riotheclown | Entries tagged with grief

ok, I don't get people... including myself. In the last weeks I have moved a mountain of stuff around, metaphorically and physically. The day I put the mattress and box spring out for the garbage I had finally some sort of agreement between my body and mind (heart?) about what I was going through and so uncharacteristically I burst into tears and hugged the neighbour who offered me condolences as she passed, but for the most part I am just shovelling an endless driveway piled high with a history made of tiny snowflakes made of mostly nothing that, in their combined weight, feel like a planet crushing me.

But you can only shovel one shovel full at a time and that is what I have been doing. I lose my shit with someone just doing their job, it's because I think the computer should be able to get it right before it spews another bill out, after all, I TOLD THE HUMAN SHE WAS DEAD. Nobody else would miss the fact that I am a bit f**ked up, this is what grief is like, especially when the history was contentious I am told, but I do and it trips me up and lays me low. Days go by and I don't want to get dressed. If I still had cable I would watch t.v. all day for days.

And yet I can feel so happy about having my spice shelf up and laugh so hard at a dog.

Is that nuts?

I took half a sleeping pill and slept from 10:30pm until almost 6:00am. Wow. I think I will start to put the house back in order. I took out all the pictures at one point and there are SO MANY and threw out a lot of clothes, well, donated them to charity. She had some beautiful clothes but she was only a girls size 12 and there aren't that many people who are. Some lucky girl's mom can buy her three cashmere sweaters at the Goodwill.

It was stupid really. I should have left that for last but I got a call from the "Clothesline" people to see if I had any "clothing or small household items for donation" and I did... I put aside the kilt my mother wanted to give my sister and the cable knit sweater every so often she would want to throw out but later would decide was her favourite. There was all the stuff in the laundry I didn't wash yet. That is still around, mostly bed wear, housecoat, fuzzy socks...

I didn't give away the blue fisherman's sweater that I found in the bottom of her closet. She kept saying she wanted to wear it but I couldn't find it and in my exhausted state told her that a housecoat was easier to put on and off. I really thought she had thrown it out. She has been throwing out clothes for years. Even when I was a kid she did these purges. I guess it was good. Cut down on the clutter. I sort of take after her in that. Black and grey go together. Easy.

She was always a smartly dressed woman with great a sense of style. It made buying her anything almost impossible. I had over heard all the dismissive comments made from the time I was old enough to run a silk scarf through my fingers. "Have you ever seen anything more ugly?" I was thrilled a few years ago when I got it right with a red leather jacket. She wore it enough I had to get it dry cleaned this year.

I had bought her a sweater jacket that was that electric blue that was popular a season ago, to go with her electric blue Tilley Endurables silk suit for Xmas. Lately she was always cold. She chose the soft navy blue in the warm jersey material, with a new crisp white crew neck cotton sweater for her birthday instead. When I went to take it back the first thing I thought was, Well, at least I don't have to face the anxiety of worrying whether she thought it was ugly, or a waste of money.

I took the sweater back to the store. I thought I might buy a top to wear to the funeral but after looking at a lot of choices I came to the cash register with something black with a pattern of grey and brown. I left it. I don't need a new top.

I know that this state I am in is normal for a grieving person. I would like to be able to put the same face on each thing that holds her scent that the world has known, and not the feeling of rejection and inadequacy that comes to mind.

But I will hold to the final acceptance I found. Humans confound themselves with wants and desires and fears, when in their simplest form they are free, and in their most marvelous state, are conduits of creativity, compassion and awareness.

Cinco De Mayo was super fun! There were at least a dozen kids some of them only weeks old!

I had a really good time painting kids faces. It was held in a restaurant on College Street West restaurant. As always it took a bit of time for the kids to start lining up for face paint but I am happy to say I got to paint two green monsters, two sunsets, several flowers, a butterfly and a few princesses! I was busy enough I forgot to take pictures. These were courtesy of the owner.

Some one brought me a Margarita, delicious and highly alcoholic! So much for me trying to dance!. I stuck to my corner and just watched. This picture was taken by the host. The piñata was a tough one. Those kids were tired by the time it burst open!

One little girl told me that if her dad were there he would have been dancing. So I asked if he had to work and she said, "He's dead." She went on to tell me a lot about him. I asked if she was sad when she thought about him and she said she was happy because she could remember him and he was funny. I had a chance to talk to her mom. He died in palliative care in British Columbia fourteen months ago. She said the facility and staff were "wonderful" and made the grief much easier for her and her daughter.

I complemented her on her parenting. Obviously, she is doing well if she and her daughter are able to talk about it. So many adults don't know how to deal with death and grief and it leaves children lonely and confused. Often children feel they have to care for the surviving parent and never get to process their own loss in a way that makes it possible to remember the deceased or talk about them.

I am so often surprised and impressed by kids. When you get to talk to them as people (or as Buddhas) they can really blow you away!

Whoever you are. It is important to remember that I am not alone, not really. I am sorry for your loss too.

Prompt: Surrender

Brigits Flame, Just for fun, wk 4 July, 2011
Title: My friend Suk (pronounced Sook)
Author: urb-banal
word Count: 922
Genre: non-fiction

My friend Suk (Sook) has taken me to the seniors swim twice now.

She is retired like me and like me she is looking after her mother. “It’s the Chinese way and I am the only daughter!” She has a way of saying “dawww…ta” that sounds plaintive and very sad, like she confessing simultaneously a crime and a punishment. I get this. There is a lot about her I get.

I have known her for a long time. When we met our kids were teenagers and we were both greatly over worked. She was working in her family’s restaurant and I was a cashier at a big box store. We both had dreams of doing something else.

Her real name is Jackie Mackenzie* and she has a thick Scottish brogue to go with it, but she is Chinese by decent, which is where the “Suk” comes in. We met in a Business English class. She was going by her Chinese name so she could avoid the surprise on the teacher’s face when she would look up from her student list and see someone who didn’t look like a typical Scottish person. It might have been to soften the teacher’s attitude when marking too. “It’s only fair, being Chinese is used against me, right?”

She offered to take me shopping. I didn’t have a car and she had a keen sense of indebtedness to the environment. She told me, “I don’t feel so guilty about driving around polluting if I give people rides.” I learned to shop like I was a member of SWAT on a mission, descending on the aisles with purpose and precision. She never had spare time. What became a weekly excursion didn’t leave a lot of time for sharing. The warm and woolly way that rich women friends on television share never happened. Still, events that marked us were occasionally thrown out as bits of information. Gradually we came to appreciate what we had in common.

When I got cancer I told Suk I would prefer it if she let me call her when I felt up to it. That was almost ten years ago. We have spoken on the phone many times of course and she has dropped by on occasion. She goes for a walk every day (she gets up at 5:00am) but my arthritis is bad so I prefer to cycle, and I no longer have a reason to get up so early so I ride in the evening. She has a bike but doesn’t like to ride and in the evening her husband is home and they watch television together. I have lots of time to shop these days and so I don’t need a ride. I get what I need when I need it. Long and short: in a friendship that is mostly practical we no longer have as many reasons to see each other.

Suk offered to take me swimming early one morning after the heat wave had been going on for so long I was feeling weak from lack of activity. She knew about Sally. She had been there when I got the call telling me she had killed herself.

The heat wave had started on the day of Sally’s funeral. Outside the funeral parlor there was a crowd of people all standing around smoking. I caught of whiff of marijuana. The smell took me to a time when I moved through my days like a slow moving train taking in the scenery. There was music in my life then. There was art and poetry. There were friends; the on-going “kitchen talks” and nights blending into mornings. There was an understanding that we were intrinsically important. There was everything that came before we found out why and why not.

I had several days when I would wear my grief like armor and fall into tears when I would realize I had forgotten for a while that my friend was dead. The aberration in the weather seemed oddly appropriate. The oppressive heat said that there was no room for happiness.

When she called I said yes, for the first time, to going to the seniors swim. They keep the water fairly warm and the space air-conditioned. It was a relief from the fetid humidity outside: It's everything that an old lady wants and needs.

I put on my swim suit, struggling to pull it over the girth that has grown dramatically over the years and walked out to the pool. Suk was greeted enthusiastically by everyone as she entered the pool. “This is my friend, it’s her first time, this is…” It seemed I was to be introduced to everyone. Suk filled me in with asides, “That’s Jimmy, he’s a funny guy, that’s Martha, she’s recovering from knee surgery, oh and they are the Germans, they are all friends, they like to keep fit. There are lots of Chinese people here…”

After what I hoped was a polite amount of time I left the group and I made my way to the kiddies’ section. It was empty. I floated. I surrendered my weight to weightless, my meaning to meaninglessness, and my loss to what could not be lost. I felt relief. I felt released.

Driving home I said to Suk, “I really appreciate you taking me. Thank you.”

If you will indulge me a bit here I will try to spell out the way she sounds.

“Oh, tha’s alrigh’, I tha maybe yewh migh’ need to get ow a bit… yewh knoe…”

Kindness can be like a star in an endless night.

The Question

“How does it open?”

Darling you have to be more specific. How does what open?

The pale grey eyes of the dying man search the room for free floating words that might compassionately fall into his mouth so he can speak them to her.

She is so strong, her edges so clear, grief over his dying has not softened her at all, and in fact she seems stronger now than ever, her steel grey coiffure, her posture so erect and her face lovelier than he had ever known it to be. He wants to tell her but the words…

“How does it open?”

That’s not what he wanted to say. He feels as if he is screaming but he knows what comes out is a barely audible whisper. She bends close and puts her ear next to his mouth to catch the wind of these meaningless words with the fine hairs and tiny drum in the channel of her ear, the Morse code of electrical impulses heading to her brain and landing there, meaningless.

They are the wrong words. Even if they were the right words he had no idea what she would do with them. She seems so very far away.

He can hear her say to someone, “I don’t think he can understand you but you can talk to him. He’s not in any pain. Go on. This might be your last chance.”

A new face comes into his field of vision; it is a face very much like his wife’s but younger. He knows who she is but he can’t quite recall her name.

She is not beautiful like her mother. She looks worn out. She looks like a shabby middle-aged woman who has been crying all night.

Well, she started out that way didn’t she? She kept us up nights for weeks on end with her crying: Colic. Everything we did for her was a wrong it seemed: Allergies to everything and so many trips to the doctor. A father can’t take so much difficulty with a child. A child is supposed to bring joy not trouble. I never had tender feelings for her. I was always too afraid she was going to die.

His daughter’s face fills his entire field of vision, he wrestles to move his head enough to see his wife.

“Dad. Can you hear me? It’s Angie. I’m here. I didn’t bring the boys. I didn’t think I should but if you tell me you want to see them I will. I don’t care what Scott says about it.”

That useless husband of hers, well at least he gave her beautiful boys, his grandson’s: golden hair, sweet, always smiling, so happy to go fishing, rough and tumble boys. His grandsons are his joy. What had she said about them? He wanted to see them. They always make him laugh.

“How does…?”

“What dad? I can’t hear you?” his daughter asks.

“He keeps saying over and over. ‘How does it open?’ I don’t think it means anything and don’t worry about bringing the boys. They should not see him like this. They have so many good memories at the lake.”

At least his daughter now moves out of the way so he can see his wife. She is moving around the room with purpose arranging things neatly.

Marry a nurse and you can die at home…

He is dying. He knows it. He has spent his entire life keeping it together and now after weeks of losing one dignity after another he knows the question that has bothered him his entire life.

He glances at the vase full of red tulips. They have just been cut from the garden that morning and placed beside his bed. His bed is a hospital bed and is raised high to make it easier for his wife, the visiting care nurse and the doctor to get at him. He looks down at the tightly closed petals.

Tulips always seem like the no-nonsense flowers of the garden, they have no pleasant, sentimental fragrance, they are so clean. When they finally open they splay their petals in a disturbingly unabashed fashion, like someone’s horny drunken old aunt.

He moves his tongue around in his mouth. Opening his mouth his dry lips seem to tear apart. He wants to tell her that he should have allowed himself to feel more and he should have found the words when they might still have mattered to her.

“My heart.” was all that came out.

“What daddy? Mom! I think he needs you! I think he is having a heart attack!” His daughters face contorts with pain.

“How does it open…” That’s not what he means to say! His eyes wander around the room wildly.

“I’m here darling. Calm yourself.” his wife says.

“How does it open…” he closes his eyes in frustration. The pain is unbearable but there is no drug that will ease it. He is at the bottom of a deep well. The question settles on the light coming from the top of this well. It comes from a vast sky outside his loss and isolation like some cheesy dove in Papist black and white movie from the 50's.

His body rattles with his breath.

"How...
does a heart
open...
without
breaking?"

She straightens. To his daughter she says, "He's fine. He rambles that's all. It doesn't mean anything." She is crying but he can't see her face, she has turned away.

The light blinks shut.