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.