Grief: Home Again

When Cathy was in hospice, we didn’t talk a lot about the Big Inevitable Thing that was about to happen. It was too upsetting for her. We had, however, done some preliminary planning many years ago, and this was codified during her treatment. I knew, then, what she wanted; we both decided on cremation for ourselves for a number of practical reasons. However, neither one of us wanted to hold on indefinitely to the other’s remains and so we decided to do something with them.

I won’t tell you what I want done with mine; you’ll just have to come to the funeral. Cathy’s solution was not nearly so interesting; she was fine with having her ashes scattered. Several locations were mentioned, but we always came back to Austin, where her heart’s home was.

This came up again during hospice. I asked her if she’d thought about it, and she said, “Maybe Town Lake?” She used to row there in college and kept it up for a while afterward as an exercise regimen. She loved it and always wished she could get back to it.

It was a solid choice. But I had another idea. “What about at Cliff Drive?” I countered.

Her eyes lit up. “Yes,” she said. “Do that.”

When I met Cathy, she and her sister Barbara were living in a small, heavily shaded neighborhood just off of Lakeshore Drive in Austin. Their place was an old garage apartment, part of a quad, originally built in the 1940s as a stone wall garage with the apartment over it. Sometime in the 1970s the garage got walled in and finished so that it was now an apartment with a nearly identical floorplan to the original one above it. What was cool about it was the wrought iron spiral staircase that connected the two living spaces. It was very bohemian and oh so very, well, South Austin. I started calling it The Bungalow of Love (shades of Lou Reed).

The Bungalow of Love was inextricably tied into our lives in Austin. We fell in love while Cathy lived there. Later, after I moved in, we got engaged there. We got married while living there. Dinner parties. Our first Thanksgiving together. It was her favorite place to live. Mine, too. It seemed absolutely right to bring her back home.

In the intervening years, the property owner had completely landscaped the front yard and the central courtyard between the four freestanding apartments. Behind our old digs, there was now a gravel path that flanked the house and led to a beautiful limestone fountain, two seating areas. In the center of the circular path, which winds around to the fountain and over to an open air patio space, there is a Chinese elm. It’s completely in the shade of the two leftmost apartments. The whole area is clearly meant to be a meditation space. The landlord graciously volunteered the elm tree for Cathy’s final resting place.

It was absolutely perfect. She would have loved it.

A mixture of old friends and family stood with me. I didn’t know what to say. I had one thing planned, and I did that first. Cathy had told our niece that she wanted a particular Tom Petty song played at her funeral. Our niece assumed that something so important would be a thing we all knew about, and so she didn’t say anything. Unfortunately, Cathy didn’t tell anyone else.

I thanked everyone for coming, and then played “The Waiting.” 

It made me laugh. Cathy had a very dry sense of humor, and I know this was supposed to be a joke to make us all laugh. I don’t know if anyone else did, but I appreciated the effort. Some folks spoke after that, and said very nice things. I wanted the people who weren’t at the funeral to be able to speak if they were so moved.

When no one else had anything to add, I played another Tom Petty song, from one of Cathy’s favorite Tom Petty albums. The song was “Wildflowers.”

I knelt down in the soft earth and I buried my wife by the tree. I covered her ashes up and packed the soil tightly over them. I spent more time doing that than I needed to, because I knew when I stood up, it would be over. My charge would be done. Nothing more left to do. Cathy was out of my hands now. I had kept her, loved her, cared for her, and grieved for her. And finally, I brought her home.

I know those ashes aren’t Cathy anymore. They aren’t the things that made her. They aren’t her heart, her soul, her dry sense of humor, her huge sense of fairness. It was merely, as Yoda once pointed out to Luke Skywalker on Dagobah, “this crude matter.” But bringing her remains home, to reside in the place she loved so much, and nourish a tree that, I guarantee, if she could have planted herself, she would have...well, I can’t speak for Cathy, not anymore. But I felt a sense of peace within myself when I stood up. I took a deep breath, smelling the fresh earth, the air, pregnant with rain, and the wet limestone fountain with water softly splashing into the stonework basin. I held that breath and let it go. It felt like a sigh of relief.

It’s okay now. It’s going to be all right. I’m going to make it. And Cathy is home. 

I added one more song to the playlist at the last minute. Another Tom Petty song. Perfect for the occasion. He wrote it for the soundtrack to the movie She’s the One. It’s called “Angel Dream (no 2).”

We stood around after that, hugging, talking, comforting one another, and eventually, laughing. Old friends and family. The tree took it all in. I hoped later, that night, during the rain that fell in thick drops, the Chinese elm whispered to Cathy everything that was said while we stood around the tree, and I hope something I said made her laugh and say, “Oh, Honey.”

Grief: Leftover Thoughts on a Year of Mourning

 
Here are a few miscellaneous thoughts, scattered hither and yon, that I decided to combine into a single post. None of these were “enough” for me to post them individually. Maybe all together, it’ll add up to something.

The Bobby pin

I came across a bobby pin today. It was on the floor in my bedroom and I spied is as I was putting my shoes on. On automatic pilot, I scooped it up in my hand, thinking, “Cathy’ll need this for something, I’m sure...” and then I stopped, and I just stared at the bent strip of wire in my hand. Even as I was thinking it, I knew I’d blundered into the classic trap. Now, with the reality of the situation covering me like a thunder shirt in a rainstorm, I stared at the bobby pin, looking for, what? A strand of hair? Some clue to tip me off that Cathy wore it at some point?

There wasn’t any. It was just a bobby pin. Likely one that didn’t even make it into her hair. But on that day, it pinned me down and it took a while to get out from under it.

Grief: The Last First

Widows and widowers speak to one another very differently than people who have not experienced a loss. I say this with no judgement. It’s just that there is a frankness, a matter-of-fact tone, that you can deploy and it won’t be “taken the wrong way,” or “misunderstood.” It’s kind of refreshing, since most everyone else is ninja-creeping around your feelings, throwing you kind eyes, and nervous because they don’t know what to say, and then saying the wrong thing anyway. This isn’t a dig; I used to do the same thing. Everyone does, until the unthinkable happens.

I mention this because I was having a conversation with one of my friends, who has become closer in the midst of this, because we share similar trajectories. Anyway, we were knocking around our collective grief, playing air hockey with it and letting it clatter around between us. I brought up how much I was dreading October, but not the rest of the year. She nodded. “You’ve already done it once before,” she agreed. 

I told her that October 15th would be my last first. The first of this without Cathy, or the first of that without Cathy, happened in rapid succession last year: Our wedding anniversary, my birthday, Halloween, her birthday, Thanksgiving, and Christmas (all big deals in our home) happened between 3 days and 3 months of her passing.  

An old pic, rediscovered

About the only thing that kept me going was my seemingly eternal, acrimonious relationship with cruciferous vegetables. It gave me a purpose to hate broccoli. It’s the only way I got through it all. And for most of this year, I was able to navigate the flow of the seasons, the holidays, real and manufactured, and other perennial events that mark the passage of time. I knew, however, that October would be rough. Her (and my) favorite month, piled high with meaning: my birthday, our anniversary, and Halloween, all within a two-week period. Now there’s one more to add to that list: her death. A signpost, first in a series, like Burma Shave ads, running me all the way to the end of the month, and oh, just TRY and be happy during your favorite month now, sucker, I double dog dare you. 

But a funny thing happened when the first of the month rolled around. I made the calculation that I had given up quite enough to cancer. It had taken so much from me. And I didn’t want to have to surrender any more. It’s been nearly a year. Cathy’s passing would be acknowledged. It would be impossible to do otherwise. But I’ll be damned if I am going to give up the rest of it. All that other stuff was mine long before cancer took her away from me. It doesn’t get anything else from me.

Grief: Rage, and the Dying of my Light

I’ve been putting this off for a while. Months.

After being so open with all of my emotions and thoughts these last few years, I wanted to take a little break from being sad. It just got to be too much. Some of you more astute folks could read between the lines on the weekly updates I’d been sending out over The FaceBooks and asked after me. Maybe I gave you a platitude. Maybe I just said, “I’m hanging in there,” which is my go-to for moving on the conversation to the next topic. I just didn’t know what to tell folks who asked after me. “I’m still furious?” "Life is a tourniquet and my neck is turning blue?" No one wants to know how the monstrous depths of my anger. 

Because that’s what I am. Still.

I thought it might be worth a checkup on the ol’ mental health report card using the five stages of grief as our barometer. I got this list from one of my grief counselors, mostly as a way to check in with myself to see just how well I’m doing. Let’s follow along together.

 

Grief: Death and Taxes

Note, for those of you wanting more frequent, day-to-day updates, I'm writing a "proof of life" post every Friday on Facebook, if you're inclined to brave that particular wilderness. It's more chatty, and talks about movies and TV shows a bit more than on here at the moment. You can follow me on FB and get the notification when I post, and hopefully being on FB to read it won't send you into an apoplexy. 

Tax Season normally fills people with dread and fear; not because everyone is secretly a white-collar criminal and living in fear that this year will be the one where the jig is suddenly up and that end up in federal prison; no, I think it’s just because most people don’t like to do math.

I don’t have a problem with paying taxes, per se. As soon as I figured out in my Economics class in high school that the taxes pay for stuff like roads, schools, national defense, yadda yadda yadda, I reasoned it was okay to expect us citizens to pay into the administrative costs of upkeep. I’ve only ever really groused about the exact percentages in each category.

What’s bothering me the most is having to go back through and relive my year, via purchases made, movies played, and that’s the trouble because I know exactly where I was from July to October and having to keep going over it again and again is a death of a thousand paper cuts. Cathy used to do this, the taxes. Oh, I’d help a little bit, with data entry and printing things out and looking at the uncategorized purchases to figure out what was what. But she did the heavy lifting. And when she got sick (well, sicker), pretty much the last thing on our minds was, “Now, don’t forget about the quarterly taxes. Here’s the password, and you’re going to want to...” I’d venture to say it was dead last at the bottom of the list of things we worried about.

So now I get to relive all of that.

Health: the Big 5-0

No, not my age, but still a pretty significant number: 50 is the number of pounds I’ve lost since September. It’s a huge number, and I’m excited to have reached it. My enthusiasm is tempered somewhat when I think about that number representing only about a third of what I need to lose. But hey, that’s a great start, and if I can keep everything on track, I ought to reach that goal before the end of the year.

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.

Grief: "I Just Want Something I Can Ignore"

 Rob says that in the film version of High Fidelity, one of the great Gen-X films of the 1990s, played by Gen-X's poster child, John Cusack. I love that quote. It's one of those things I wish I'd written, damn you, Nick Hornby. It's such a succinct thought that conveys something we don't often articulate about mass media; namely, that there is, underneath the Must Watch Shows and the Trending Twitter Topics, and the "No Spoilers" Fan-Bombs on Facebook, a second layer of media, movies, and music. It's the stuff that, for one reason or another, serves as a kind of white noise machine for our overly-stimulated simian brains. 

Shows like M.A.S.H., for instance. That's a show everyone of a certain age remembered watching, both during prime time and syndication, for two or more decades. Now, well into our adulthood, M.A.S.H. is a show that is part of the glue of television. It's always on somewhere, and we've seen every episode multiple times. Even the episodes we think we didn't see...trust me, we've seen it. It's now a digital backdrop, visual Muzak, the kind of thing that can be on in the background during a family dinner and no one minds, because no one really pays that much attention to it, even the super serious episodes where Hawkeye cries or when Sidney tries to psychoanalyze someone.

Which leads me to Gilmore Girls. 

Aftermath: One Month

 Cathy died a month ago today. As hard as the last two years have been, and this includes my own hospitalization and other assorted health problems, and as rough as this year has been, and as painful as the last four months have been, the last thirty days have been some of the most challenging days of my life. I went from the funeral straight to not having a vehicle for three weeks. The enforced shut-in was both oddly comforting and ridiculously stressful, in that it made me feel even more helpless an ineffectual. Running the gauntlet between our wedding anniversary, my birthday, Halloween, and Cathy's birthday sure as hell didn't help matters one little bit. 

All this to say, I am grateful that friends and family don't blithely ask me how I'm doing. Ordinarily I would be loathe to bypass the social niceties (the hi's and how are you's), but my patience is worn tissue paper thin right now, and things that ordinarily wouldn't bother me a bit are sending me into a red rage. But I can't yell in a stranger's face, "I feel like I'm trying to play the trombone with only one arm! How do you THINK I'm doing today!?"

That's how I feel: like I've been amputated. And phantom limb syndrome for me involves walking around the house like a mental patient, talking to thin air and anxiously waiting for an answer that will never come.