Love is forever…One woman’s journey with grief

Last Saturday at yoga class we did some focused breathing.  We paused between each inhalation and each exhalation, at the top and bottom of each breath, and I wondered if this was THE metaphor for life on earth, and whatever comes next.  Each inhalation is a lifetime here.  And then a pause to rest before coming back.  Then each exhalation is another lifetime.  And then a pause to rest in between.  And over and over, countless times.

What if it’s that simple?

E bumped into our across-the-street neighbor on his morning walk the other day; she informed him that our next-door neighbor’s memorial service was that day.   We hadn’t even known he’d passed.  He was an old man, though he did go out from time to time and drove himself still, his oxygen tank in the passenger seat.  He lived with his adult daughter, whose car restoration hobby frequently fumigates us inside our house and has made my working in the garage impossible some days.  Her dearly departed father engaged in several months of harassment about our trees that were, according to him, ever in imminent danger of crashing into his roof (though they weren’t) and wouldn’t quit until we had the tree guys out to trim them out of season.  First big summer storm that blew through resulted in his palo verde out back being cracked and the greater part of it crashing over the wall into our yard for us to clean up.  Palo verdes are prickly, as was our relationship with these neighbors.  So it was not a surprise that we were not informed of his death.

Still, our remaining neighbor had lost her father.  “Should we do something?” I asked E.  We didn’t know; we didn’t even know her name.  I looked up his obituary and found that he’d passed two weeks ago, at the age of 87.  He had lived ten years widowed, having lost his wife of 54 years.  And I learned his daughter’s name.

But to find him, I had to go through seven pages of obituaries looking for him, because I only knew his first name; his full name had been on a piece of his personal stationary on one of the notes he sent us, but I’d long since forgotten it.  I knew I’d probably recognize it once I saw it, but I had to skim every obituary until I got to him, in the S’s.  And what struck me as I did is that we all die of the same things:  heart attack, accident, cancer, some other disease, accident.  That’s really it.  

I think I had this idea that each death was unique, and of course it is, in its way, but overall, the list is short, and therefore universal.  And I keep coming back to the idea that anything that universal an experience is probably meaningful.  I took comfort from that idea.  It implied to me some kind of cosmic exit strategy.  I wish I understood the timing; I wish I understood why my 87-year-old neighbor left having lived almost my entire lifetime in years longer than A.  If only we could understand, perhaps it wouldn’t be so vicious, this forced rebuilding.

I watched ER tonight, as we’ve been doing every Thursday night for years—at least a decade.  This is the last season, and there are all kinds of guest stars and former cast members revisiting the show for one last hurrah.  Watching the preview for next week’s show, I learned Dr. Greene would be returning in the next episode.  Mark Greene died of brain cancer in 2002.  But somehow, maybe through flashbacks, he’ll be on next week.  I admit, I get very attached to TV show characters, and I cried when he died.  And I got goosebumps as I watched the preview and saw him again.  And I thought, “If only it were that easy.” 

I seem to be angry.  I didn’t realize how angry until I e-mailed my friend B about the cause of my anger, and my words carried a venom I wasn’t sure I’d intended, but could find no fault with.  It was too late anyway; I’d already hit “send.”  Fortunately, the anger was not directed at her.

In October of 2004 I made the happy discovery that there was such a thing as camp for adults, specifically, guitar camp.  I’d had no idea, and determined that I would like to go to a guitar camp.  At that point, I’d been playing for all of 3 months.

I did a little research and was surprised to find a fair number of guitar camps in California, and an idea formed.  At that point, A and I had been talking for almost 6 months, and I was in love, and suspected he was right there with me.  I really wanted to meet him in person, and I decided I would try to find a camp as close to him as I could and see if we couldn’t actually share space for a bit.  When I found a women-only guitar camp in Mendocino, I knew I’d found exactly what I was looking for.

Last year, the camp was cancelled at nearly the last minute, the result of an acrimonious break-up between the organizers and attendance too low to make it worth them gutting it out.  My friend B and I went to San Francisco anyway, as we had non-refundable tickets, and we had a great time.  Last year, I wasn’t too broken up about not revisiting that context; I was only 18 months out, and still actively grieving.

We were given vague hope that perhaps the organizers would manage to get it together for this year; the August camp I never go to happened through the efforts of one of the women, and so we planned on going this winter to check out the new version and make any decisions after seeing for ourselves.

But they have not gotten it together; in fact, they’ve decided to “handle” things by offering competing camps a week apart in the exact same venue, essentially forcing campers who come to this camp because they really enjoy the sisterhood to choose between them.  Camp isn’t cheap, and it’s unlikely many, or any, of us will go to both weekends and hang out up there in the January rain for the week in between.

On the surface, I resent being forced to choose.  I understand that they cannot stay together, or work together, or live their lives to suit my preferences; but this solution is, in my opinion, a pretty poor one.  I’m also pissed because they jacked up the price, and if I choose my preferred camp, I will have to take more time off from work than I would have to if I went to camp at the normal time.

But it’s deeper than that, and so is my sorrow that it has come to this.  That guitar camp was really the only reason I had to go back to northern California now that A is not there.  Losing that means that I will be unlikely to get back there with any regularity, back to a place that holds so many sweet memories.  And camp is so inextricably tied up in A; I probably never would’ve been at that one if not for him.  And I wouldn’t have looked for a guitar camp at all if he hadn’t been instrumental (ha!) in my learning to play the guitar.

And what really makes me upset is that I loved camp.  All of us do.  As soon as we do our closing ceremonies, we are all looking forward to next year; it was that good.  And now it’s falling apart.  It can never be the same, and I’m facing the loss of camp I could’ve realistically mourned last year (but didn’t) now.  Another loss of something I really love.  Another loss of a place that felt like home.  Another “lesson” that everything ends.  Nothing can ever stay the same; not even the things we love most.  Especially the things we love most.

That’s why I’m angry.  Because I’m losing again, and it’s their fault, despite my knowing that it’s not personal; it’s not something they’re trying to do to me.  My unhappiness is a side effect of theirs.  But I feel like I am to be allowed nothing but memories from those places.  Perhaps somewhere down the road, I will say to myself that it was a good thing I was forced to stop haunting that hallowed ground; right now, I just feel robbed again.

I don’t know yet what I’m going to do about this; I can’t realistically make a decision until after I’m back to work after my surgery; the amount of time I have to take off to recover from that will be the major determiner.  Part of me wants to say “fuck it,”  but it will have to reckon with the part of me that wants to hold on to whatever I can.

I found A’s Christmas gift Monday, in a Hammacher-Schlemmer catalog.  

The first Christmas without him, 5 months after he died, was so painful for so many reasons, but the knife twisted just a bit more every time I went out Christmas shopping, saw things that he would’ve liked, and walked past them with tears in my eyes.  

The impulses to do for them stay for so long.

E, bless his heart, told me I could go ahead and buy the gifts if I wanted to.  But we talked about it and had visions of having to rent storage as the years went on; even in my desperate, grief-stricken state, I realized that would be less than ideal on several levels, though I gave E many points for offering the plan; it was exceedingly sweet of him.

Last year, the second Christmas, I found the perfect gift for A in a catalog.  It was a miniature Gort, the robot from The Day the Earth Stood Still, one of his favorite movies.  I cut the picture of it out of the catalog and put it in my journal that I write to him in.  I told him about it and wished him “Merry Christmas.”  It helped.  It really did.  It allowed me to do something with those impulses other than stifle them.  If all I can do is send him my thoughts, well, then, that’s what I’ll do.

I cut out comics he would like, and I put those in my journal.  Fortunately, it hasn’t gotten out of hand;  I don’t have boxes of clippings for him.  And it costs me nothing, but it saves me some of the hurt of having to deny my feelings of wanting to do for A.  I don’t have to.  

Is it a little odd?  Sure, but it’s odd I can live with.  “Odd” is par for the widow course, and this is pretty benign.

He’s getting a converter this year that makes digital photos out of your old slides and negatives.  He had talked about wanting such a thing because he had a lot of slides, but the technology hadn’t reached gadget level quite yet back then.  Now it has, apparently, and this is something I would’ve bought him, were he here.  

I hope he likes it.

My office at home is frequently home to piles of disorganized pages of guitar chords and lyrics of songs I’m learning.  Well, they’re not really disorganized; it’s just that they are organized in about a dozen different ways, so the end result is disorganization, anyway.  So bad has it gotten that half the time I cannot lay my hands on the piece of music I want, and end up rifling through page after page.  I decided to look into one of those digital sheet music displays I’d heard about, but when I learned they ran $900, I decided on plan B:  I would just make sure all the music I had on paper was on my laptop, and I would fire that up to read my music.  Everything would be organized alphabetically, and searching would be effortless.  And it wouldn’t cost me a cent.  I spent the greater part of my Saturday evening working on that.

I find a lot of my chords and tabs online and save them to my computer anyway, so I had most of them.  But they were scattered here and there on a flash drive and a back-up hard drive and on the laptop itself, and there was a lot of other stuff mixed in between them, much of which I had to take a look at to figure out what it was.

I ran across “Manhã de Carnaval” and when I opened it to see if it was just lyrics or lyrics and chords, I found something totally unexpected.  It was lyrics, and a screenshot photo I’d taken of A as we’d chatted on April 4, 2005, at 9:17:34 p.m.  That moment in time had been recorded with such precision.

He was smiling as he looked at the screen, and I can only assume I put that smile on his face with my extreme wit.  I was totally delighted to find this picture.  It’s something of a miracle to receive a “new” picture of someone who died over 2 years ago.  I don’t know why I put that screenshot there; all I can guess is I’d been working on finding those lyrics as he and I chatted, I needed a place to put the screenshot to get it off my clipboard, and that was the file that was open.  

I was giddy to have found it.  It felt like a gift, and still feels like one two days later.  Photographs and memories…that’s really all I have left; everything else was lost or withheld.  So one more picture is a real treasure.

Sunday morning in the shower, I was thinking about the photo, and how truly pleased I was to find it.  It was then that it hit me that the reason those photos are so valuable is because he died.  When he was alive, I didn’t spend a lot of time looking at photos when I could look at him directly.  But that hadn’t figured into my emotional reaction when I found it; when I found it, all I felt was excitement and joy.  It didn’t cause me even a moment of pain.  And I realized then that, evidently, I have accepted the reality of his permanent (at least as far as this lifetime’s concerned) absence.  Because if I had not, I would’ve been upset about having only had a photo unexpectedly restored to me instead of him.  My pleasure in finding the photo tells me, I think, that I accept my world as it is now, and that is a world where he is only here in spirit, and a new photograph of a dead man really is a gift.

I don’t know if I’m making any sense.  I guess I felt it was significant that the picture was a treasure I could appreciate for what it was, rather than to feel disappointed about because it was a vastly distant second to what I’d rather have and cannot.  I am still a little ambivalent about this acceptance business, but healing was ever the goal, and I have to think this shift in perspective is a good thing.

I have mentioned 10@10 on KFOG before here.  It’s something A introduced me to, and I listened to it from time to time when he was alive.  After he died, I became a dedicated listener 5 days a week.  I liked still being connected to something that he enjoyed, something living and fresh instead of just a memory, something that he shared with me, something from the Bay area when most of my other connections had slipped away or been tarnished by his absence.  I don’t listen to the morning show, but I never miss 10@10 if I can help it.

The DJ, Dave Morey, announced his retirement on his blog last night, and on the air today.   Dave will never know that in addition to creating a kickass show with fantastic music that I love, he also was part of something that mattered to me on a much deeper and more personal level.  I had known it was coming, but had put it out of my mind.  The announcement made it real, and it made me a little sad.  It’s hard to believe that, 2+ years out, I’m still running into fresh secondary losses.  They don’t make me crumble anymore, but I rather hope this is the last of them.  Enough already.

It’s not as bad as it could be; he’s still going to do 10@10 from his home studio, so things won’t change all that much for me, until he decides to retire from that, too.  And I find myself grateful for that; I never expected to be so attached to a radio show.

I wish him well, of course.  He’s done his time, made a lot of listeners happy in a shared love of music, and he’s earned a lovely retirement.  But of course, given the connection, some thoughts are inevitable for me.  Dave Morey is the same age as my A should be; they graduated the same year from high school.  He is retiring to a lake house.  My sweetie, who always said that he’d work until the day he died, "retired" to whatever comes next.  I’d like to believe that whatever that is, it’s way better than a lake house, and he doesn’t feel at all cheated, regardless of how I and the other people who love him feel.