Love is forever…One woman’s journey with grief

There is a woman who is 70 years old if she is a day out in my front yard weeding as I write this.  She is part of a 3-person team from the service we hired to take care of a yard that has gone desert jungle during this record-breaking monsoon season.  Our old yard service, headed up by Tito, just stopped showing up and wouldn’t answer calls, and it took us a few months to get off the dime and get a new one.   And by “us” I mean E, who saw that I wasn’t moving too fast on getting it taken care of like I said I would, and so took care of it himself, bless his heart.  People sometimes think love is, or should be, all romance and passion.  But long-time couples will tell you that more often than not, love is making a phone call and taking care of something that your partner really didn’t want to do.  Love is disposing of the dead kamikaze bird at the foot of the picture window so your wife doesn’t have to see it, and before she is forced to pry it from the terrier’s jaws.  Love is stopping for groceries on the way home from work so your beloved doesn’t have to deal with the hassle of the after-work crowds and clueless cashiers.  Love is scraping the ice off  your wife’s car windows before you leave for work in the early morning darkness of a Minnesota winter.  He’s a good man, that E.  I don’t care what they say about him.

There must be thousands of baby palo verdes in the front yard, spawn of the big palo verde tree there that shed its bean pods this spring, and pulling them all is back-breaking work under a summer desert sky.  She is seventy-something, and she’s out there, doing it.  I question the wisdom of having a septuagenarian doing hard physical labor on my property, and wonder if I have insurance for that.  I can’t even do it; I’ve tried.  I get heat stroke in half an hour out there.  And I shake my head for the umpteenth time in the last 8 weeks, trying to understand the genetic lottery that kills a seemingly healthy 55-year-old, makes a 34-year-old too feeble to do her own summer weeding, and has a 75-year-old not only still working, but working outside pulling weeds for hours in a T summer without a care.

The monsoon seems to be petering out, although it may just be a temporary dry spell.  Mostly, we’re getting lots of clouds and gorgeous sunsets, not rain.  The season officially goes for another month, and the air is still humid, but I felt the first whispers of autumn the other night.  I stepped outside to let the dogs out right before bed, and the evening air was cool.  Well, cooler.  It was probably in the 70s, but it was the first night in months that it had cooled off.  In the height of summer here it’s still 100 degrees hours after sunset.

Fall is always a melancholy time for me, but this year, especially, I find myself wanting to resist the change of the season, as if I could do any such thing.  Time marches on, and one might think I’d be glad to distance myself from the summer of 2006, because it has not been kind to me.  But every day that passes brings me further away from the daily life that included A.  I know that that’s inevitable, but I feel it keenly nonetheless, and it smarts.  On the other hand, it is that same distance that allows me to feel more normal more often, and to slowly, gingerly, get back to the business of living.  In some ways I’m moving on; in some ways, I don’t want to, but I know I have little choice.  The world keeps spinning, and it keeps going around the sun, and I cannot but allow that that is, empirically, a good thing, because it forces me to keep going with it, even if I sometimes resent it.

I kissed A’s picture good night the other night, and I smiled to see his face instead of tearing up as usual.  It didn’t last, and I was a bit misty as I headed to bed.  I was a bit misty as I wrote that sentence.  But the smile existed nonetheless, ephemeral but real.  We take our victories where we can.

Wishbone—Art Garfunkel, Buddy Mondlock & Billy Mann

A wishbone was broken
I’m left holding the smaller part
With words left unspoken
They rattle round in my empty heart
Help me start to lay this burden down
On the solid ground

I wish I would have told you that
The air you breathe was everything