Depends on where you’re standing
On the way to lunch Tuesday, E asked me how I was doing. “Okay,” I said, and he said “Only okay?”
It’s a fair enough question, one I would ask, too, and have. I said “Okay is about as good as it gets these days. I’ll take it.” I felt like I’d given him good news, actually. An “okay” day constitutes a pretty good day for me lately, everything being relative. Monday was not an okay day. Monday was a sad day. My days are categorized as “okay,” “sad,” and “horrible” since A passed on, and while empirically “okay” isn’t really all that great, it’s the top of the scale when you’re grading on a curve life’s thrown you, like this one.
An “okay” day for me means the grief is manageable, there but not insistent. A “sad” day means the grief is heavy, front-and-center, weighing me down and making concentration on anything else difficult. A “horrible” day starts its life as a sad day and involves a complete breakdown at some point, a temporary return to the very worst of the emotional storm. Friday was mostly okay, got sad after work, and ended horrible. That’s not unusual; I find the nights are hardest. In a way, living with grief is like when you’re fighting a cold. You know you’re not really well, but you feel reasonably human when you wake up after a good night’s sleep. Then by the end of the day, you’re worn out, the hacking cough won’t quit, and you feel like you’ve been hit by a semi, and then subsequently run over by all 18 wheels. On an “okay” day, it’s only a hit-and-run by a Yugo. It still hurts, but you don’t have to be scraped up off the road with a spatula.
Context is a funny thing. The same 50 degrees that would’ve had me outside without a jacket and praising the glorious Spring weather when I lived in Minnesota is now my threshold for donning sweatpants, fuzzy socks, and an afghan and firing up the microwave for hot cocoa. “Okay” wouldn’t have been anything to write home about two months ago; in fact, “just okay” would’ve been a potential red flag of an approaching funk. Now, I consider myself lucky when the okay days happen. Okay days give me hope that there will be more of them.