Living with it
It’s thunder and lightning playing outside my window as I write this, strange weather. The annual neighborhood holiday hayride just got rained out, and I don’t think anyone was expecting that. I haven’t heard thunder since September. The monsoon was unusually long and heavy this year, both matching and exacerbating my mood and my tears this summer.
What can I say? I survived the holidays. I don’t think they were as bad for me as everyone said they’d be, but they were certainly bad enough. I was unquestionably down. Every time someone wished me a “Merry Christmas,” I gave an approximation of what I hoped was a smile, and thought “Merry? That’s a bit too much to ask.” I wasn’t trapped in the depths of despair, I’m glad to say, but “merry” I was not. The worst, I fear, is yet to come.
I’m trying not to psych myself out for this upcoming trip to guitar camp, but have little doubt that it will be much harder on me than all of the holidays put together. It was our trip, but only I will be taking it this year. That’s going to hurt. It hurts just thinking about it, so I don’t too much; when I do, I end up in tears.
I suppose it’s entirely possible that going there might be cathartic, that somehow grace might be bestowed upon me, and more healing than hurting result. But I don’t know. I don’t know much of anything these days, and have given my crystal ball to Goodwill. That is not to say that I don’t think, ponder, mull, and speculate. I do that as much as ever, but without the certainty I once had that my conclusions were the right ones, or the only possible ones, or even close.
I guess I’m living with it now, living with the grief, living with the myriad emotions that go along with it. Oddly, I somehow feel that I’m living more authentically, at least on an emotional level, than I ever have in my life. Because I’m not just focused on the positive emotions, and have little energy or desire to control the so-called negative ones. It feels like I’m living fully, wholly, human. I feel what I feel when I feel it, instead of arguing with myself about how I “should” be feeling.
I got a book of quotations from my mother for Christmas, and on one of the pages I flipped through was this quotation: “Enjoy when you can, and endure when you must.” (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe) And I thought that perfectly described my life currently, and perhaps for the duration. Perhaps it is the secret others have already figured out, and I finally, truly, get. I mean, what else can we do, at any point in our lives, whether we are wrecked with grief or back in the halcyon days where we just had a crappy day? (God, wouldn’t we welcome THAT now?) The sadness is never far from the surface, I’ll admit. It’s only been 5 months, and I really don’t expect otherwise. In fact, I’m surprised to be doing as well as I am (knock wood). I take what I get, enjoying and enduring in turn.
I got a nice Christmas card from the wife of A’s best friend that heartened me immensely, and have been reading another book that’s been encouraging me to be patient, live my life, and know that we’ll meet up again in time. Some days I can accept that as enough. Yesterday and today, for example. The days before that not so much, and I cannot guess what tomorrow will bring. But I know that every day brings me one day closer to him again. It may be a strange thing to find comforting, but you take what you can, and it does comfort me. I’m not going to quibble.
I am doing more than just existing and surviving now. I am playing out regularly again at open mics, and have a gig tomorrow night. I’m teaching myself a new hobby. I have plans for the future, with the bone-deep understanding that that future may not ever come, but I’m okay with that, too.
It doesn’t hurt to smile. No, what hurts now is not sharing those smiles with him as I once did, and I cannot even say it’s pain. It’s a deep wistfulness, dipped in sadness and garnished with longing. I tell him about my day, what’s going on, but the witticisms and the silly stories from work aren’t quite as fun when there’s no response from the other side, so I don’t tell quite so many.
In the book I was reading, it talked about bereavement being a lifetime commitment, quite matter-of-factly. I appreciated that, that someone SAID it, because it feels like it’s going to be. There is no going back; I will always have lost him, and that event will be forever recorded in my growth rings, like a year of drought, or a year of endless rain, affecting everything comes after it in some way. Not all of the effects will be negative; I can see that even now. In fact, I have to say that I’ve become more and more aware of the profound effect he had on my life, for the better, in ways I couldn’t have guessed, even as I thought I knew that when he was here. I don’t even know how to explain it. But I am glad of it. I am very glad that our love together, our time together, and the man he was all by himself, has so deeply permeated my soul, for he can never be taken away from me again as he has been.