Ghoul

In the little Town of Mayberry, Brooklyn Heights, I have some dear old friends, many "hey how about this crazy weather, it's the warmin'" first-name-basis longtime acquaintances (who know little about the actual me), and in between these two, a number of what I think of as Street Chat Relationships.  These are the kind of weird ones where we know a lot about each other, always stop to talk, and the talks can get rather lengthy and even meaningful, within the limited scope of setting.

I have a particularly congenial Street Chat Relationship with the lovely mother of a boy in Ella's class, who lives across the street from me.  Over the last decade, we've had many (at times daily) exchanges: about our children (she really spilled the tea on her son throughout his early adolescence! That poor boy, his frailties laid bare for me, sotto voce!), our families (oy vey, our families!), our Judaism, tips on planning our kids' b'nai mitzvot festivities.  We laughed about our dogs' misbehaviors, lamented the shortcomings of the school math curriculum, shared stories of growing up in Brooklyn.

I ran into her walking her dog, the very day after I'd helplessly watched Alex die so suddenly, right in front of me.  I was still in shock, literal body-brain shock.  I was inside-out and quite crazy with the feelings that come before the grief sets in.  The email had already gone out to the high school with the news, and she approached me and asked how I was.  I'm sure she was immediately sorry she'd asked such an open-ended question, because I proceeded to tell her how I was, or rather, how it was.  I dimly remember telling her in a weird possibly smiling conversational tone, "oh it was terrible, he dropped dead just dropped dead, I mean literally fell down and died, right there right in front of me, one minute hanging out happily, the next minute on the floor dying, then the minute after that, dead!" I saw her sympathy smile freeze, and I knew I should stop talking.  I had reached out and grabbed her hand from the other side of the veil, and with my own clammy undead widow's hand, tried to pull her down into the intimate corruption of the grave.

I imagine myself now as a sort of ghoul in a human suit, walking the streets of my neighborhood.  The reek of body horror and fear and death is on me and in me.

I saw her this morning, halfway down the block, her golden lab in tow.  She raised her hand in greeting, then turned away, then walked away, then broke into a little trot, and disappeared fast around the corner.

East of the Sun, West of the Moon

Alex never really wanted to get married; he didn't see the point, and probably also had a lot of reservations about me (who could blame him).  I had to convince him.  We'd been together five years.  I brought it up a lot, strategically and then directly.  He kept saying no, it wasn't the right time, and then quoting Joni Mitchell: "we don't need a piece of paper from the city hall..."

I really wanted to get married to him.  Eventually I wore him down, and we got a set of 14k gold wedding rings at Macy's (on sale for $35 dollars for my slender band and $65 for his manly version), and we got married by a judge in chambers at the Supreme Courthouse at the foot of Montague Street.

I was never sure what he really felt about me.  Not really.  Well, sometimes I was certain he hated me.  Sometimes I thought I was his.  Mostly I was just unsure.  Maybe in the very very beginning, when I was young and his eyes twinkled at me like Pa's eyes twinkled at Laura, I knew.  But he held me at arm's length and I was never certain where I stood.  Not for 28 years.

I would have crossed the frozen wastes of the Steppe, on foot, for just one sure sign of his love.

PhD in Grief: a Slightly Tortured Metaphor

In my family we always joke about levels of driving skill.  Toodling along an empty country road upstate at midday on a sunny day is at most high school junior level driving.  At very most.  The FDR in heavy but fast-moving traffic on a rainy night is Masters-level.  Driving the unplowed back roads of the Adirondacks, in the dark, during a post-blizzard ice storm, on the way from your husband's burial, is PhD-level driving.  Though as you attempt the merges on and off unplowed highways under such conditions, possibly you reach your Driving Post-Doc.

Though I never made it past a hanging state of ABD with my actual doctoral work, I find myself now struggling to completion in a field of study I didn't choose, don't enjoy, but am resolved to see through to graduation (on an undisclosed far-off date, in an imagined auditorium somewhere).  I really hate the coursework.  It's all over the place, from the philosophical to the practical; some might call it interdisciplinary.  And it has no real specialization, but never mind.  A sampling from the course roster:


Staring Down the Void: Readings in Existential Abandonment  (independent study)
How to Cook a Nourishing Dinner for Your Child While Shaking and Tear-Blind (practicum)
Civil Service Bureaucracy: An Overview (prerequisite survey course)
Civil Service Bureaucracy II: Intricate Forms
Civil Service Bureaucracy III: Phone System Navigation
Advanced Civil Service Bureaucracy: Magical Realism and Lateral Thinking
Blurring: Uses and Abuses of Psychopharmacology


This really is some advanced-level grief.  I've watched people die before.  I've had losses.  Deaths of loved ones, numerous.  I sat vigil with the body of my father, and held his dead hand.  But I never imagined what a piker I really was, til now.

God Never Said It Would Be Easy

I'm up very early.  Brooding over God, and all the collective hurts of my marriage and his death and now the last two weeks.  It's built up big time.  People saying awful shit.  The ex-girlfriends popping out of the wainscoting to offer to send me baby photos his mother gave them, and to tread heavily on my grief.  Throwaway comments meant to help but actually are little knife jabs and twists that keep me in a state of bristling self-protection.

During the worst times of my marriage (and people have said to me, "all marriages have their rough spots," a platitude that reeks of 1950s received wisdom), I remember this out of body thing that used to happen to me.  I could see my hurt face.  Not the rest of me, just my face.  I could see the preternaturally gigantic fairytale tears quivering and spilling over.  I could see the surprise in my eyes (how could this be happening?). But any anger was pushed deep down into a hidden trunk way back in a hidden room behind another hidden room in a hidden mansion on a hidden street in a hidden neighborhood where The Worst Things live.  It lives there still, but its wispy dark tendrils are beginning to sneak out.

I said to some cop friend of his, last week, "I was a good wife!" like I was arguing with doubters, which I was.  There are many doubters, including me.  "I liked to take care of him and cook nice things and even pair the socks and make sure there were always clean clothes and a cozy home and cozy love."  To which the cop replied, with a little bitterness, "other wives could take a lesson from you!"  I had many startled and conflicting replies, but for once in my overly-confessional big-mouthed life, I kept silent.

God never said it would be easy

I hear this in my head in a rumbling voice: "I NEVER SAID IT WOULD BE EASY," and it has been going round and round my brain in an unpleasant and uncomfortable spin cycle of suds and filth commingling, the psychodynamic washer of my injured soul.  God never said it would be easy! 

If we're in that kind of a casual, chatty convo with God, I'd say back, "Oh Great Lord of the Bait-&-Switch, are you retroactively applying plausible deniability to the shitstorm of my life?" And then I'd  imagine this chat further, with God saying, "I'm God, child! The Great Watch-maker! I never said anything one way or another! Where did I ever say that? Where do you think I told you it wouldn't be easy? The Bibles ? You are one of my faithful, and even you know those books were written by human beings.  Some very fine writing, yes.  The best of all human writing.  Some magnificent poetry, erotica, prayer, history, some gorgeously imagined psychotic ramblings of prophets.  But the actual Me-God? No.  I'm off the hook for ex-post-facto denials and helpful warnings and also for all misery, suffering, grief, concentration camps, child abuse, and even failed crops."

And I'd reply, "but God, I never blamed you for my suffering.  I blamed people and I blamed myself.  Now though, I'm suddenly wondering:  should I blame you? If you are saying 'I never said it would be easy,' then you're a dismissive jerk.  If you didn't say 'this shit is gonna be awful, don't say you weren't warned,' WHY NOT? Why didn't you warn me? WHY DIDN'T YOU WARN ME.  I went blindly hopefully toward life and love.  Like a fool."

I think God is mulling over His response.  I hope He gets back to me soon.  I'm waiting.

Faith

I talk about my Judaism a lot, but I don't often talk with people about my strong and abiding faith, that is to say, my belief in God.  But I was talking this morning with a friend whose belief in God is also deep and abiding, and I felt a little relief.  Talking directly and specifically about my relationship with God, out loud.  Just a little.  I'm posting a fragment of my side of the conversation just so I won't forget:

"The Rabbinic chaplain of the NYPD (an amazing old man, full of what we call "kavanah") came to the wake and held a small service for us.  He chanted the El Malei Rachamim and said Kaddish, and gave a homily.  The ancient words really do give so much comfort to me.  I had felt at sea in traditions that were not mine, as I tried my best to do the right thing for Alex, in the hour of his death.  But I felt so alienated.  The Rabbi helped anchor me so I could continue on, a little strengthened.

I don't know.  My thoughts are all over the place.  I know I need some grief support, especially to help me work through my agony over the moments of death, I mean the details of the sudden horrible dying and my fears and deep guilt and regret over having failed him.  But I also need God.  I'm working my way to Him, I'm almost afraid of Him, I don't want to be rejected and I've never before asked for succor in a situation like this.  I tiptoe up to Him and whisper something, then I run away again, shy and worried.  Do you know what I mean? It's such a strange feeling, to feel shy and frightened of God, but at the same time to need Him as much as I do."

Just a fragment.  That's all for now.

Thy Firmness Makes My Circle Just

A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

John Donne

As virtuous men pass mildly away, 

   And whisper to their souls to go, 

Whilst some of their sad friends do say 

   The breath goes now, and some say, No: 

So let us melt, and make no noise, 

   No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move; 

'Twere profanation of our joys 

   To tell the laity our love. 

Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears, 

   Men reckon what it did, and meant; 

But trepidation of the spheres, 

   Though greater far, is innocent. 

Dull sublunary lovers' love 

   (Whose soul is sense) cannot admit 

Absence, because it doth remove 

   Those things which elemented it. 

But we by a love so much refined, 

   That our selves know not what it is, 

Inter-assured of the mind, 

   Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss. 

Our two souls therefore, which are one, 

   Though I must go, endure not yet 

A breach, but an expansion, 

   Like gold to airy thinness beat. 

If they be two, they are two so 

   As stiff twin compasses are two; 

Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show 

   To move, but doth, if the other do. 

And though it in the center sit, 

   Yet when the other far doth roam, 

It leans and hearkens after it, 

   And grows erect, as that comes home. 

Such wilt thou be to me, who must, 

   Like th' other foot, obliquely run; 

Thy firmness makes my circle just, 

   And makes me end where I begun. 

Heartbeat

The first time we spent the night together, at Swarthmore, on that silly futon of mine that was not even 3/4 of a twin bed, I put my head on your warm chest and listened to your heartbeat.  It was strong, I mean it was really strong, it was so outrageously bold just like you were.

Call-and-response

In the emergency room, after they called your time of death (which was strange, because I saw the moment when you died with me, and that moment was an hour earlier; I watched as your brain stopped all thought and your eyes became fixed and dilated, though the men continued working to keep a heartbeat for you, that could no longer keep itself), a wail loosened and I couldn't stop calling your name and your epithet: darling darling Alex darling Alex darling

In the waste of cold lights and twisted sheets and metal things, you  couldn't answer me

I took your dead hand in mine and suddenly, beyond the wailing, there began a chorus of voices,  a sea of crumpled people in the curtained beds all around us, reedy thin hesitant voices "I'm sorry" "I'm sorry" "I'm sorry" locked with my voice in the call-and-response of a blues song as old as human memory