Hello. I am posting what was meant to be the original first post on this blog back in 2015. It took 2 years, but most of these feelings still feel pretty real. A lot has happened in the last two years. Including two additional major losses. Our 20 year old only cat in May 2015 and my Mother in May 2016. She suffered a stroke in April 2015 (hey, maybe thats why I never got the blog going?) and never went home. It was a year in and out of multiple long-term care facilities and hospitals. And she was 1000 miles from here. It wasn’t a great year. It wasn’t a great two years! But in February 2017 I can honestly say that I think I’ve made a lot of internal progress and that I am in a better place with so much grief. But back to where it all began. Here is that first intended post:
First post for the new blog, Day-Blind Stars
Happy New Year? We’ll see. So long 2014. Adios. Get lost. See ya, wouldn’t wanna be ya. All that. 2014 had its ups, but it also had its downs. And man were the downs way down.
In the spring I learned my father had cancer. It was a bit of a shock for a number of reasons, the least of which was my physical reaction to it. We had not been close and it had actually been years since we had talked. I would like to say he was difficult, and I wouldn’t be wrong, but certainly I am not without a role in our difficult relationship. But even though he was not a close dominant presence in my life, he was there. Everyday. When I tie my shoes incorrectly using the rabbit ear method because that was how he taught me to do it when my little fingers twisted in frustrated knots trying to make a real bow. And here I am just shy of 40 and I still don’t know how to properly tie my shoes! Or how I sometimes talk to myself and know that it is OK because my father told me it was perfectly normal to talk to yourself. He told me this using himself as an example. His story was that when he was a little boy there was a closet in his bathroom with a curtain for a door and when he would sit on the toilet he would pretend that there was a queen behind the curtain (a room with two thrones?) and he would carry on conversations with her. Ok. Talking to oneself is a-ok. But conversing with a Queen whilst on the loo, not so sure. And my enjoyment of wine. My dad taught me that too. And in other subtle ways, like how when I see a seagull I always think, there goes Jonathan Livingston. I once heard my father say that same thing aloud and I was shocked that we had read the same book. So when my dad was diagnosed with cancer and reported (through my siblings or his wife, I never heard it from him directly) that he had 5-8 months to live, I felt a physical hollow in my hand. It was as if when I went to grab something I had to reach again and give an extra squeeze in order to feel anything. And I felt as if “my father is dying” was on a loop in my head. I don’t think I said it aloud nearly as often as I think I said it. My father is dying. My father is dying. It was constant. Like a faucet accidentally left on.
I got used to the idea that it was happening. I saw him in early October at his house in Ohio and then one last time in the hospital in November. He died on Veteran’s Day. Of cancer caused by his exposure to Agent Orange in the Vietnam War. Is that hipster-level irony? It was sad. And difficult. And the emotions I felt were many and they were confusing. I have a lot to write on the subject, but not now.
And then December started with so much fun it was scary. (I am prone to waiting for the other shoe to drop, so fun is often at the expense of feeling true joy.) Friends visiting from NY and Open Studios. I was drunk on the brief escape from grief. Until. Until I woke up one morning to find a text message that my grandmother had died during the night. She was 95 and in so many ways I don’t have a childhood or early adult memory that is not tangled up in her.
My grandparents were the dominant force in my life. They were so much more to me than any other living person – sibling, parent, Aunt, Uncle or cousin. I thought they made the sun rise and set just for our own amusement and wonder. Wonder. How Great Thou Art. Sitting on a stiff-backed oak church pew in Antioch, IL listening to my grandmother belt “Oh lord my God, when I in AWESOME WONDER, consider all the worlds thy hands have made, I see the stars, I HEAR THE ROLLING THUNDER…Then sings MY SOUL, my SAVIOR GOD to thee: How GREAT THOU ART, How GREAT THOU ART!” I know that was a tangent, just go with it. Here’s the thing, my grandmother really let her voice loose in church. She would belt out the hymns with gusto. And me? I would be barely audible, mouthing instead the words I found so beautiful. And I had a great satisfaction in listening to my grandmother sing in church. I was satisfied in the knowledge that there was at least one person with a singing voice worse than mine. She might not have known it, but her voice was like nails on a chalk board. I felt my spine shudder more than once. Usually when she got into a verse she found particularly meaningful. Such as “I will go Lord, if you lead me. I will hold your people in my heart.” Or “And I will RAISE you UP on EAGLES wings, bear you on the BREATH of dawn…” she just let it go. And go it went. Into your bones like a brutal winter wind. Her hitting the chorus would jerk my grandpa awake next to me. And he would startle for a quick moment before settling back in to “rest his eyes.”
So on the one hand I had been thinking about my grandmother’s death since November 1989 when my grandfather died. Once he died I think it sunk in that she was going to eventually die too. I had already lost both my paternal grandparents, but they were different. Losing my grandfather felt a little like losing a limb. I remember that day. I was a freshman in high school and I woke up with a pit in my stomach and I stayed home from school. And in the afternoon I learned that my grandfather had died. My sister’s friend came to see if I was OK. And I just stood there thinking, am I? Am I? I had no idea. And then I started wondering about my grandmother’s death. I wondered if my grandmother would still be alive when I turned 16. If she would still be alive when I went to prom. Or if she would still be alive when I graduated from high school. Or college. Or got married. I listed the major life events and wondered whether she would be there with me. And each time one event concluded with her there I wondered about the next. And then I stopped thinking about it. Until two years ago when I visited her at the nursing home and she didn’t recognize me. That’s when I started grieving. The physical death was something else altogether. But that feeling of being invisible or unimportant to the person who made me feel special was a death that was deep.
I was thinking about these two deaths at the end of 2014 and thinking how I haven’t really grieved yet. Little grieving, or grief lite, but not the grand grieving. Why not? Time. And I imagined the physical manifestation of my grief and I saw myself in a shed somewhere across a snowy field and under a big tree, wrapped in a wool blanket with a candle, huddled in a corner with my knees tucked under my chin and just crying. Really snotty, ugly, red, puffy-faced crying. For a long time. And then having a glass of wine and a piece of the most delicious bread with Irish butter on it. That is my idea of grieving. I shared that image with my friend Maria and she said it made her think of the poem The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry.
When despair for the world grows in me
And I wake in the night at the least sound
In fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down when the wood drake
Rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things,
Who do not tax their lives with forethought
Of grief. I come into the presence of still water
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
Waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world and am
Free.
So beautiful. And that is what made me think to start a little blog again. One that I can invite people to and keep hidden away from others. I don’t know how often I will write, but I want to give myself a place to do it. To share words. And sometimes photos too.
Cheers to 2015!
But the baptismal font is medieval. Dave’s great-grandfather AEJ, later AEP, was baptized here in 1870. He wanted to go into the ministry and left in 1888 for America. He was invited back in 1929 to preach at his childhood church.
Things have been quiet over here on this blog. Quiet? More like an eerie silence. (Tangent alert. Like once when Dave and I sat in this park near our house and didn’t hear one bird. It was bizarre. I had never been in that park without the sound of birds doing their bird things. We wondered whether someone had sprayed chemicals or what the cause could possibly be.)
day-blind stars 