The small birds are chattering in rained-on outrage. I wish I could say what kind they are, but they’re puny and hide in bushes. I only hear their tiny voices, raised together to form a brave cacophony.
I only have one voice, and it’s surely puny right now.
My panic attacks are leading to another job ending abruptly. This will be the third time. It’s very hard to speak up for oneself when one's throat is collapsing.
Galloping toward me with terrifying velocity, here comes my ten-year high school reunion. Put aside the usual stressors of the holidays and think of the horror of facing high school all over again. I wasn’t so good at it the first time.
I freely acknowledge that I’m not actually going back to high school. It’s not like the movies – we’re not queuing up outside the gym in nice suits and shoulder-padded dresses, playing grown-up in the nursery. The class president (who’s actually not a douche, thank goodness) organized some space at a bar big enough to accommodate a crowd.
Not sure who will show up, but I know I won’t remember names or details. We will ask each other, “So what are you doing these days?” and, “How’s life in
It’s occurred to me that I should have a sentence prepared that I can repeat on command; something simple and only slightly artful where facts are smudged. I need something translucent but not transparent. No one need know how much I’ve struggled over the last ten years, right?
My parents, who were in town this weekend for a chorus concert, bless’m, reminded me that my view of my own life is a bit exclusive these days. My mother reminded me of grad school, travels abroad, publishing, non-profits,
Here’s the fascinating thing, however: my mother kept bringing up my single status. She said that I could tell them I was “in love, and now looking again,” to appease them. I know that a ton of people from my class are married or attached, but it never occurred to me to be uncomfortable as a bachelorette. She mentioned it enough to make me realize how preoccupied she is with my marriage prospects, or total lack thereof. This must be one of the things she worries about when she frets away with thoughts of me. To her, I must be lonely.
So I present to you yet another dimension of parent-induced insanity. While they’re here they not only convince me that I’m unstable, unable to support myself, sickly and pitiful, but now I’m also incredibly lonely – adrift in the world without a captain to steer me right.
Yes, I know that’s ridiculous. I know I should have some rallying anger against the very thought. I should dig up thoughts of all my excellent friends, tepid dates, excellent daily flirtings; all the things that show my own agency in creating connections in this city. Alas, there’s something tempting in my post-parental-visit emotional hangover that pushes me toward self-pity. I am alone. I am lonely. I am unloved… even (gasp!) ten years after High School. I am a hopeless case.
So this is the feeling that propels tv heroines to take a stranger to a party and pretend he’s the fiancée. Silly.
Watching one of my closest friends deal with the slow whittling away of her grandfather, I’ve been a valuable support because I’ve seen it. I can sympathize. I can do what she needs me to do, which is mostly to exist in common knowledge; to share the onus.
And then, when she’s not looking, I choke on my memories and the freshly overturned soil of my past losses. I ache in that weird spot in my chest where my heart must be squeezing itself in useless, useless grief.
How is it that my life is most punctuated by funerals? I’m trying to figure this out: is it that there have been more in my life than in others? Or was it timing? I started going to funerals when I was eleven, so it’s possible that I’ve clung to those experiences because of the absolute shock to my eleven-year-old mind with the first one. Psychologically it makes sense that I’m still ruminating over something that was so bewildering then. It left a big messy pile in my brain that won’t right itself.
Then I think that maybe this is natural, too. The grieving process has no set time limit. Who can say how long a person can hurt? Memories can blindside you whenever they surface. I can catch a scent of beeswax and find myself transported to the Russian Orthodox church, kissing a paper crown on my grandmother’s forehead with my brain whirring away, trying to figure out if I killed her with inaction. Countless hospital patients come in and out of the café with their tired gaits and pinched faces, all evoking the Via Dolorosa of a passage to death. Without warning I’m eleven again, pressing myself against the too-clean wall of a hospital corridor, desperately seeking the courage to go in and look at my dried-out grandfather, speak to him, smile at him, bring him some last comforts, avoiding the leering ghosts in wheelchairs who cough around their dismantling bodies.
The truth is that I forgot about the healing process entirely. I’m separated enough from those family and friends, those with whom I mourned, to have forgotten the period of communal laughter and tears. My friend had piles of pictures with her last night. There she was with various embarrassing hairstyles and awkward body shapes, laughing and loved by her warm grandfather. Here’s the beach house where they spent their Augusts together, the whole family. Here’s the graduation party for her brother. Here are the countless times she got stuck or lost and he reached in to untangle the problem and deliver her to safety. Here are the jokes and the memories – stories she’d never heard before and the stories they’ve all memorized by rote.
The wake is tonight. Shane’s was the last wake I attended, inappropriately dressed and manic with proprietal grief. I remember the vast line, the clogged funeral home, his parents smiling and sharing memories, graciously, so graciously making a space for the rest of us to mourn him. I’d turned over a box of artifacts to them: livid paper towel doodles of inside jokes and odd notes that showed his bizarre and contagious sense of humor. I finally got to meet his high school friends and the all the people who’d watched him go through his childhood dramas. We all poured our love and grief into the middle of that space. We fed off of it desperately. I gave and took angrily, not knowing what I would need for my own stores in the coming years without him.
I hope for my friend that her process is more cathartic. God, that sounds almost clinical, but I do mean it. I hope she cries her heart out and then finds that space that hurts with emptiness, and slowly gathers memories to fill it in again over the years. There will be the spot on the pew where her grandfather should have sat at her wedding. She will tell her babies about how he would have loved to meet them. She’ll be caught off guard reaching for the phone when she needs to know which back road leads to her destination, realizing she can’t rely on Gramps this time. It will hurt, but it will also slowly heal.
She's officially THE Starbucks baby, so it seemed appropriate. I'd show you a pic of her wearing it but I don't think her parents would appreciate it.
On the summer days or presidents’ week vacation, I’d follow my mother around the house, curious about what she did on a normal day. With the boys somewhat self-sufficient and me always more responsible than they were, she took on the onus of our stuffed house, her parents, and my father. We mostly took up emotional energy, I realize now, and actively undid all her work on the house without realizing it.
We always joked about my mother leaving glasses of water all over the house. In her bustling she’d realize she was thirsty, forget she’d already filled and left a glass of water around the kitchen, and bring the next cup of water with her wherever she was headed. She’d get busy or called away by her obnoxious kids, and later that evening we’d have to collect her water glasses when we ran the dishwasher. More often than not, one of the glasses would end up spilled before the day was over. Thus they were christened, “water bombs.”
I suppose in a house of six people the logic goes thisaway: Look, there’s a glass of water; I wonder if it’s mine. It can’t possibly be mine, there are five other people, plus guests, roaming this house right now. At least three of them have hacking colds, too. If I move it, one of the kids will yell about me throwing out his glass of water. I will leave it.
So when some skinny elbow or flailing overexcited hand brushed one off a shelf, or the hearth, or the washing machine, or the end table… the permutations are endless. We all did it, and we all smiled patiently, laughed together, and screamed out, “Water Bomb!” My mother rolled her eyes, surely thinking they couldn’t all be her glasses of water, and handed us the paper towels.
Just as a game, though, when I was following my mother around on those rainy vacation days, I’d count myself lucky if I found her morning tea. It was never anywhere near the kitchen. I figured out it was closest to the location of the first errand of the day, left cold and lonely in a linen closet, the basement, the shelf above the recycling in the garage, next to the stack of library books that needed to go back. I’d find it and rejoice privately, the real thing after ten false-gold nuggets in the form of water bombs. And before I’d wander back to the kitchen with it, or offer it to her wherever she was, I’d take a sip.
Black tea, English breakfast or the equivalent, not enough sugar for me, a lot of skim milk, stone cold. Maybe this explains why I can never drink mine hot.
