Love is forever…One woman’s journey with grief

In my efforts to get my head on straight and get back to living…really living…I’ve started by trying to get organized and free myself from a lot of annoying tasks that I have been putting off in action but carrying around in my mind.  Last night, I completed my tax returns, started up a new checkbook and register to replace the one I lost (and despair of finding at this point), paid all the bills in my possession through the middle of April, and mailed the earplugs I promised (in mid-February) I’d send my cousin.

The next order of business was to find the actual wooden top of my desk at home.  But in order to find my desk I first needed to put away the jewelry-making stuff that’s been sitting there (for 2+ weeks) on top of the other piles.  And in order to put away the jewelry-making stuff, I needed to find room in my various bead containers for all the new stuff I had out.  And in order to find room in my various bead containers, I basically had to get all of them out and totally reorganize them.

This is how projects go at my house.  I start to do one thing, and it ends up being a massive multi-level, multi-hour extravaganza that makes my room look like it exploded.

At the same time, I happen to like sorting beads.  I find it meditative and calming, putting order to chaos.  It’s on a miniature scale, of course, but I have long since given up imagining that I can put order to the apparent chaos that is life in this universe.  So I soothe my frustration by tidying up the little corners of my life.

The result of this reorganizing of all my beads and findings and such is that I discovered that I have been, and remain, the custodian of about a metric ton of beads.  I’m not quite sure how I managed to acquire so many; they may be breeding.  If I never bought another bead, I still could make new jewelry twice a week for the next 4 years.  At least.

Among the beads were surprise, fear, and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope.  No!  Actually, among the beads were some that I wanted, and was sure I didn’t have anymore.  These were beads that became important to me because of A.

A few months into our friendship, and not long after our friendship turned into something more, A sent me a pair of necklaces that he’d purchased in Kenya a few years before we met.  He’d worn one of them, and the other had dangled from his backpack, a plaything for his cat.  It was an offering of love, and though the word hadn’t been spoken yet, I knew it for what it was.  I felt the same way.  And it was about the same time that I’d decided I wanted to offer him a token of love and determined to make him a bracelet because I knew he wore them.  Along with his watch, he wore another strand of beads he’d gotten in Africa.

I ended up making the bracelet out of malachite, silver spacers, and black beads.  I wrote him a card explaining the symbolism of all the beads I’d chosen.  I picked the malachite because I had it on hand, and because it was green, for my Irish boy.  But when I looked up the supposed metaphysical properties of malachite, they were so appropriate—transformation, balance, healing, and moving past negative influences and experiences.  He was still in the middle of the practicalities of separating from his wife, though emotionally he was ready to move on.  The black beads were taken from one of the necklaces he’d sent me that I’d shortened, giving him back a little bit of what he’d given me.  The silver might’ve been for his silver hair.  I cannot remember now, but they had meaning, too, and the overall effect of the bracelet was a masculine, earthy one, just like him.  

He loved it, and loved the explanatory card as much.  He put that bracelet on between his African beads and his watch and I don’t think he took it off again.  He is wearing it in picture after picture, and always had it on when I saw him.  I imagine he was wearing it when the police found him.

When I found out he was going to be cremated, it was that bracelet I asked for, because I knew if it went with him, that would be the end of it.  I do not know if it did.  I don’t know how that process works, and I’m not sure I want to.  I know it was just his body, but I don’t want to think about it.  It’s pretty horrible to contemplate.  

In what I chalked up to the fog that was those first days and week leading up to the memorial service, his sister forgot that I’d asked, or never even realized I asked, or who knows what, and nothing was ever said in response to my request.  While there were many things of his that I wanted for myself, and things he wanted me to have, when it became clear that the family was not going to offer me anything at all beyond the cards they’d found that I’d sent him, the bracelet was the only thing I decided I would ask for.  It meant nothing to anyone else, but it would have meant the world to me.

I screwed up my courage to ask his sister again for the bracelet, and she said she’d talk to his daughter and his ex, to see if it ended up in his personal effects.  Months would pass before I would ask again, and for the last time, for it and the cards.

I ended up with neither, and nothing else, either.  I have talked at length in other posts about how much this hurt me.  It still does, though I’ve gotten pretty good about not letting it make me crazy anymore.  

For some reason unknown to me, the idea popped into my head this morning that I should just contact his ex directly for it, though she and I have had no contact at all before or after his passing.  I didn’t want to bother her, but suddenly today my thought process was “I don’t care about her feelings. It’s my turn to get what I need.”  It was a selfish, fed-up moment and I’m not sure where it came from today because I wasn’t feeling either, but the thought came up again later in the day, and I pondered it, but dismissed it for the same reasons I’ve always dismissed it, as well as the fact that it’s been 20 months.  I guess I kind of always harbored a futile hope that the light would dawn, and it would occur to his family to do the right thing, the kind thing, late rather than never.  Not so much, as it turns out.

But as I was going through my beads tonight, I realized that I still had more of the malachite beads, as well as the silver ones that I used.  I thought that I’d used them all up on his.  I didn’t have any more of the black ones, and didn’t want to cannibalize the necklace he gave me further, but it was okay, I had other black beads.

I kept sorting as I considered whether, after all this time, I wanted to create a replica of his bracelet.  I have lots of replicas of his things.  We have the same 12-string guitar, plus my most recent electric guitar is the same kind as his, the one he always said would be mine, but I don’t know where it is now.  I bought a prayer wheel like his, and pray for him every time I pass it.   I have many replicas, symbols of the symbols of the man.  This would be one more, but this one mattered more.

As I ruminated, I happened upon some hematite beads I got on my January trip to San Francisco with my friend B.  They were spacers between large pieces of dyed abalone, which were why I bought the strand.  Maybe there were enough?

I lined up the beads, and there were almost exactly enough—I only had 2 left over.  It is a little more feminine in this incarnation, which is appropriate, and it is not exactly the same bracelet, which I think is important.  I cannot have the one I gave him; this will always be a substitute.  But if I’d made it as close as possible to his, I had the sense that I might be trying to fool myself that it was the same one I gave him.  And that didn’t feel right.  But it is close enough, and it makes me happy to see it on my wrist.  

These hematite beads will always remind me, too, of a weekend spent in The City with another beloved friend, of the healing I felt on that trip with her, despite being in a city he and I shared, and of my new life since he left.  And I think that’s important as I try to embrace this life of mine, rather than just plod through it waiting for the credits to roll.  This bracelet is in memory of him, and to appease my angry demons for not having the original; but with the change of just a few pieces of it, it is also inspirational to me.  My past and my future can coexist with honor and harmony close to where I can feel my heart beat.