Dahlin' You

I’m sitting in a coffee shop.  Exeter, New Hampshire.  It’s unreasonably warm out there, but still chilly, November cold.  It’s December and I’m listening to "Famous Blue Raincoat."  It pulls at my heart in a way that isn’t difficult right now.  All the threads are out.  You could see them if you were here - in the public tears, the spontaneous weeping.

I don’t mind it.  I don’t mind when it gets unraveled like that - a puddle at my feet, untied shoelaces.

And I keep tripping over the strings and it hurts so good.  Because I need some proof that she’s gone.  That she was here.  That she entered the house with that beautiful scratchy voice, “Dahlin! How ah ya my dahlin?”  She would open her arms, stretching the Red Sox emblem forever emblazoned across the chest of every sweatshirt she wore.  She smelled good, familiar good…good like your favorite aunt’s house, and the wood fire welcoming you in after a long play in the snow, and the secret place where you used to hide - behind the big rock and underneath the scrawny maple just your size, and…  

“How is Calarado Dahlin?  You doin’ good out theah?”

“Oh Dahlin’ I’m fine.  Did you hea about Boab Schmitt?  I know, it’s so sad.  If ya gonna go though, he died doin’ what he loved.  How’s yah friend, the one who helps with the festival?”

Her hair sticks out of her cap like an unruly cottonball.  Eyes nestled into her face, twinkling always.  She is Santa Clause, she is a fairy tale.  You didn’t know anyone like her.  You couldn’t. 

I can’t figure out what tense to use.  Because her light is so full of color, so vivid, I can’t let her be dead.  She is Sue, fresh baked bread, warm pub on a rainy day, your favorite mittens, crotcheted with heart strings long before you were born.  

How can those things die?

She was good, every salty inch of her.  She coached little league for a million years.  She wrote letters to the soldiers fighting in every war she was alive for.  She took care of us - you even - even though you didn’t know her, she took care of all of us, believing in the goodness of people.

She cleaned our house for 20 years and loved us still, amidst the grime and mess we hid (with her help) from the world.  She loved the stink and trash out of us.  A strong love, reliable.  

When I hear a car come up the driveway it won’t be her.  It won’t be her.  It won’t be Sue Russell, baseball zealot, coach, community organizer, fisherwoman, pot-smokin’ beer drinkin’ lover of the great outdoors, giver of everything she could…

But she isn’t gone.  Even her death can’t kill her.  Sue Russell - a Sunday afternoon, hot diner coffee, your grandmother’s worn quilt.  She had the wildness of a deer, loyalty of a dog, mouth of a sailor.

I am so lucky to have her with me.  I’m sad mostly because I wish you, all of you, had known her.  She brought such goodness to the world…and still does, I suppose, but it has to come through those of us who were graced with her proximity.  The goodness comes through her story and the way we can all giggle and rest inside it.  

…the comfy recliner, the cloud you can sit in.  Sue Russell, that wonderful, wonderful human.

Joe

You surprised me with your death.  I think about people dying a lot.  You were the perfect distance from these reflections.  I couldn’t imagine yours…not in a million years.   Once I watched and admired from the periphery, the support and inspiration you gave to the community.  Now I feel it.  I am more alive for it.  Somehow I feel closer to you, to the people grieving and celebrating your life. The pace is slower, the sky, a more generous blue.  You have colored my eyes like a child and polished my sense of wonder.

The last big memory:  Circus Center.  I climbed the fabric and there you were, in a little window.  Your face lit up and you ran down to meet me.  I descended too and ran toward you for a hug I knew would be good.  But it wasn’t just a hug.  You lifted me off the ground and spun me in circles.  The child in me was greeted with playful reverence.  Excited and nervous, like stumbling onto a loving carnival ride.  It was awkward for a moment when you put me down.  I wanted more and I didn’t know what to say.

Just like now.

You must know what I’m feeling.  You felt it so strongly…the longing to connect.  And so you offered the same to others - inspiration, support, a way of making each person feel important, beautiful, possible.  I took you for granted, as I do many people, places, experiences.  But your passing dissolves that too.

Your death becomes a perfect frame for your vivid and extraordinary life.  You make me want to pick people up, spin them around, treasure each set of wonder-filled eyes.  You hugged me as if it were the last time I would see you.  And indeed it was.  I’m so sorry I didn’t know it.  And I’m so grateful that it’s how you treated everyone.

Thank you Joe.  Thank you for that permanent reminder.  Never in my experience has there been such life in dying.  My heart hurts so badly and I’m grateful for that too.

She Won't Let Me Run Away

It happens before my period, a great build up before the release.  I admire them in her mirror.  There is a loveliness to the shiny skin, gently stretched with swelling.  A pink line runs over the top of each breast where my bathing suit ends.  I push them together to make impressive cleavage.  They are tender to touch.  Alex Trebek is in the next room, drowning out the sound of labored inhales.  

My aunt is dying.  She gasps for last breaths.  She has many last breaths.  Stress builds among family members as our love for her becomes louder and desperate.  My uncle drives me crazy.  Not really.  I drive myself crazy and use him as an excuse.  

I put on a shirt and return to my perch.  She holds on next to me.  To what?  Sometimes she will mumble, call out to her sister, sing a song from her childhood.  Otherwise, her triumphant body continues to sink into the bed. 

At first I wanted to be here for it, to heroically usher her through the transition.  I wanted to be strong for everyone.  Now the dying process tries my patience.  At first it seemed so beautiful, so real and honest.  After weeks of anticipation, our waiting has become rigid.  We built a dam to hold back our grief so that we are capable enough to get dressed and give her medicine.  Emotional constipation has us on edge.

Death, where are you?  She should go now.  This is her time. These are the words that crowd my head as I touch my living body, crave sandwiches, busyness, and the ocean on my skin.  They seem true, but they are thoughts arising out of exhaustion and an eagerness to experience something else.

Her lovely scent is still somehow alive in the home.  She dies with slow grace and fortitude.  She dies quietly, so that we can hear coverage of the presidential race, reruns of Jeopardy and episodes of Forensic Files. She softens our tension by waking from near death with important observations.  She sits up suddenly, wide-eyed and lucid after a long period of inert survival: “Donald Trump’s face must look like that because he has been eating too much pussy.”

We laugh and kiss her forehead and then return with her to the passing of languid hours. 

Despite the sweet moments, I don’t want to hear her or smell her or watch her endure pain anymore.

I fancy myself a lover of Death - the equalizer, humbler, reminder of impermanent perfection.  But Death isn’t all beautiful.  It tests composure.  How is she still alive when she hasn’t eaten in weeks and she is on enough morphine to sedate an elephant?

I am embarrassed in the face of Death.  I am embarrassed to feel frustrated.  To waste energy on ugly thoughts and interior grumbles.  I promise myself to be better, to grow beyond this childish irascibility.  I will be peaceful.

But this doesn’t happen immediately like I wish it would.  She won’t let me run away.  I can go into the bathroom, put on her makeup, make faces in her mirror, but I can’t escape myself.

Maybe Death is hiding under the bed.  Maybe he loves to watch human folly.  Maybe what he loves is giving us the opportunity to clean ourselves up before our individual journeys.  He likes a lighter load and this is his way of saying, “Look, here is all your baggage.  It’s going to be a heavy ride if you don’t put some of it down.”

But I don’t know how to do it.  I’m afraid.  And maybe, so is she.

Breaking Can Be Beautiful

I am not toxic.  I am not perfect either.  I am flawed and broken in places.  I feel all of that right now.  It isn’t easy.  It isn’t easy to break open.  To feel pain and light at the same time.  It’s confusing.  When I’m not paying attention, there are stories that play over in my mind.  When I’m not paying attention, my breath stops and my stomach tightens and all of a sudden I realize I have been listening to a radio show of me yelling all the things I want to yell at you.  One of them is this:  “I’m not toxic.”

I don’t know why that one stuck out.  Maybe because you repeated it several times.  You brought your face near to mine and said my closest friends call me toxic.  Maybe because I started to believe it.  You said I’m not worth it.  Over and over again.  And I sat in the white chair - the old one with a tiny carpet placed crookedly to cover the worn seat - the chair nobody sits in anymore - and I looked at the floor.  

We yelled at each other and then I couldn’t because your voice became too big.  That’s when I sat and stopped.  Even though it was loud, something happened and everything became quiet.  In the spacious house, I watched the little statues tremble, the blue eggs on the half-finished mobile shake.  Your face was red, your mouth open and I knew you were still yelling.  But I couldn’t hear you.

Remember when you told me about the radish - the way you taste that first radish whenever you eat one?  “All radishes are that radish,” you said.  And I understood.  Because I have a similar experience.  It doesn’t happen as often as it used to when I was a child.  In a moment when I know I am making a memory that will stay with me forever, everything goes quiet.  There is a visual echo that reaches back in time throughout my life and also forward - like a tunnel growing into past and future.  As I sat in the white chair I knew it was coming when your voice stopped working on me and time dissolved around my body.  Everything about the chair became knowable.  The fibers, rough against the prickles of my Thursday shaven legs.  The whiteness, or attempt at white, softened with age and stains.  The stories woven into fabric, buried in the armature, all holding me while I sat suspended in a reality apart from yours.

I kept telling myself, It isn’t true.  Like there were two of me and I was suddenly the white chair, holding a little girl.  As your voice faded in and the forever moment broke, I started to hear the ugly things you were saying.  It isn’t true, I said as the chair.  Don’t believe this.  You are worth it.

What is true, is that I have been afraid from the beginning.  I wanted to be with you so badly it was like all my insecurities came to the surface.  Afraid I wasn’t beautiful enough, afraid I was too weird, afraid you would judge choices I have made in the past…or worse, that you wouldn’t want to understand them.  I was afraid of your unpredictability, afraid of your lifestyle, afraid to like it and afraid that I would drown in you.

So I reached out in the moments when you didn’t show up.  I tried to prove that I didn’t need you.  I used friends as flotation and swam around performing sexuality, strength and independence.  This, I know, only fueled our battles.  This, I know, is hard to be with.  

I’m sorry I wasn’t braver in the beginning.  It doesn’t mean I’m not worth it.  Even the performance of myself is worthy of love.  I'm not perfect.  That doesn't mean I'm toxic.  I am flawed and broken in places.  And it isn’t easy to break.  It's confusing.  

As children, just as our skulls have not fully grown together, there are parts of our selves yet unfastened, the parts later sewn together with experience and memory.  But sometimes, in our adult years, the sutures come undone.

On the white chair, I cracked open and fell out of time.  I discovered a part of myself sturdy and soft enough to break the fall.  I feel strong, even though there is pain.  And grateful, even though there is resentment.  Thank you for bringing parts of me to life, for teaching me where I can grow and showing me where I am afraid.  Thank you for reminding me that breaking can be beautiful.