Ripples
When I was a little girl, my dad worked in a store at one end of a plaza, and at the other end was a store whose name I don’t remember. But in that store there was a shoe department, and in that shoe department there was a big poster of Buster Brown and his dog, and Buster Brown was holding a placard of the exact same picture of Buster Brown and his dog. This went on infinitely, and as I sat and had new shoes tried on my feet, and stood so my mother could press the toe to see how much room was there, I would stare at that picture and try to see how many Buster Browns and his dogs I could see before they became too small to discern.
I played a similar game whenever I ran across those department store triptych mirrors. If you adjusted them carefully, you could stand in the middle, look into the one on either the right or the left and see images of your front and back in both mirrors repeating into infinity. It fascinated me that I could never see the end of me, and eventually I would give up, just like I would give up counting stars in the night sky; the task was dizzyingly impossible.
But I guess I’ve always had a deep interest in the concept of infinity. Where do the circles stop in a pond? I discussed this with a friend, who said they stop at the shore, but I argued that they continue into the dirt, affecting the worms and the rocks who then affect other things in response, and that the chain of events from one tossed pebble is so long that we may never have even known there was ever a pebble, nor can we see where they will end, because, strictly speaking, they don’t.
So it is, it seems, with grief and loss. In one of my many grief books is a quotation from Mark Twain, who says, “The mind has a dumb sense of vast loss—that is all. It will take mind and memory months and possibly years to gather the details and thus learn and know the whole extent of the loss.” The ripple of this massive meteorite in my puddle of a life continues to reach out and through my life, causing me to consider everything anew. It surprises me often.
This afternoon, in the shower, I was thinking about my parents, and I suddenly acknowledged an expectation I never even realized I’d held. All during my youth, my mother talked to me, the eldest, about where stuff was and where my brother and I would go “if something happened to us.” And over the years, when I thought about it at all, I thought about my brother and me, and what we would do, and what my responsibilities would be toward him, and later, as we became adults, what we would do with my folks’ house, and how we would divvy up the tasks. Because of my mother’s informational campaign, I quietly built up the belief that they would go together. It was always if anything happened to “us,” never “me, or your father.” The thought was never entertained, at least not publicly with me or my brother.
What’s stranger is that until 4 o’clock this afternoon, and despite everything I’ve been through and learned from other widoweds in the last two years, I still held that belief. Except it doesn’t usually work out that way. One almost always leaves first. But somehow, I never imagined either of my parents’ widowed. Myself, again, yes. E, yes. But not them. And I find that odd and almost willfully naïve (but not quite).
I went over to my friend’s mom’s house last night, plunger in hand, to attempt to save her a call to the plumber. She’s been a widow a little over two months, now. I had to walk into their, her, bedroom to get to the bathroom, and I saw the bed neatly made, with one side turned down, the other now forever unrumpled. It broke my heart.
And it scares me. Because I know that the next time it happens to me, it will be worse. I can’t imagine worse, and yet I know it’s out there. Is it any wonder we all hope our parents will go together, and that we will depart this earth with our spouses? Early on in my grief, I was absolutely certain that should E die, being widowed a second time would kill me; I barely survived it the first time. Sometimes I think to myself, “I survived it once; I can probably do it again.” But I know it will be different, and I wonder if that’s true.
I wonder about how each of my parents will cope without the other, and I cut the thoughts off, because it’s too sad to contemplate. I know it’s denial, but no point in torturing myself in advance; there will be pain enough when the time comes. But I brace myself every time my phone rings in the middle of a work day.
There are countless things I’ve thought about since A died, things I’ve reconsidered in light of my new experience, that would’ve never flitted through my mind before he passed. The lessons of bereavement continue to roll out in an endless sea of grass, each blade able to whistle, rustle, or cut as I walk through them. I wonder how long I will walk in this prairie until I can see the sun setting on a western ocean and rest.