Love is forever…One woman’s journey with grief

Living in the desert as I do, there is a reverence and appreciation for rainy days here that would no doubt baffle most people where rain is a regular event. Thursday morning as I was on my way to the dentist, the DJ on the radio was going on about how gorgeous it was outside, the skies gray and heavy, the rain that started last night still coming down, the roads wet and hissing with the splash and spray of passing cars.

When I got to work I was chatting with a friend (the same one who found my blog and I was sure I’d lost forever…funny how things change), and she said she was loving this weather. I have marveled at the transformation a rainy day imposes upon this desert landscape, and I like a good storm, but solid rain just brings me down, and I’m scraping bottom as it is. I told her the rain just matched and exacerbated my sadness. But on sunny days I feel insulted at old Sol’s audacity, as the rain continues little abated inside me. There is no pleasing me, which is why huddled under a quilt is probably the best place for me right now.

It seemed odd to be going to the dentist already; I swear I was just there. 6 months passes by so quickly, and you cannot know how much your life can change in so short a time. Hell, it only takes a minute. I was glad I was going today, when I made the appointment. I was going to have a bright and shiny smile to beam at A when he picked me up from the airport tonight. I was so excited—somehow I’d managed to get a non-stop flight from T to SJ, so leaving after work would get me there by 8, our normal chat time, and we’d have the whole evening. Would that we did.

A and I spent a lot of time dancing in his living room, although it was more swaying than dancing. We loved music, and neither of us could hear it without moving, at least tapping a toe. We loved being close. So dancing was a natural, and one of our favorite things to do. My favorite memory from my last visit to him involved dancing. It was after dinner, and we were dancing (ostensibly) in the living room. But we were talking as we swayed, and I don’t remember what got me started…maybe we were talking about the totally skeezy McDonald’s we stopped at for lunch and potty break in SC. But I ended up asking him if he’d ever seen the bit about the pink Wonderbread welfare burger from Eddie Murphy’s Delirious. He hadn’t, so I did the whole bit for him. I couldn’t finish it without busting up, and by the time I was done, we were both laughing so hard all pretense of dancing had come to an end. We were literally holding each other up, our knees weak from laughing so hard, tears in our eyes, trying to catch our breath.

And those few minutes perfectly encapsulate who we were together.

Tuesday was weirdly okay. I was still feeling heavy and sad, but I was more functional than I’d been in a week, and I hardly knew what to make of it. It was unexpected, and different than the numbness I was feeling. I looked at his pictures with sad longing, but not with tears in my eyes. I even played guitar for awhile, and it felt good. I’d been on a break from it because of my various hand injuries/issues, and then of course this last week it was hard to play. But when I picked V up, she was a dear old friend and we seemed to be in sync despite the time apart, even more so than usual. I sang the songs I’d learned or written for or because of A, and held it together still, and I felt hope. Was it a fluke? Was it a corner I was turning? Was it a delusion of okayness I was succumbing to? I didn’t know. I still don’t. I’ve never been here before, and there is no road map.

The only other time in my life I lost someone I loved a lot was my maternal grandmother, 21 years ago. I was 13 years old, and I answered the phone when the sheriff called and asked to talk to my mom. I was a kid, but I knew, even though he wouldn’t do anything but leave a message to have my mom call him back when she got home. It seems it is my lot in life to speak to law enforcement about the deaths of those I love most. I hereby resign; I don’t want this job. I have been thanked by his family, and now one of his dearest friends, for calling the police to find him. I cannot say it was my pleasure. I don’t need or deserve thanks. I loved him; I could, and would, do no less.

It seems Tuesday was a fluke, as Wednesday dawned and remained less okay, and more teary. Mornings are hard, as I have to literally wake up to this reality, again and again, and readjust. Sleep is a boon, an escape, and I’m getting lots of it. I don’t keep the late hours I used to, because I don’t spend evenings talking to A, and then try to squeeze in other stuff between his bedtime and mine. Of course, that means I get up early, too, before the alarm lately, even on weekends. That supposed healer, Time, is also an enemy to me as I have so much of it I have to try to fill now that I didn’t when it was time I spent with him, and I feel his absence so keenly at those moments. The book I’d been reading was one he’d recommended, that Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus book, so that’s back on the shelf, unfinished, and I’m pretty unmotivated to start another right now, despite having tons of time to read.

Friends of faith have tried to tell me that he is with me, watching over me, and knows everything I want him to know, so there is no unfinished business. I’d like to believe that. You don’t know how much I’d like to believe that was true. I understood, on an intellectual level, people’s desire for god and heaven. Now I understand that desire that on a visceral level. Believing he was someplace better and hearing everything I want him to hear would be comforting. However, this isn’t so much a foxhole this atheist is in, but rather, a blast crater, and I won’t be a born-again mourner ex post facto. And even if I were willing to buy in to heaven, I’d still have to deal with the issue of a god who thinks he needs my sweetheart more than I do, which makes god an unbelievable bastard. My friend P says it doesn’t matter if I believe in god; he believes in me. If I’m wrong, I’ll be the gladdest person in the world to learn that’s the case. The energy that was A is somewhere; maybe it’s here, with me. I don’t know. I’m not above a little agnosticism to get through this. Certainty is a childish luxury I can no longer afford, nor muster up.

I have become hyperaware of how prevalent the expression of death and killing is in language every day, my own and everyone else’s. “Would you kill your barking dog, please?” I asked E, and then I was horrified at what I’d just said. Fortunately, he declined to comply with my request. I hear it everywhere, in songs, in common conversation, and I cringe inside every time, for it is no longer theory or metaphor for me. It’s not that I don’t think people have an understanding of what mortality really means when they use it; maybe they understand it better than I do, and are more comfortable with death as part of life than I am. It certainly wouldn’t be hard to achieve that. But the only people who talk about death that matter-of-factly are those who are still alive, so what the hell do we know? I don’t deal with death well on any level, let alone one this personal; road-kill has reduced me to tears on more than one occasion, and even the abstract is hard for me to ponder, for it is, and always has been, inextricably linked with pain, that of the one dying and that of the survivors. I fear it, for myself and others, and I believe I will fight for every last breath coming to me. I used to fear I would die young, before I had time to do what I wanted to do, to do what I was meant to do. Then I got over that for a long while, and thought it was no longer an issue for me. It’s back, in full force. E tells me that 55 isn’t as young as I want to think it is, but in this day and age, it’s younger than it used to be. The Bible promises us 3 score and 10 years. I was really counting on that. Obviously, it’s not a source to be trusted. Fucker. But actuarial tables make a similar promise. I cannot get over being cheated so cruelly. And I’m not the only one. There are his family and friends, too.

Mortality’s on my mind, and the musings are not pleasant. We always think there’ll be time for things, “all the time in the world,” “whole life ahead of you,” when in fact it may be only another second, another hour, another day, and even if it’s decades, it’s not enough. Not nearly enough. You never can have “enough” time with the people you love.

Early in our correspondence, A and I talked about our atheism, and he said this:
“You had said that, not believing in reincarnation, you’ve got a lot of lives to live in this one. I couldn’t agree more. The notion that this is all preparation for the afterlife would make be think the here and now means nothing. To me, not believing in an afterlife means I should enjoy things now, as they present themselves. What a wasted life, it seems to me, to be spent in preparation for something that may or may not be.”

He was wise, my A.

While I was writing this, The Byrds came up on shuffle play, with this song. Almost 9,000 songs, and this one comes up, one I’m not even sure I’ve ever heard it more than once before. I’ve listened to it over and over now. All my Byrds came from A. He loved him some 12-string Ric. I never told him, but I was going to save up my gig tips and get him one some day. I have so far earned $32 in tips; it was going to take a long time, but I thought we’d have it. It was funny… songs specifically connected to A, particularly George Harrison songs, always seemed to pop up when he logged in to chat. I guess it’s still happening. He always enjoyed serendipity; me too, although right now it has a sharp edge.

Here Without You

Daytime just makes me feel lonely
At night I can only dream about you
Girl you’re on my mind nearly all of the time
It’s so hard being here without you

Words in my head keep repeating
Things that you said when I was with you
And I wonder is it true do you feel the same way too
It’s so hard being here without you, being here without you

Though I know it won’t last I’ll see you some day
It seems as though that the day will come never
But there’s one thing I’ll swear though you’re far away
I’ll be thinking about you forever

The streets that I walk on depress me
The ones that were happy when I was with you
Still with all the friends I know and with all the things I do
It’s so hard being here without you being here without you

Grief is a tidal wave that overtakes you,
smashes down upon you with unimaginable force,
sweeps you up into its darkness,
where you tumble and crash against unidentifiable surfaces,
only to be thrown out on an unknown beach, bruised, reshaped…
Grief will make a new person out of you,
if it doesn’t kill you in the making. –Stephanie Ericsson

I have been doing some reading on the web about grieving. Apparently, everything I’m going through and feeling is “normal,” the irony of which is enough to choke on, and its taste is bitter. I guess there is some solace in that, though, because I’ve been feeling some pretty weird shit, calmness and calamity alternating at their seeming whim. This morning at Jamba Juice there was a different couple sitting outside at a table playing cards. They were probably in their mid-to-late 50s. He had a gray goatee and was wearing a baseball cap, and I looked away very quickly, the tears already springing to my eyes. But I looked at him again when I walked out, and watched him light up a cigarette. I wanted to scream “NO! Don’t you realize what you’re doing??? Do you want to hurt that lady across from you like that?” and I started crying in the car. Life has become so precious to me, life by the second, and the idea that anyone would fritter it away on something known to kill, when people die for seemingly no reason…that just wrecks me. I know, intellectually, that this is the stuff of life, and you cannot live with the constant spectre of your own death in the forefront of your mind. I didn’t, before. But right now, it seems to be front and center. I worry about everyone. I worry about me. Everything’s so uncertain and unpredictable and dangerous now to me.

The most compassionate article I came across so far dealt with myths about grieving, most of which involved timetables and expectations of others as to what it should look like. It also talked about the difference between grieving and mourning. Grieving is the internal emotional work; mourning is making that public, visible on the outside. In days gone by, there were rituals for this, including wearing mourning black for a year, so that people knew to handle you with care until you felt ready to relinquish that mantle, until you’d healed enough to rejoin the world in some kind of forward-looking way. Nowadays, you’re just supposed to stuff it down and stoically go back to the “important” work of shuffling papers at your desk and washing dishes and worrying about weeds in the back yard, which is totally ridiculous, but there it is. I got an e-mail at work this afternoon, exhorting me to be excited that July was going to be an over $1 million month for our company, and all I could do was think “so?” and delete it. I talked to my mother and father Sunday, and my mother offered up my cousin’s wedding as something to look forward to. I am not yet ready to look forward too much; I’m still looking backward, awash in memories, in feelings of loss, missing him as I spend time rereading and pouring over his pictures until I can’t anymore. I am sad. And I have a right to be.

Instinctively, I seem to have found those old rituals for myself, despite their formal absence in modern American society. I am not dressed in black every day, but my grieving does inform my dress. I have been choosing comfortable shoes and soft shirts to cuddle me, and shorts with pockets to hold my hanky, salt-streaked with tears, to which I’ve attached the grasshopper pin A gave me last Christmas. I wear no makeup. I wear no jewelry. I wear no perfume. I’m not shaving my legs. I stick a barrette in my hair and call it good. I am clean, and clothed, and ambulatory. That is the best I can offer right now, and I make no excuses or apologies. I have printed out pictures of him, and when I finally get them into the frames I bought, (wood, of course, because he was a cabinetmaker, and most of them in natural finish, because that was his favorite, both aesthetically and because staining’s a lot of damn work), I will put together what will amount to a shrine, or in the Mexican tradition, an ofrenda, a memorial that I hope will, in time, just bring a smile to my face to see his and remember the life and love we shared. I started writing to him in my journal last night, pages and pages until I was spent, to tell him all the things mundane and personal I meant to tell him the next time we talked. I don’t hold back when I e-mail friends about him, and they ask about how I’m feeling, and I talk about everything with E, who is my hero in all this. It takes a giant of a man, with the strongest and biggest of hearts, to hold his wife as she mourns her lover. Every site I read said that’s a good thing to do, to talk about the loss and hurt, and the person lost, and truly, it’s the only thing that takes the sharpest edge off the pain. I let the tears flow when they come, and am not particularly interested in putting on a brave face for anyone. I’m working slowly at work, doing what I need to, as I need to, to cope with my feelings, and I’ll just have to be excused from being brilliant and efficient for awhile. This is a big damn deal, and I have to take my time. I have no choice. As with anything else, it’s pay now or pay later, with interest, and grief will not be denied. You can postpone it indefinitely, but there is nothing more patient than death, and it will wait for you, and trip you repeatedly until you stop and pick it up.

I’d had it in mind that I would not put too much of that mourning here, because I know it’s hard for people to stand in the face of such ongoing, relentless expression of naked emotion. I know no one knows what to say. I wouldn’t, either. I know dealing with a friend’s loss brings up uncomfortable thoughts for everyone, as the reality of mortality hits a bit too close to home. But then I thought “fuck that.” When I think, when I need to work something out, when I’m troubled, I write. (I was A’s favorite writer, edging out no less than long-time favorite Joseph Conrad.) It’s how I operate. And I need people to listen. No one has to feel compelled to comment or try to cheer me up. I just need patience, understanding, and time. This is something that I cannot go around; going through is the only option. My life has changed, and there’s no undoing that, as much as I’d like to. I have to learn how to make my way in this new life of mine, and it affects E, too. His strong wife has become fragile. So many routines we counted on have just vanished, and it will take an adjustment on both our parts. I have to tend my wounds. I’ll know you’ve been by, and are “listening,” even if you don’t say a word, and believe it or not, it’s enough. That’s what I need—sympathetic ears to listen to me as I walk this dark path for awhile. And if it’s too hard for you to read, I understand that, too, and maybe you’ll check back in awhile. I don’t know how long it’s going to take. But I need to do what I need to do, and it seems the only way to ease the pain inside is to get it outside. I know I have more calmness when I do.

I’m in mourning. Please, handle me with care.

Today I saw a bald man with a beard at Target and lost it. I almost lost it in the Target as E shopped for a new frying pan. A and I were in the same aisle of Target, 900 miles away, the last time I visited him. He is everywhere but where I want him to be, which is alive and waiting for me. I have ordered books that may help, once I have the heart to open them. But this is going to take much longer than I can even conceive of. Of that much, I am sure. There are moments of clarity and understanding; there are moments when I feel like I “get” that he’s gone. And there are moments of complete dissolution where I cannot understand a damn thing, least of all why he was taken from me. And I never really know why it’s one type of moment or the other.

It is my father’s 57th birthday today. I almost forgot, and what reminded me is the date on a bunch of old e-mails I’m mailing from one account to another, e-mails from A from early in our friendship. I had to laugh a little at the one that said the last thing he needed was another wife or girlfriend at this point in the divorcing process. At that point, I was neither. I was just a friend. What is the strange arithmetic that takes one man at 55 and leaves another? I have always worried that my dad would fall victim to a heart attack. I have more reason to worry now.

There was a time that I thought the universe was on my side, that it loved me and wanted me to be happy. Not now. There was a time when I thought the world was largely good, and filled with wonder and joy. Now it seems to me a dangerous and unpredictable place. A would be sad to know that, that my feelings had changed, and he would hope it’s just temporary. I hope that, too.

All around me, everything seems so trivial, and I want to scream “How can you laugh when I hurt like this?” Or to quote our beloved Beatles, “How can you laugh, when you know I’m down?” But the things I talked about and thought about were trivial, or rather, just small, before this happened, and that is the stuff of life. A and I often spoke of the fact that life was the small, meaningful, precious moments. It’s not trivial. It IS life, and I cannot fault people for enjoying that. It’s what we’re meant to do.

Even today, I laughed so hard as E spoke as P, only P was a bad-ass militant black woman instead of a 9-lb. shih tzu. I looked up at him with the tears still in my eyes, and said “Would you knock it off??? I’m trying to cry here!” Those are the moments that life is made of. Treasure them. Every last one of them is more precious than we can understand.

And so it is done.

He has been cremated. There will be a family service at his sister’s house this afternoon. I will not be there. I just found out about it this morning. His sister, his daughter, and his wife (they were in a long process of divorcing) discussed it, and while his wife was okay with me being there, they didn’t want to have to deal with the questions, and have it distract from the purpose of the service, which was to celebrate a wonderful man. I understand. Now is not the time. I can only assume that they are as devastated as I am, and I don’t wish to cause them any further discomfort on top of pain this all-encompassing. And I think I could not have grieved as I needed to if I had to hide who I was to him, and who he was to me. They were not expecting me. And none of us were expecting this.

They want to meet me, though, his daughter, his sister, his brother, and his closest friends, and so I await the scheduling of that. I still have my ticket to go visit him next weekend, and perhaps that’s when I’ll go. As his sister said in her e-mail this morning, if we don’t meet soon, we may never, and that would be a shame. It’s easy to let time pass and then too much passes and it would just be awkward. More awkward.

I am staying home today, to lie in bed and cry and mourn. I’ve gone to work all week, trying to function by way of distraction, and the belief that shutting down entirely can’t be good for me, however tempting. It’s been hard, and I have broken down many, many times at work. I decided I didn’t need to work so hard to hold it together today. Last night I went through pictures to select some to share with his family and reread some old chats. I found the one, a little over a year old, where we talked about his sister-in-law passing away and my worries about if something happened to him, and he gave me his daughter’s e-mail. That one was especially hard to read, especially when he said “People my age aren’t supposed to be dying.” I couldn’t agree more. And he said he’d live forever, and I told him he’d damn well better. This is so wrong. So very, very wrong.

Yesterday I stopped for a smoothie on the way to work, because my stomach can’t tolerate much solid food and I can’t eat noodles for breakfast like I normally would, because that’s what he ate for breakfast most days. At a table playing cards outside the restaurants at the strip mall was an elderly couple, well into their 70s. I started crying as soon as I got the car door shut. Why do they get all that time, and we did not? Not that I would take that time away from them. I just want mine. I just want my sweetie back, and there’s nothing that can make that happen.

The bitch of it is, there are moments when I can force myself not to think about it actively. But I don’t want to not think about him. I thought about him all the time when he was alive; I can do no less now. And yet thinking about him wrecks me. But there is no lesser evil in choosing between numb and completely distraught.

I am a woman of words, and that will be the thing that brings me comfort. Talking about him, in e-mails to friends, to his brother and sister, and talking about him to E seems to help a little bit. And because our long-distance relationship was largely conducted via e-mail and daily chat, I have a vast archive of the bulk of our conversations. I have literally thousands of e-mails from him. And when I read his words, I hear his voice, and he is not so very far away. It is not the same. It is not nearly enough. But it is all I have.

What wrecks me most is thinking of all the little things I so loved about him that I will never have again. All our in-jokes. Our pet names for each other. Holding him. Hearing his voice, his laugh. It is too much sacrifice, all at once, to have someone you love taken from you. It rips you apart.