A Crab Molts Its Shell

I found a spider crab shell on the beach last week. Purplish pink with the horn-like protuberances seen in the video above, it was too weird (and too large--bicycle helmet sized) to pocket. I poked it with a stick and flipped it over. Alas, it was not a shell that had been molted, but a casket for the remains of a creature who perished. Not picking it up was a wise decision. Even after the waves cleaned it out, I didn't want it in my arms.

I feel like I'm molting. Dashing around to distract myself while there are bigger things happening as the second anniversary of Dan's death approaches. Yesterday it was as if I stepped out of bed and into chasm, dropping down into a place airless and dark. I lay on the couch and dozed, too stupefied to read or muster the good sense to go out for a walk, meditate, or do anything.

Today it felt as if the sun was pouring in despite the May-gray skies here, yet there are more dealings with the dead. Another beneficiary form to fill out as we close my mother's last bank account.  And her supplementary insurance continues to send emails (despite my emails announcing her death and the attaching of a jpeg of her death certificate.) They're asking for her to sign the cancellation form, asking if she'd agree to serve on some patient  panel and fill out questionnaires about how they're doing.  While I'd like to impersonate her and participate with scathing commentary, I don't have the heart for it  right now. Darn. I know an opportunity for a heck of a good time when I see one, right?

From the New Yorker

Meanwhile, I continue to tend to my health. Beset with swollen knees, fingers, and hands and in pain since I returned from final visit with my mother in Iowa in March, blood tests show no Lyme disease, no autoimmune diseases. I have paid my thousand dollar bill and have letters from my primary care physician and a rheumatologist proclaiming the good news. A week ago I took my swollen self to a Functional Medicine doctor. Of course he told me to change my diet. No dairy. No gluten. ( I used to be a gluten free vegetarian, but converted back to being a regular omnivore about a year ago.) My cynical self didn't want to believe that I needed to give up dairy and gluten, (I mean, c'mon, it seems like such a knee-jerk alternative thing) but my desperate self was, well, desperate. After two days the swelling in my knees and fingers was pretty much gone. My right hand is still deciding whether or not to go with the miracle. But maybe it's lagging behind because it actually poured the milk and put the toast in the toaster.

And back to the molting--my caregiver skin is nearly shed. Another form/email or two and I am something new. The ex-wife skin, while only able to be gotten rid of when either or both The Someone and myself meet the same fate as the crab I found on the beach, feels like there's been  at least some exfoliation or a nip and a tuck. July holds its own treacherous anniversary. This year it will be nine years since my marriage ended with a three-sentence conversation. I lost my husband, my family, my house, my town. Three decades of personal history became a fraud. Half my life felt like a hallucination.

But I'm all right now. Quite wonderful, in fact. A new person, alive and well. There is that chasm.  But I think I can remember to climb out.

Mourning in Margaritaville

My Aunt Millie, my mother's twin sister, died this past Friday evening. She and my mom recently celebrated their 89th birthdays together on the east coast. The trip was wonderful for my mom, and although her sister's health was more frail than her own, my mother began enthusiastically talking about next year's trip immediately after our return home. "I just can't believe it," she says over and over again when she considers the fact that Millie is gone.

I loved my aunt. I met her for the first time when I was a teenager. She lived on the east coast while my mom was raising her family in Iowa, and in those days, distance and lack money for travel kept the twins apart. It was eerie waking up on the sofa in her Baltimore apartment--like I'd been transported to a parellel universe where a woman who looked just like my mother was making my breakfast in a city I'd never been to.

In the 80s after my mom and my aunt were both widows, they moved back in together and were housemates for decades. Every year they came to visit me and my family in California. My daughters sometimes referred to my Aunt Millie as a "bonus" grandma. The twins were a package deal--no doubt much like they'd been as children

My mother's loss is profound, and I try to imagine what it's like to experience her particular grief. My own grief at the death of my aunt feels as though it's waiting in the wings while center stage a weeping old woman looks in a mirror and there's no one looking back.

Maybe 4 years old?

Age 7 /First Holy Communion--
my grandmother cut her wedding veil in two to
make their veils

wow

1970-something

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