That’s pretty amazing, if I do say so myself. This number is an excellent milestone, but there is a more important one for me to hit, and that’s going six months after Cathy’s passing without having a coronary event of any kind. That grim milestone happens at the end of March. So far, so good!
Well, here’s hoping. I am well aware of what a pernicious and sneaky bastard grief is, and my particular plague animal these days is something I’m calling grief gnats. These are tiny mites, flecks of random gibberish, really, that interrupt me whenever I’m in danger of feeling like myself again.
Driving, grocery shopping, working on the projectors, whatever. I will be bopping alone, humming one of the 8-bar samples that occupy space in my brain on the world’s worst spotify playlist, completely in the zone, and my thoughts will stray in that way creative people can do one thing and think another. I’ll get thirty seconds into that wonderful little attic crawl space and then something will flash in my brain, just like in the movies, a quick cut. Cathy in her hospital bed. Her tears of frustration. The sound that came out of me at the end. It’ll only last an instant, flitting across my eyes like a pest. But it’s enough.
I spiral back out of my mindset and take a few minutes to compose myself. When I am breathing normally and not chiding myself like Crash Davis swinging at a breaking ball, I make a valiant attempt to retrace my steps and get back to where I was before I so rudely interrupted myself. Most days, I can re-engage.
The clinical name for it is survivor’s guilt. I didn’t think I had any, but I kinda guess I do. These damn grief gnats. It’s like there’s a switch that flips when I get to a certain cruising speed. A Wellness Circuit Breaker. I’m cranking the Sonics and bee-bopping along, yowling out the lyrics to “Have Love, Will Travel,” you know, like you do. And then my subconscious sees that I am living and reminds me of what I had to endure last year. It’s not fair. I say this with genuine resentment, since I do plenty of grieving without any prompting from my subconscious. I even get the occasional extra bonus of stepping on someone else’s land mine.
Last week I was buying something at the hardware store, and
the person at the counter asked me if I was a member of the rewards program. I
get the weekly flier, so, yeah. I gave him my phone number and I could
instantly see that wasn’t the right one by the look on his face. “Uh, I don’t…”
I cut him off. “It’s this one,” I said, giving him Cathy’s phone number. He
tickity-tacked on the computer and then smiled and said, “Cathy?”
I started to deliver my standard joke in this fairly common
scenario about my parents having a really warped sense of humor, but I opened
my mouth and nothing came out. It just didn’t seem very funny. I put my head
down and said, “No...” and let me tell you that there is nothing more uncomfortable
in the world than a grown man crying in a hardware store. It’ll make water run
back up a spout, I shit you not. I stood there, and he stood there, and the
only thing missing from the chasm that formed between us was Evel Knievel
trying to jump over it in a rocket car.
Thankfully the two managers, who knew the score, jumped in an took over the
transaction and on the fly changed the rewards name to mine in the computer so that
the incident wouldn’t repeat itself the next time I needed a can of WD-40 or a
tap and die. I got back in the car and made the drive home, trying to keep my
hands from shaking.
So, what I’m getting at, basically, is I don’t need any
extra help being sad, grief gnats, thanks all the same. Between my own grief
hammers and the occasional clothesline everyone else leaves out for me to self-garotte
with, it’s a wonder I can get anything done.
