She said it like she meant it. Like she expected to be reunited with her friend. I cried. I want to go to the big broadcasting studio in the sky with them, and with everyone I love.
These early fall days have been hard for me. Hard in regular ways, "normal people" ways, or at least semi-normal people ways. I get home from work, there is usually about half an hour at home to check in with our new lovely sitter, listen to all the kids at once, greet the neighbor friends who are with them, jumping on the trampoline or playing Magic upstairs, and realize I don't know what to do about dinner. Then it's shuttling Gabriel to soccer or martial arts, Beatrice to swimming, Frances to play rehearsals. Reminders to practice guitar and scoop the kitty litter and sitting with Beatrice while she does her first grade homework. Feeding everyone somehow in the in between times (last night as I was saying goodnight to Gabriel he mentioned that he was starving. Wait - did you eat dinner tonight? Uh...no. Oh, well, I said. Too late now.) Braiding hair, hunting for clean laundry, loading the dishwasher, feeding the cats.
Remembering to breathe, forgetting to breathe, missing Mike. Missing my partner to share it with, to help me with decisions, to get mad at for not thinking to wipe down the kitchen counters after dinner or to thank for taking on a bedtime routine so I could stretch out on the couch with the New Yorker for a few minutes.
Despite the breakneck pace, each day this week I've mentioned to someone that today is the Most Perfect Day of the Entire Year. It's been gorgeous. Then the next day I wake up and it's the Most Perfect Day again. That's just mid September, when even a humble Pennsylvania town glows like a jewel around 6:30 in the evening. I was seeing everything lit by the golden setting sun tonight, noticing the brilliant edges around every leaf and brick and stop sign. I felt sad.
It was nice. Don't get me wrong, it was nice. But it wasn't striking me in the way it did when Mike was sick. I missed the heartwrenching beauty of those cancer falls we had together. Four years ago I walked these same streets; we had just arrived from our old heathy oblivious life in a state of fear and confusion. We were only three or four weeks into the first round of chemo and I remember how yellow the light looked, how unbelievably cute and clever the squirrels seemed, the way the electrical wires slashed through the bright blue sky overhead. Everything was beautiful, so beautiful it hurt.
We had two more falls together like that. We lived with so much uncertainty and pain then, and the ensuing rawness I felt often left me aching before the mundane glories of the small town we live in: its flowers, signs, hawks, children, rowhomes, dogs. The scudding clouds overhead. The red maples and yellow gingkos autumn reliably, miraculously brings.
Anyway. I don't feel the ache this year. I think it's pretty, sure. Nice. Nice day, today. Most Perfect Day of the Year! But heartbreakingly, bonecrushingly, unbearably beautiful? Not so much. Also we're late for swimming, can you guys please get in the car already.
And that makes me sad. I miss the world as I saw it when Mike was alive. I miss the quiet awareness of his grief before so much goodness, his grappling with the reality that he might have to say goodbye to the mundane glories of the world too soon. I miss the subterranean anguish I felt, beneath all my other feelings, for him and with him, a terrible underground river that I didn't always want to acknowledge. Simple pleasures brought tears to his eyes. We were cracked open, each in our own way but also in relationship, feeling our own pain and each others' pain. It could make a regular old Wednesday in September absolutely exquisite.
Add exquisite September to the pile of secondary losses. When your person dies, you lose the whole world you shared with him. It doesn't feel the same anymore because it isn't the same anymore. A September without Mike getting excited about school supply shopping has to lose some of its sparkle. It's just the way it is, which is sad. You lose the future you'd imagined, yes, but you also lose the present you'd come to depend upon and enjoy.
So many secondary losses! Also tertiary, quarternary, hundredthary, gazillionthary losses. They just keep rippling outwards, touching every new season and special day and grocery shopping trip and vacation.
I miss the world we shared together. I miss the person I was with Mike.
I still like being me, but it's a hell of a lot harder. Moving through the world while grieving your most important person is like bushwhacking a path through a new, wild landscape, even if the streets and stoplights and trees still stand. The names of the places haven't changed; no place will ever be the same again.
2 comments:
Powerful.
The gorgeous fall season here in New England is also tarnished by the memories of my wife. In September 2014 she was diagnosed with brain cancer. A year later, at what would be her last doctor’s visit at Brigham and Women’s, she was given four weeks to live. So began an entire series of lasts. We attended our last dinner party, then we had our last walk together, then we had our last movie together, then we had our last meal together and so on and son on until she fell into a shallow coma descending toward death.
For our son who was 12 at the time, memories of that last month are pushed to the surface by the weather and seasonal change. Now 16 he rarely breaks down in tears over missing his mom, except for September and October.
I find it amazing how the brain suppresses memories, until they can be processed effectually. Every year I recall events that happened in that last month that had been unconsciously quelled. So this time of year is difficult because mental images of horrific events that have remained buried are unpredictably thrown in our face to confront. In addition, because fall is the time of annual death, it makes dealing with those memories even more challenging. My son and I combat the sad recollections by recalling the wonderful fall hikes in the White Mountains, raking leaves, Halloween, and we remind ourselves that she is forever with us.
I do wish peace for you and your family. And thank goodness for Experience Camps.
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