tuesday, my first day of the week, and when it was over I thought, “Phew! Thank goodness I made it to the weekend” and was quite shocked to realize I had only just begun.

*

jet-lagged

Late July.

When they see me people often ask me, with care and with hope, if I’m feeling better. They are concerned and want to know; they love me and want me to be in less pain; and sometimes they don’t know what to do with the fact of my painful grief. Sometimes they seem to be hoping I am ready to rejoin them in the ordinary world, where we all know how to interact. Where I am is so far away. “How are you, are you feeling better?” So far the question always feels odd to me, almost a non sequitur, like, “Are you feeding kangaroos?” “Are you feeling better?” presupposes that I have moved into some sort of aftermath. But the experience is all of a piece, and I am still inside it. It feels like people calling me up my first week in Italy and asking, “How was the trip?” I’m still in Italy, my dears. I haven’t even adjusted to this time zone yet.

*

flashbacks

July 29.

After five years in the medical system for Val’s cancer, and a few years of wheeling myself painfully to multiple weekly visits myself, even just giving my health record number makes me flinch, like at the dentist this morning. And I hate it that I come across as surly to the medical staff (when I’m actually surfing a wave of grief). I remember how Val’s charming wisecracks and general charisma won everyone over to her side, and I could use these people on my side. But I’m not Val.

*

still trying to get ready

August 6.

Since July I have been dreaming about Val every night. Last night I dreamed we were in an RV, getting ready for me to drive her to the next thing, to the leaving. I washed her feet with holy water, to prepare. She wasn’t ready, she was anxious, she didn’t want to have to go yet. I reassured her that she didn’t have to, not yet, we were just getting everything ready. My heart was so sad. I thought about washing my hurting feet with holy water too, but I woke up.

*

emotional time vs. employed time

August 7.

Several people shared a New York Times article called “The Trauma of Being Alive” on Facebook this week. Here’s a quotable line from it: “An undercurrent of trauma runs through ordinary life, shot through as it is with the poignancy of impermanence. I like to say that if we are not suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, we are suffering from pre-traumatic stress disorder.” And later: “The willingness to face traumas — be they large, small, primitive or fresh — is the key to healing from them. They may never disappear in the way we think they should, but maybe they don’t need to. Trauma is an ineradicable aspect of life. We are human as a result of it, not in spite of it.”

The part that resonates for me is the part about dealing with trauma by leaning into it, which is my impulse (and was also Val’s). I find it rather difficult and exhausting to be thrown back into the world of “regular life,” when my internal world is nowhere near regular yet. My yearning is toward experiencing this rich, overwhelming, complicated emotional life, rather than deferring it for days until the cramped weekend.

*

six months to a year

August 11.

Cripes, it’s been a hard few days. Tonight I think I have been crying not about Val’s death but about my life. My life without Val, without the person who helps me feel real and to whom I can tell any damn uncivilized thing I feel. My life with daily physical pain. Now that Val’s gone, I am back to this life in this body of inexplicable, constraining disability. (It’s not the only thing, and there are plenty of worse things that could happen, and I try hard to notice all the richness; but sometimes the pain thing leaches the delight out of everything else.) I remember when the young, sweet, ultimately useless Kaiser doc first saw me for the mysterious and sudden foot pain. She handed me a pamphlet and said casually that it could take six months to a year to get better. My stomach dropped; I was appalled and stunned. Now I would pay money to hear someone tell me with confidence that if I waited one more year this flipping foot hell would be over and I could walk and hike and travel and join anybody’s night out however I want.

*

in which I play the role of Proust’s madeleine, and the pool is a cup of tea

When I turn back the covers at night, sometimes I find my dream from the night before settled like a tule fog on the pillow. I only encounter it if I lie down exactly right, if I happen to arrange my limbs and head just as they were when last I lay there; and then it’s as if my head re-enters its morning outline and the dream pooled there fills my head back up for an immersive moment before it dissipates for good.

There are ways in which time is not sequential but geographically contiguous. Situational. Beads lined up on separate strings called “visits to Kaiser” or “slow walks at the tiny lake.”

Take the community center swimming pool. For three years now I’ve gone to the pool more days than not, trying to get some exercise and stretch my sidelined body. The pool was a place I often came directly from a hard, air-starving morning with Val, or a stop on my way back to Val. It’s where the pool ladies comforted me with their camaraderie and witness. It was a place just for me, where I could finally put my body on autopilot for a minute while my mind went through the latest fears and sorrows and tried to chew them into pieces small enough to swallow.

When all else in my routine fell away and I became a full-time Val-person, I still went to the pool. I still go now. And when I slip into the water of the deep end, it’s the memories, emotions, and musings from the last pool-time (and the long stream of pool-times before those) that lap up around my shoulders. I enter the water and enter the days when I was trying to keep afloat and breathe for us both.

This is one reason that as I remember and process and heal, it’s not along a single linear route. I seem to be healing in a jump-around way, different bits of me healing as they are dipped in the waters of my different time streams.

*

to be, to was, to is.

Usually I like the way words help us pinpoint where we are, so other people can find us. Where we are, who we are, when, why, how. I love how English is so fat with accreted words that we can describe almost any experience with extravagant precision. In storytime I help the kids notice juicy words like when the owl mother “swoops,” and we try them out with full-body expression until we’ve eaten them up and own them. And I love helping the kids amass this sparkling array of tools that will help them make their own personal universes visible to the rest of us.

But right now I am wrestling with some of the inelastic conventions of our language. English presupposes certain binary categories. For example, we must choose between on and off; and female and male (so that if you want to say an unknown person entered the room, you have to convert “them” awkwardly into a plural person).

Also, English has a rule about aliveness. Either you have it, says English, or you don’t. When we die, our verbs change. It happens fast. We who were “is” overnight become “was.” English feels pretty confident about that transition, whereas I am still feeling my way through the time change. The verbs don’t feel adequate to the situation of Val’s being. I feel like there is actually a lot of gray area between “is” and “was,” and it stymies me that my normally nuanced language isn’t quite up to the task. It’s more than frustrating: it’s disembodying. It’s the opposite of actualizing. It makes my internal universe a little less visible, even to myself. It makes Val a little less visible.

But I have noticed a loophole to this “is/was” rule, and it’s one that feels good to me: the is-ness of writers. Writers exist in a third time. When a writer’s work speaks to us, we in turn speak of them in the present. Right? We don’t say “Jane Austen wrote such hilarious books”; we say “I love the way she writes.” Because there is something in the alchemy between writer and reader that renders a living conversation between minds.

When I think about Val’s writing, Val’s words, part of me is heartbroken that she will not be crafting new phrases to give me new glimpses into her startling inner world. But part of me feels like she is still speaking to me, actively. Her writing is. And through her writing, her voice is. She is an illuminating writer. She is still telling me stories.

*

summer snow globe

August 6.

There was this moment today. On my dinner break I left the cold air-conditioned library and went out into the furnacey 95-degree day. I drove down to the empty Woodsomething School and parked in the turnaround at the back, maybe illicitly. The school backs up to a scrawny woods there, and in between there is a narrow slope of grass mowed down to summer stubble. Invasive blackberry vines have colonized the verge, vines snaking up over tree limbs and coiling out into the hot grass like the tentacles of a thorny kraken. The naturalist (and gardener) in me hates how blackberries rampage across the countryside… but man they taste good. Like the perfume of summer.

So in my tender Crocs (the only shoes my feet will tolerate), and with my work pants rolled up to the knee, I stepped into the mess of sticker vines and picked succulent, perfumy, summer-favorite blackberries for the first time in three years. I dropped them dripping into skinny plastic newspaper bags I happened to have in the car. Flowering weeds showered seeds in drifts on my pant legs. I called a friend whose mom is dying, and left her a message. A rabbit hopped out of the hedgerow at the other end beside the classroom windows. From the park on the far side of the tiny woods I could hear the summer sounds of amplified amateurs — some kind of free park event. Sounded like martial arts (lots of grunting screams and heavy bass music) followed by a pretty decent band covering Mellencamp’s “Hurt So Good.” An odd choice maybe for a presumably family-friendly park event, but he’s a Hoosier like me and I grew up with his songs, so it made me smile.

Bees dislodged by my berry-picking skimmed my arms and flew off. My hair stuck to my temples. Feathery weeds tried to mate with my scratched ankles. The rabbit and I were peacefully alone. I sang along to the rock music drifting through the dusty trees: “sink your teeth right through my bones, baby” and felt suffused with summer. Standing there in my difficult, exultant body, right in the middle of this messy confounding beautiful world, I felt time lapping sweetly around me like the summer lakes of my childhood and the words in my head were:

This is a perfect moment of being alive.

*