Love is forever…One woman’s journey with grief

I went up the mountain Sunday with my friend J.  She and I worked on a little project together that culminated with our field trip.  We left behind a desert floor that was plenty hot, especially for October, and found ourselves in a shady grove of quaking aspen 40 degrees cooler, where long sleeves were a must.

I realized that I had not been up the mountain in just over 2 years, and the last time I went, it was with A at my side.  I was showing him the sights here, his first (and as it would turn out, his only) trip to the desert.  It was hot that day, but we were caught in a cold, torrential downpour of the kind you really don’t want to be driving in as we reached the top of the mountain.  Our destination was the Octoberfest they put on at the ski lodge.  As we got out of the car, it was foggy, cold, and the thunder was still rolling through the mountains.   Soggy dancers, looking deflated in once-fluffy skirts and sharp lederhosen, streamed out into the parking lot; they had been rained out.  We had a good time anyway, though we skipped the brats and sauerkraut and instead went on into town for pie.  One of my favorite pictures of him was taken that day, the one that graces "the shrine."  It seems prophetic now.  He is looking back at me over his shoulder, and behind (or ahead of him, if he’d kept walking) was a partly cloudy sky slowly clearing from the storm, the great blue beyond.  Was the future told in that picture?  Sometimes I think so.  Mostly I think he was one hell of a sexy guy, and it was my good fortune that he preferred sleeveless shirts.

It’s hard to believe I haven’t been up in 2 years.  But when I think about it, I realize that the last 15 months have kind of been a wash.  They have slipped away faster than I can comprehend, and yet I feel like he’s been gone forever too long.  Both are true.

There was a point in my grief where I stopped hating every day that passed because it brought me further away from our life together, and took an initially bitter comfort in the fact that every day that passed would bring me closer to him again.  I certainly wasn’t getting any younger.  But I am also not in a hurry.  My time will come when it does; that much I know.  I know that, barring my own stupidity, I have no control over that.

I no longer have a grip on time, if I ever did.  There is eternity in every moment, and years are a blur as they pass, and I often wonder if that is a more accurate view of the whole “time” concept than I’ve ever had before.  Who is to say?  I read books that tell me that time does not exist on the other side; it only exists here in the material world.  That would be cool, but I cannot believe it just because someone says it.  But I want to.  I want to believe that when I get there, it will feel like no time has passed, and we just spoke yesterday.

Anyway, despite my realization of the last time I was there, it was a good day.  J doesn’t seem to mind that I talk about A, and when I apologized for not stringing 3 sentences together without mentioning him at least once, she said it seemed normal to her.  I am blessed to have such an understanding friend; there are few such in my life.  She, too, knows grief, and too much of it in recent years.  It has made her vast heart even more compassionate.

The weather was beautiful, the trees were gorgeous, the mountains grand and inspiring, and we both exclaimed once again that we could not believe we lived in such a beautiful place.  We sat in the woods and ate cookies and drank hot spiced cider and talked like the old friends we are, and I felt fortunate.  Fortunate to have such a dear friend.  Fortunate to sit on the gold-strewn forest floor, only the sound of the wind in the leaves breaking in upon our quiet visit.  Fortunate to feel the sun on my face.  Fortunate to live half an hour downhill from this idyll, and to have the wheels to get us there.  Fortunate to actually feel fortunate again, when for so long I felt cursed.

Miracles happen every day.

I’ve been making travel plans today.  I have my guitar camp trip in January, and a family trip to Mexico in February.  It was a little disconcerting to see how much vacation time I’ve managed to accrue to allow me to not only do both trips, but to extend the Mexico one an extra day, and still end up having a week’s vacation available come Memorial day.
 
I’ve never had a surplus of vacation time.  It took me 10 months to get out of the red for the “vacation” time I ended up taking right after A died.  I didn’t have the option of taking time off to get my bearings; in fact, I was at work when I found out he had died.  Most days I managed to get to work, but not much work happened.  Almost none, in fact.  I spent a lot of time at my desk crying silently, in the bathroom crying hard, but always silently.  When I wasn’t doing that, I was zoning out, or reading old e-mails he’d sent me.  I left early for weeks; some days, I didn’t come back after lunch; on really bad days, I just stayed home.  It all added up fast.
 
And when he was still here, I spent a lot of my vacation time making quick trips out to California to see A whenever a long weekend was feasible, or taking time off when he visited here, plus my own vacation plans.  I had to balance the time, and there was never enough of it.  And while I’m glad to have the vacation time, the fact that I do was another unexpected reminder:  You’re not going to California anymore. 
 
I got the Mexico plane ticket squared away easily enough.  My family, a place I’ve never been before; the only hesitation was whether or not I could stand that much togetherness.  It says a lot about where my head is at since A’s passing that I decided to take the extra day with them because my parents are actually slightly older than he and could go anytime, and I wouldn’t want to regret missing that day.  Perspective—I’ve got it by the truckload.

But then I started looking at plane tickets to San Francisco for camp.  Even that wasn’t so bad, and I didn’t even pause to think, as I did last year, that I’m not supposed to be flying into San Francisco; I’m supposed to be driving up with A.  Then I decided to consider going into Oakland instead to save money, and pulled up a map to see how far the two airports are from each other.  And that’s when it hit me.  The map with all the place names we’d passed every time we went into The Fucking City, places he would tell me about because he worked there once or knew someone there, or I recognized because I’d seen the road signs so many times—that was what slammed me right in the heart.  I could feel it like a physical sensation.
 
The ambushes don’t bring me to my knees anymore, but they often make my eyes hot with tears.  The acute phase passes pretty quickly with a few deep breaths, but the emotional hangover can last a little longer.  Though I have to admit, I was probably primed for this; it’s been an up-and-down week again.  I’m fine when I’m busy and engaged, but when I’m alone with my thoughts, the sadness and the ache for him rolls in, as if it were just awaiting its cue.  As has been true all along, I don’t know what causes one day be easier or harder than another. 
 
Thursday night I was writing to him in my journal, and I got lost in my pictures of him as the pen fell still.  They are my screensaver on my laptop, which I angle so that I can see it from my chair as I write.  And for the first time ever, I looked at him and realized how much older than I he was.  It’s not like I didn’t know, but it had barely figured in our relationship.  Last night, though, I looked at the pictures and saw an old man, and I don’t know why.  He’s never appeared that way to me before, nor ever when he was alive, despite the hair that was silver on the sides and in his beard, and missing on top.  All I could think of was that the pictures were static, and that without a continual fix of seeing him animated, smiling, laughing, frowning, thinking, maybe something was lost.  Maybe it was something in me that was struck in that moment—I’d been kind of low all afternoon and evening, missing him—because I don’t see that today.  Today I just see my sweetie as he was:  vibrantly alive and beautiful.  Maybe it was part of my brain making me see that he wasn’t all that young, that this wasn’t all that unexpected, to which part I say “Screw you.”  He was too young to go.
 
I never know why I am sadder some days than others, why some days I have extra bonus missing-him on top of the baseline missing-him I do like breathing:  constantly and only half aware.  I sometimes think it’s when the reality of the situation becomes clear to me once again.  There is no half-assing this death business; when people do it, they are stubborn about it, refusing to come back.  You reconcile yourself to days, and weeks, and months without them, but they keep staying gone.  It’s an insistent absence that you have to come to terms with over and over again, as once more the “never agains” become as clear and painful as shattered glass.  No matter how carefully you clean it up, you’re likely to end up bleeding a little.

A and I had a running gag that when we were “dying” of laughter, we would bequeath our guitars to each other, because it was all over for us, and whom else would they go to but each other?  After awhile, he didn’t even have to tell me, “I’m dyin’ here”; he’d just say “Take the Tele.  She’s yourn.”

Perhaps a morbid bit of joking, but certainly it indicated our intentions, and of course, we never thought we’d be in a position for it to come to pass, not for a long, long time, anyway; I figured by the time the Tele was mine, I’d be too old and arthritic to play her.  Of course, the very existence of this blog tells you how that turned out. 

I screwed up my courage in an early e-mail response to his brother, who had said he hoped he’d get to keep the 12-string, and I mentioned to him that A always wanted me to have the Telecaster.  There were multiple instruments at A’s place, but I only wanted the one, the one he loved most.  I never got a response from him about it, and I know that time period was, and is, a blur for me, so perhaps my request got missed, rather than ignored.  I figured I’d have another opportunity to bring it up, but that opportunity never presented itself, and I just couldn’t ask apropos of nothing; it seemed creepy, and I didn’t want to be even marginally creepy with these people I’d just met under the most horrible circumstances, and whom I wanted to hold on to if I could.  I hoped at some point someone would think to offer me a memento, or ask me if there was anything I wanted of his personal effects, which included many gifts I’d given him, and some of my personal property I’d lent him, mostly books.  That never happened though, and if I didn’t have it in my possession when he passed, I wasn’t getting it.  It still hurts; I won’t lie to you.

When it became clear that there was no way I was going to get the guitar, E suggested I buy one just like it, and I appreciated the suggestion; it came from a very kind place in his heart.  And I really did think about it, but after awhile, I decided that what I wanted was A’s, the one that he loved and played and touched, and any other one would just be a placeholder, a sad and ultimately unsatisfying attempt to kid myself.  I wanted to play his guitar; a different one would just be an electric guitar I would be unlikely to play.

I didn’t think seriously about getting another guitar until recently, when major hand, wrist, and forearm problems made playing my acoustic guitars nigh on impossible, and certainly not pleasant.  I have an electric that is easier to play, but very heavy, and I’ve been having a shoulder problem, too.  And I remembered A’s Tele, and how it was so easy to play.  And then I went to Wisconsin and played B’s Stratocaster (same company), and my fingers remembered, too, how easy it was to play, and I decided that perhaps I could do with one after all.  And I would get the Tele in his honor.

I had a bit of debate with myself, though, because I realized that I’d really prefer a different color than his, if I had the option.  It’s a little laughable, how much trouble I had over that point, like I was betraying him if I got anything other than what he had, but so it was.  Of course the color I wanted would quadruple the price.  But then I found one on eBay that had everything I wanted at the right price.  It was a sign, so I bought it.  It arrived last Thursday.

It was part accommodation of my physical issues, part retail therapy, and part homage to the man who was instrumental (pun intended) in my becoming a guitar player, and a guitar junkie to boot; this is guitar #7.  But I find that I really like seeing a guitar like his hanging beside his pictures.  It seems right.

The lack of mementos all along has forced me to reckon with the lesson that all these “things” are merely symbols of the man, and one symbol is probably as good as another, even if I ascribe magic to the things that were his that would make them so much more desirable.  Though a guitar is not just a thing; it’s a relationship.  And while it’s a symbol of him, and the guitar I wanted but could not have, it is a symbol of healing, too.  Because early on, I wanted to leave everything in state, and get exact copies where I didn’t have the original.  I couldn’t imagine doing otherwise.  I so desperately needed things to be the same, even if I had to create the illusion that they were, even though I knew there was no way they could be.

But as I’ve grown stronger, I have been able to do things, or in this case, have things, that are remembrances of him, but with my personal mark on them, and I think that shows healing.  Like working out in my shop.  I like being out there, because he worked all day in his shop, and I like having that connection.  But what I’m doing in my shop is very different than what he did; he would’ve never spent days sawing shell and gluing his fingers together with superglue; he wasn’t a big fan of inlay on guitars, actually.  It is the same with this guitar:  it is a remembrance of him, but it is all my style.  I think that’s probably healthy.  These things echo the past, but exist in the present with an eye toward the future.  It is about him; but it is also very much me.

I feel varying degrees of comfort with such actions, to be honest.  Despite all the progress towards recovery I’ve made, in a very real way, there’s a big part of me that has never left the morning of July 17, 2006, when my world fell apart.  The weeks and months fly by, and yet I know I’m still as much there as I am here.  I really just want things the way they were, with him playing his guitar.  But I know that is impossible.  So ruling out the impossible, I consider my options.  I don’t regret getting the guitar, even though it’s not his.  It is what it is.  The fact that I’m good with that must mean I’m moving with this.  I don’t say “moving on.”  This is my life; I cannot move on from myself.  And he is my love.  I would not leave him behind.

Dear Sweetie,

Chilliwack and windy here today; the wind blew hard all night and is still going.  It’s 81 where you are supposed to be, though it started at 58 this morning.  But I knew you wouldn’t have given in and gone with pants instead of shorts.  Not yet.  Last night I was looking at your pictures while I played my guitar, and I was so glad you were such an insistent wearer of shorts; I have lots of pictures of your fantastic legs.  Your sister never did scan those ones of you for me that she said she would; there was a great one of you and Princess Smiley that I really would’ve loved.  The two of you were adorable; not that you could be anything but.  I never got tired of ogling you.  I still do, though I have to admit, sometimes I am brought up short by the thought that you don’t have legs anymore.  You don’t have anything anymore.  Except a heart.   You’ve got mine.

I spend a lot of time thinking about what you would be doing, if you were here, and wondering what you’re doing, wherever you are.  I’m still curious about what you’re up to; you still fascinate me.  We were so close, and knew each other so well, but it was still early in our life together when you left.  So many questions I hadn’t yet had a chance to ask, with the kind of answers that come after many years of togetherness.  I was really looking forward to those.  And there are things I’m doing since you left that I really want to pick your brain about, and am frustrated and sad that I can’t.  It is strange, though, because I realize that if you’d never left, there are some I wouldn’t be doing, so wouldn’t have asked you if you were here anyway.  But I still want to talk to you about it.

I miss so much, everything, about you, but if I could have just one thing back, it’d be the conversation.  I miss talking to you.  It was always educational and hilarious.  If all things are possible in the universe, I really don’t know why y’all can’t have e-mail access in the next life.  There’d better be a damn good reason for it; I’m counting on it, or I’m going to be one pissed dead lady when the time comes.  

Love,

Me

Friday night I went to open mic, as (mostly) usual.  An acquaintance of mine, also a regular, had missed last week, and the hostess had told us that his sister had died and he’d had to leave town.  He’s an odd duck, this one, but over time I’ve learned that he’s really not a bad guy, and I felt sad for him.  He, too, is in his 50s, so I would guess his sister is, too.  Too young.

Anyway, he was arriving just as the hostess and I were, and he held the door for us.  I got settled with my friends, signed up for my time slot, confirmed with the hostess that in fact it was this guy whose sister had passed, and then made my way over there to offer my sympathy.

We ended up talking for awhile, and he told me a lot about his sister, and I recognized in him that need to tell the story.  It was all so new for him; I was actually surprised to see him there, ready to perform, after only a week.  It was well over a month before I could even think about going back, and when I did, it was a disaster:  too soon.  So it was 2 more months before I tried it again. 

I probably talked to him for 10-15 minutes; he seemed to really appreciate that I asked.  I couldn’t imagine not doing so.  Since A died, and I watched the world retreat from my grief at a pace that made my head spin, I have kind of made it my personal mission to acknowledge, and be there as much as I can for, other grievers.  It seems the least I can do.  It is such a lonely, difficult road, and seems to get lonelier by the day.  Very few look back for you; eventually,you just decide to try to catch up with the rest of the world.  Or not.

But after I went back to my chair, I didn’t see anyone else go over to talk to him, or offer condolences, though I know several regulars had heard the sad tale at the same time I did the week before.  I wasn’t surprised, but I was disappointed in them in a general way.  Just more of the same.  I know that people don’t know what to say, but to not even acknowledge it?  That is cruelty through cowardice, as far as I’m concerned.  Maybe they did when I wasn’t looking.  I’d like to think so; then again, I think I know better.  Maybe it’s how you’re brought up.  My parents are not prone to overt displays of emotion, but they always bought sympathy cards when they knew someone had lost a loved one; they always made the gesture.  It takes so little to reach out, and means so much to the grieving person, and yet people can’t bring themselves to do it.  I don’t get it. 

It ended up being a pretty good night for me, after all.  My performance went really well, which is a “win” I really, really needed, especially with a gig coming up Tuesday.  I sat with my friends playing Scrabble, listened to the other performers, and worked on my embroidery while eating cookies.  Such simple, old-fashioned pleasures, but I felt happy in the moment, like how I felt on the back of that motorcycle a few weeks back.  I’m glad I could recognize the feeling.