“Adornment is never anything except a reflection of the heart.” Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel
I suppose it’s a good sign that I have been looking forward to Memorial Day weekend, instead of sinking into a deep funk. Memorial Day 2006 was the last time I touched A, kissed him, hugged him, and watched him through tears in my eyes as I went through security at the airport. He always told me not to cry, that we’d be together again soon. He was wrong that time. I have had a few thoughts in the last week or so of “Memorial weekend was our last trip together,” but that’s as far as it went. Mostly, I’ve really been looking forward to the extra day off, and that has been my focus. Another sign of healing. And it’s not the only one.
In other news, I’ve been doing a lot of shopping lately—dresses and skirts and cute tops. Things that are not at all the uniform I dressed myself in the day after I found out he died until recently: t-shirt and jeans, or shorts. Every day.
It started as a form of mourning, black for the 21st century. I was clean, not naked, and at work. It was all I could manage, and accomplishing even that much wore me out for the rest of the day. I wore no makeup, no perfume, no jewelry, and just combed my hair once in the morning, and that was it for the rest of the day. I just couldn’t care about such frivolous things. And I found I had new contempt for the human body in general, given that I was living the proof that it could just betray you at any moment, and the idea of attending to the aesthetics of such a flaky piece of equipment seemed absurd. Plus, if the soul was the important bit, as it seemed to me it was, the meat hardly mattered.
Yeah, I was bitter. And lost.
The jewelry was the first to come back, and then only earrings, because I always wear earrings, and anything else seemed to lack propriety. Plus, you can only wear so much jewelry with t-shirts and jeans. The perfume took a lot longer, because I always sprayed the cards I sent him with my perfume, including the one that was going to go out in the mail the day I found out he’d died. I didn’t put on makeup until 18 months out, in January of this year, when my friend and I were hanging out at Saks in San Francisco and I had an impulse to have my makeup done at one of the counters.
The clothes took longer, because it was still my signal that I was not myself. Not that anyone else noticed or cared; I doubt anyone at work wondered, “What happened with her? She used to be such a sharp dresser, and now she’s just given up.” But I knew, and I didn’t want anything to be expected of me if I decided to spiff up. There was an additional complication, too: after the initial grief weight loss, when I lived for weeks on Pepto and very little food because the thought of eating was repulsive to my mind and stomach, I have put on weight and a lot of the clothes I was wearing at the time before his passing no longer fit. And I felt pretty crappy and defeated about that, too. So I wore what I had that fit, which was jeans and t-shirts.
I’m not even sure now what the trigger was that made me decide I needed new duds, but in addition to all the healing I’ve done on the grief front thus far, I’ve been doing some work in the realm of physical self-acceptance, and am giving up self-hate and body shame. I won’t bore you with all the details of my inner process, but the end result is that I decided I deserved clothes that fit, flattered, and made me feel good, even though I am and will continue to be a fat woman. So I’ve been buying pretty things and if I do say so myself, I look damn good. And what’s more, I feel better when I look good.
Shopping. She’s writing about shopping. Yes I am, because it is not the shopping that is important here; it’s what it says about where I am:
- I’m caring again how I look.
- I get out of my head occasionally and am living in my body a bit more lately.
- I’m not trying to hide behind my own drab camouflage; I don’t feel the need to be quite so protected anymore.
- Working on my self-acceptance issues means that grief has moved, at least slightly, out of the spotlight as my greatest psychological task of the moment.
- Life is a little lighter now, in that I don’t think automatically of shopping and fashion as completely useless and beyond trivial. Sure it’s trivial, but I’m ready for a life that isn’t quite so fraught at all times.
- I realized that I really like wearing dresses. I’d forgotten, I guess. I used to wear them, almost exclusively, for work when he was still here. So in wearing them again, I’m regaining more of myself, bit by bit.
- He’d really like these dresses, I think; the thought makes me smile…a bit wistfully, but smile nonetheless.