Ah hell. I attempted to start this post as a reverse "emotions" travelogue back to the time when I thought things were more stable in my life. As I track the days and weeks back, I realize that it’s a failing hypothesis. Things have never "more stable" in my life. How often does one predicate future actions and decisions on faulty logic, misplaced or damaged perceptions? How often did I make erroneous decisions when in a state of personal crisis? Far too often when my actions and decisions were motivated by a need for a flight to emotional safety.
A special welcome to anyone who is new to The Grieving Room. We meet every Monday evening. Whether your loss is recent or many years ago, whether you have lost a person or a pet, or even if the person you are "mourning" is still alive ("pre-grief" can be a very lonely and confusing time) you can come to this diary and process your grieving in whatever way works for you. Share whatever you need to share. We can't solve each other's problems, but we can be a sounding board and a place of connection.
What makes this safety so imperative?
And what does safety truly mean at the end of the day? What does safety need?
Freedom from grief, fear, other kinds of hunger beyond physical sustenance; is safe a place to go or a place to run to? Someone to run with, to run to? To date, unanswerable questions for me.
A few years ago, I went through hypnosis in an attempt to quit smoking. Doesn't matter, really; it didn't work. Of the six sessions, only the final session left an impact. At some point, I realized there was a dark figure standing over my right shoulder, just...there. A human-like figure, dark, opaque, lacking in density. It had no menacing aura, nor did it have an evil aspect. It was watching, listening (did it have ears? I don’t know – my memory is vague and wants to give it a small dark fedora, but that reeks of over-embellishment). As I came back to consciousness, it backed away. I never turned to face it, or to question. It was familiar in a way that the figure at the end of your bed when you are a child and the room is dark and the hallway lights are on and you see it, just...there, before you go to sleep, is familiar.
I’ve been low-level sick these past five months or so, though the symptoms have been there for years. It is, of course, all my fault. Number of reasons, that. I’ve plowed on each day thinking that tomorrow will be better, ignoring the fog in the thoughts, the fatigue that weighs down my dragging feet and burgeoning thighs, the lack of energy and motivation; though I am jocular about such things, I’ve really been ignoring signs of age, like menopause, and weight gain around the stomach, and the few gray hairs that are becoming so many now. The can’t sleep, the joint ache, the wheezing in the morning, pericarditis, hypothyroidic anemia, a melange of symptoms that mimic so many things, the slog, slog, slog through each day.
It’s now rote to hear the doc say "how much stress do you have in your life" and to laugh, both silently and out loud. I hear the chorus and response in my head each time "it’s all in your head", which becomes your body, which doesn’t become at all, but disintegrates upon you, leaving bits and pieces, painful pieces of you behind to remind you what you thought was once possible might still be ahead. Now it doesn’t seem possible.
As if it ever changes, it’s a flow, doc, it’s a constant river of stress, and don’t you experience it, too, and do you ask all your patients this, or is it just me, or is it just the female ones? The true origins of the word "hysteria" spring to mind – a Victorian arrogance once meant to imply that some female issues are and will always be undefined and "in the head". By the male-dominated world of Victorian medicine, at least. I’m finding it not much different nowadays and I have a medicine drawer to prove the point. But that’s a diary for another day.
Is it the menopausal ones who bring to you symptoms of aches and pains, and breath that isn’t deep, or a heart that won’t heal, physically? Or emotionally. What do you say, doc? Is it real pain or do you really think I spend my time at doc’s office to get attention? Or is it the discontinuity of health care in this country that I must repeat and repeat and repeat the symptoms and wait for weeks for follow-up and get a different diagnosis each time?
I meant to write today about the anniversary, two years on, of my sister’s death on April 26, 2007. But I find I can’t write anymore now (about fucking time, that, I think). I’ll include a short paragraph in my previous diary a few days ago about this, and I will in some needful way – needful because I’ve become exhaustive, exhausting, worn out, turning in circles to catch my own tail like one of my pugs does, failing every time.
Two years ago today, a Friday night, an earlier Spring, I served a final meal to my dying sister, who passed away seven days later. I have to tell you now (and I'm not sure why this applies, but humor me), I won't cook liver and onions again. Didn't like it then, hate them even more now. I guess it was an act of sisterly love and my meager attempt to fulfill a phantom hunger of a soul who could no longer taste. But she did savor a small portion of the food she'd craved, and on that last Friday night in 2007, it was enough. There are moments when small portions are simply quite enough.
We are all, each of us, dying, doesn’t matter what we are or who we are or where we are, we are dying. There’s a thing there, a gate, a doorway, a portal, a veritable gap in our own space-time continuum that is that point on a linestring leading out from where we now stand at this moment. And that point signifies our own true mystery, our dreaded punctuated earthly sentence in that last chapter. That period, exclamation point, question mark, is foretold by "the black floater hovering on the fringe of consciousness" that James Wolcott’s mentioned in his recent entry in Vanity Fair, March 2009 issue.
Slipping off the mortal coil is no excuse for slacking off. Only in America could the prospect of dying be promoted as a motivational tool to rack up frequent-flier miles. Bookstores and Web sites abound in self-help guides listing the 10 (or 100, or 1,000) things and places you must do and visit before you die (there’s even a 100 Birds to See Before You Die catalogue), as if life were a race through the supermarket aisle to grab as many experiences off the shelves as possible before collapsing at the checkout line. Breadth of experience rather than depth is what’s being peddled.
Yeah, well, breadth of experience. That brings up the point (at least to me) that a lot of breadth of experience deals with the dying "others" in your life. How that can affect you. Or me, in this case.
I think I have a broken heart. But it doesn’t bother me anymore. Really. Because I can still savor stuff. The bird that sang in the apple tree this morning, and shook its wings enough to make the blossoms fly. The taste of homemade crème brulee, the aroma of the turbinado sugar as it broiled, a sweet gliding nectar thinly caramelizing the delicate buttery texture of the custard below. Taste, taste, taste. And sound, the sound of life every day.
One of my pugs chased its tail last night for a good two minutes; there was a bit of fuzz attached to a clump of hair that had stuck to its burly pug butt. Tiny often steals a hairbrush and carries it off to his pillow to munch on. And pugs can’t reach their butts. My pug-a-poo mix sat and watched from about two feet away, around and around her head went as Tiny spun. Finally, Tiny collapsed on his side, exhausted and dizzy and defeated. As he stood up, Porkman (the pug-a-poo) walked over and calmly grasped the fuzz in her mouth and pulled it off. For the next ten minutes, I watched as yet another dog tried to relieve Porkman of the fuzz; she was unaware that the remains of her helpful gesture had gotten stuck to her own beard. Somewhere in the mix, later on, the fuzz disappeared.
Why is this anecdote so random? At some admittedly weird level, it signifies what I have left out in my middling angst ridden diatribe above this little tale. To get through, to get beyond, to get past, to get there, to get to a safe place, to run to a safe place, committing as few errors in judgment as you can, it takes reaching out and it takes help from others. It takes many to get back to being whole again, to being one.
My pugs know that.
Do we? This is a fine, fine community. Thank you all.
