The River

Dan Paik left this world six years ago today. 

He has not visited me in any dreams recently, but he and my mom are always with me. In the past several months my mom has had cameo roles in many dreams. 

It just so happens that this essay was published by a wonderful journal last week.

https://underthesunonline.com/wordpress/2020/the-river/

State of the State of Margaritaville

Evening walk last week.

I'm alive and I live in paradise.

For more than a year I've been wrestling.
Swollen joints.(They went away; yesterday the swollen knees and ankles came back) A hoarse voice.
Grief.
Musing over  Dan's central tenet. You're doing the best that you can. Really, you did the best that you could at the time. Really really, you did the best that you could at the time with what you knew at the time.
Really?

I am alive and I live in paradise.

My voice is unreliable. Is that the same as an unreliable narrator?

Why am I not working on a writing project right now?

Some days I can barely make myself understood. In places that I go regularly, people know to lean closer. Other days I clear my throat a million times. The phlegm lady.

Yes, I've been to doctors.
Hooray, I'll be on Medicare in November.

The lungs are the seat of grief, the acupuncturist says. Okay.

The Integrated Medicine doc says no dairy and gluten. Sometimes I cheat on the dairy.

What do you do with grief when you're grieving over a dead person while taking care of a dying person?
Wow, wasn't that like, a long time ago?

No.
I am alive and I live in paradise.

Paradise itself is struggling.

Starting in the lower right foreground, notice the white bumps, and follow them into the distance. These are the breasts of western grebes, poisoned by domoic acid. The Pacific loons, cormorants, and pelicans are darker and cannot be distinguished in the photograph.

The beach, early morning, after the winds have subsided.

How to Sing Auld Lang Syne With the Dead

My dearly departed number enough to make a chorus. In 2016, the year we've come to revile for its loss of so many beloved celebrities and the loss of hope for a woman president, I also lost my mother. It's a common thing to lose one's parents at this stage of life, but nothing is more unexpected than the expected death of a loved one. We tell can tell everyone about the many trips to death's door and the seemingly incessant knocking there, but once the door swings wide, there's nothing to do but gasp with disbelief. 

What surprises me these many months later is how close I feel to her at times. How I can clearly hear what she might say in a given situation. How the hairdo or the shape of a daughter's lipsticked smile makes me feel as though my mother is just inches from my grasp.

And what surprises me these many months later is how far away she feels. Her clothes are gone, her room repainted, the wheel chair at the dining room table donated. Some days I cannot find her in any room of the house we shared.

It's the same with the man who loved me, my friend Dale, my ex-mother-in-law. I can open my eyes in the deep middle of the night dark of my bedroom and see Dan's bass leaning in a corner, and I can almost hear the strings humming. They are playing George Michael songs on the radio a lot these days, and I'm transported in front of the TV with Dale talking about rock-a-billy. I pick up the pen to write my mother-in-law's name  on the order form for the same box of Christmas oranges  I've sent her for decades. The body has momentary lapses.  

I never look heavenward when searching for the dead. I don't believe in heaven or hell. For me, there is no old man with a beard, standing at a gate. I find neither solace nor fear in those images, though if  I hold fast to those convictions, I must also mourn the loss of  the myth of reunion. How do we all meet again in paradise if there is no paradise? Lately I've come to believe that these stories are translations of a cosmic reality so profound that we mere mortals cannot grasp it. Somehow though, I believe our spirits will merge; we'll be one with love and each other in some indescribable universal song.

New Year's has long been my favorite holiday. I want to start over. I need to start over. But should auld acquaintance be forgot? Do we go forward without the dead? We do and we don't. If it's true that we are stardust (and it is), and if it's true that our carbon atoms were once "part of volcanoes, giant redwoods, Apatosauruses, diamonds, plastic bottles, snakes, snails, lichens, nematodes, photosynthetic algae, the very first cells," as a recent science article in the Washington Post tells us, it's easy to imagine how we are and could become part of each other. "It’s certain that your carbon saw the interior of a star, survived a supernova, sailed through the solar system and splashed down on Earth long before arriving at you," Sarah Kaplan writes. And now for the best part of the article. "Now breathe out. Riding an invisible cloud of carbon dioxide, a carbon atom just left your body, headed for its next great adventure." 

I was holding Dan in my arms when he took his final breath. I was stroking my mom's hair and her hands at her bedside when she breathed out and the next in-breath never came. But I breathed in. I breathed in.

It's fairly certain that if I've ever breathed in the carbon atom of a singer or a musician, it's rendered no effect on me in terms of musical talent. I can't carry a tune. But on New Year's Eve, I'll sing Auld Lang Syne inside my head--or maybe out loud if I've had a third glass of wine.  I'll sing it, arms wrapped around myself, wrapped around cosmic love, while looking up at the stars.  2017 will be a brand new start.

Happy New Year. 

For auld lang syne, my dear,
for auld lang syne,
we'll take a cup of kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.

The Ways We Miss the Dead

I had a dream last night too muddled to recount. In it was a young man--the friend of one of my daughters. He was shot and killed at a party when they were in high school. In my dream he was playing the guitar and I was trying to explain to a friend that he was dead and had come back only for this one special evening. No matter how I tried, I could not make her understand.

Friday night I went to the mall to buy a purse and to have three dead watches checked out to see if batteries might revive them. One of the watches was my mother's. I had a snappy red leather band put on it along with the new battery, wondering if some day I might wear this watch, its pulse beating on my wrist now instead of my mother's and somehow this might make me feel her presence in my life in a physical way. While I waited for the work to be done on the watches, I walked through the mall and found myself in Sears, walking in the very same aisle I once walked regularly with my mother to get to Miracle Ear.

The other day I told a friend how my father often spoke in tired and true old sayings and how he didn't even have to deliver the whole saying because he'd said them so often that we kids knew what came next.  Up too late? "The early bird," he'd say. A friend got in trouble for running with the wild kids? "Birds of a feather," he'd say.

On Thursday night, my regular night out to hear music at a local bar with friends, the musicians played a song we'd never heard them play, Sweet and Shiny Eyes. Bonnie Rait recorded it and I think Willie Nelson put out a version too.

Your sweet and shiny eyes are like the stars above Laredo
Like meat and potatoes to me
In my sweet dreams we are in a bar, and it's my birthday
Drinking salted Margaritas with Fernando

Young and wild, we drove five hundred miles of Texas highway
To the Mexican border as the day was coming on
We crossed the Rio Grande river and we swore we'd have things our way
When we happened to walk into Nuevo Leon

Your sweet and shiny eyes are like the stars above Laredo
Like meat and potatoes to me
In my sweet dreams we are in a bar, and it's my birthday
And we're having our picture taken with Fernando

In my sweet dreams we are in a bar, and it's my birthday
And we're having our picture taken with Fernando

The version I know best was sung to me live. The way I remember it, it was usually after dinner at my place. Dan would pull his guitar out of its case and carry it back to the table. We'd push our chairs far enough from each other so he'd have room to play.

In my sweet dreams I'm in a bar, there are people playing the guitar, and the dead are back for a visit, their eyes sweet and shiny. We know, just by being in their presence how lucky we are, and they know that they were lucky, in a way, to leave this life first because we were here to hold them, to mourn them, to keep them alive in our dreams, to tell their stories--and they can never do that for us.

Here's an essay about that by Donald Hall from the New Yorker.

Crying on Planes

Alaska. I can't quite remember if I cried on this flight. Maybe not. I was with a good friend.

The first time I cried on a plane was also my very first flight. My grandmother had  a heart attack and lay dying in a hospital in Dubuque, Iowa. I had been on a road trip with an aunt and uncle and when we got the news, the aunt I was traveling with, the aunt we were visiting in Baltimore, and I flew back to Iowa while my two uncles drove the camper through the night and met us there. I was 14 and saved, for maybe a a decade, the individual salt and pepper shakers and the stir stick I'd gotten with the Shirley Temple I'd gulped while swallowing my grief. Whenever I ran across these things in a drawer full of keepsakes they made me sad all over again.

The next time I flew was when my grandfather died. He had a heart attack--and died according to my mother's account--before he hit the floor. By this time I was a freshman in college and hurriedly made the 350-mile trip home, not sure how to negotiate the travel arrangements, thereby arriving at the airport completely rattled.  I remember crying openly on this flight, any effort to swallow the tears impossible.

My father died the next year, and I flew home suddenly once again. There had been a few flights to visit a boyfriend in between, but those trips were emotional minefields too since we'd given up our son for adoption just weeks before we started college. Airplane trips and crying were one and the same to me back then.

Things changed when I flew to France my junior year of college for a semester abroad. Flying was for fun and adventure, but I think I remember laughing so hard that I cried. In the ensuing years of marriage and children, there were more flights that fell into the category of mostly fun, but the motherhood years were when the flying anxiety began in ernest. More crying on airplanes.

With my aunt and my mom aging on the east coast, there were even more reasons to cry on planes. The break-up of my marriage was the watershed (pun intended.) I not only cried copiously on every flight I took anywhere--but I cried while telling my seat mate why I was crying. I have cried--or felt like crying-- for one reason or another on almost every flight I've ever taken.

My flying anxiety is somewhat less these days--but today I found myself crying on a plane once again. Traveling to the Twin Cities to meet my friend Carol who has been on a road trip since May 1 in her 45 ft. RV, I wanted to bring her a gift and found the perfect book: My Life On the Road by Gloria Steinem. I thought I might page through it a bit on the flight. The dedication and the epigraph brought tears to my eyes, and I settled in to read the book, crying over something in nearly every chapter. A history of feminism, told through the lens of Steinem's travels, reading it now when we are on the cusp of electing our first woman president during this era of burgeoning hate and prejudice, is an emotional experience. I'm half-way through the book and wonder what it will be like finishing it on the ground.

Crying on planes, it turns out, is a thing.

You can read about it:  ATLANTIC  BUSTLE
And you can listen to THIS AMERICAN LIFE episode.

People cry on planes.

Thursday Beach Report

Today's green sea and blue sky

The ocean is all chop and churn today, and a cool wind is blowing sand into the neighboring streets,  once again threatening to obliterate the little parking lot and barricade the bathrooms behind a sand dune.

There's a paperwork version of this tumult in my kitchen. And as we say these days, I. Can't. Even. 

 
I mean it. I can't.

I spent last evening Googling "spiritual reasons for swollen knees" instead of moving one sheet of paper. The swollen knees began maybe two weeks ago. Swollen fingers too. Stiffness. A bad attitude. I tried everything. Arnica, essential oil, rest, movement, yoga, no yoga, T'ai Chi Chih, no T'ai Chi Chih, ice, heat. Sunday night I could not move my arms and spent the evening imitating a tyrannosaurus rex. The chiropractor said he was not the guy, and suggested blood tests ASAP. As of last night all terrible immune diseases have been ruled out. (Whew.) But the stiffness and the swelling persists, perhaps a bit better, but not markedly.

Last night a friend asked if I'd given myself a chance to grieve. Yes, I told her, not quite believing it. I remember making an effort to grieve Dan's death out of sight of my mom. I'd sit in my closet in front of his Dia de Los Muertos altar and sob--but it was hard to give into it completely with one ear open for what might be going on downstairs. And it felt like there was too much to do to sob for my mother--too much time in the public eye. Memorial, shuttle bus, airplane.

As I sat on the couch last night, I began to picture my knees filled with unshed tears. The Google fest yielded many interesting tidbits: Fear of being ambushed from behind, "cut off at the knees"; rigidity, trying to maintain control, losing control, trying to take charge of everything; pretending to be flexible, but not really being flexible. And there was something about the left knee (the worst one) being an anchor to the past. Visualize running water, one of the sites said. It's lack of humility, said another. Genuflect.

I walked in the surf, asking for all the stiffness to be washed away. There were very few people on the beach, but I saw two young women in shorts working out. They were doing that walking/squatting exercise. It looked like genuflecting to me. I watched them, putting myself into their shoes, hoping for some relief, but probably I'll have to do my own genuflecting and shed my own tears whether I want to or not.

Thank you for your kind words, your sympathy, and your condolences.

I appreciate each and every expression of your love and understanding.

Wednesday Beach Report

Yesterday I felt wrecked. My hair in tangles from the wind, my throat dry, never quite warm enough to be comfortable. The bereavement group I attended left me feeling rattled. What do I do with that box of videos on my garage shelf that may or may not contain footage of Dan? Will there be some future day when I sit on the couch with the curtains drawn, fast-forwarding through past moments when I didn't even know him? What do I do with Dan's computer? What would I search for there? Is compartmentalizing a good thing or a bad thing? How do we mourn a loved one's continued absence while acknowledging that we've moved on? How do we live inside the gratitude for that love and translate that into living each day going forward? There were answers to those questions. Just not an answer.  And what about all the grief in that room? How does each of us carry it? The box of kleenex that gets shoved from one end of the table to another seems like a metaphor, but I can't quite put it into words.

By bedtime last night, still a bit teary-eyed, I shivered under a tower of blankets, figuring I was coming down with something.

This morning I woke up feeling well. Better than well.

Not today's actual surfer--but a previous day's surfer. Just in case someone recognizes this guy and he's supposed to be at work.

The beach today was windswept today. A lone and patient surfer waited far out from shore for that perfect moment. As I walked back, he was riding in, every breath full of balance and grace. So much of every day feels like a chain of perfect moments for me right now. But I haven't really caught my wave. I'm still treading water, figuring out how to manage my freedom.

Lovelovelove: The knowing and the forgetting

I can't remember how it started.

Sometime after the divorce, the refrain that explained everything was lovelovelove. I loved my children and felt their pain and we consoled each other sometimes with simply the chant of lovelovelove. We said it aloud. Texted it. Emailed it. I lay down on the floor with my dogs and whispered lovelovelove into  their ears. They scooted closer, wagged their tails, and professed to know what I was talking about. We were all  then (yes, even the dogs who were traumatized by the loss of the the person who'd walked and fed them) split open, raw to elements, stripped down and so fully present in the center of our love for one another. The thing I wanted most then was not to hurt the people who loved me. That purpose kept me alive, quite literally, kept the wish to die pushing into the background, but still the wish to self-destruct bobbed up and down in the ocean of grief that surrounded me.

Yet I survived. Because of lovelovelove. Because lovelovelove is the life raft. Children are the life raft. Friends are the life raft. Parents are the life raft. Things that you read and write are the life raft. Your practices (yoga, T'ai Chi Chih, meditation, etc.) are the life raft. Trees are the life raft. The ocean is the life raft. Birds are the life raft. Maybe even gin was the life raft for a while. Pick one. Get in it. Paddle the life raft. Now paddle faster. Or maybe just drift. Drift and say the words lovelovelove.

My day here in Pillville has been a mess. (And  a portal.) My mom spilled her coffee liberally laced with half and half about 10 minutes before I left to teach a T'ai Chi Chih class. Nothing stinks like spoiled milk. (Somewhere in my memory banks is a car totaled by an insurance company because of spilled milk.) I had to mop and clean rapidly, but the amazing thing was that neither my mom nor I dropped into the negative. Oh, you fell asleep holding your coffee cup, I said. Yes, that's what happened, she said. She moved out of the way while I mopped. We were okay.

When I came back from teaching my T'ai Chi Chih class this morning I discovered that two half drunk bottles of champagne had leaked into the bottom drawer of the fridge. What to do but mop it up and drink the rest. (Champagne is the life raft.) Working at simple physical tasks that require little thinking always transport me. Scrub, mop, throw in a load of laundry. Soak up the spilled mess. Soak up the love. While actually sipping the champagne, I found that the guys who'd "professionally" cleaned my barbecue grill had dumped their mess into the recycling bin. I cleaned that mess up too.

I was a mess when Dan Paik found me. Date the bass player, a friend said. So I did. And for much of the five and a half years we had had together, I dragged the grief of my lost marriage behind me like a tail. I wept. I moaned. I cursed. I went crazy. He told me over and over again that I didn't scare him. He loved me beyond my wildest hopes, no matter the wreckage I carried.

I'm in love again and the man I love now told me THIS STORY, which he called You Never Know.--a story that Dan told me too. Dan called it Good Luck Bad Luck.

Luck is everything sometimes. And sometimes luck feels like more than luck. It feels like the luck of the universe, not just plain ordinary luck, but some kind of cosmic Knowing. But the thing about knowing is that the glimpse of it can easily slip from our grasp. We forget what we know. Today I'm remembering that I know lovelovelove.

Report from the Love Shack

Look closely. My head is in there somewhere.

Love changes everything.

And yes, I'm doing a sort of high wire dance--grieving the loss of Dan while falling in love. It's difficult and strange at times. My footing slips and I fall, but I don't hit the ground.

It turns out that going into my fourth year as a caregiver is not so bad. Caregiving is how I met this man I love. He's a caregiver for his father and due to some mutual friends on Facebook, he began reading my blog. Email addresses were exchanged, Skype was launched, and plane tickets have been purchased (he lives in Indiana.)

So I've been busy tapping out emails and looking through my laptop screen into a beautiful pair of eyes. But stay tuned. Soon there will be beach reports, more news from Pillville, and I'll get caught up with all of you. Thanks for the kind wishes

And I think a couple of you were wondering about the dance partner. We're still dancing. We're just not going to tango.

Oh by the way, my mom is doing just fine.

Comfort In/Dump Out

I revisited this piece today as I pondered what a friend is going through in a very tough caregiving situation.

How Not to Say the Wrong Thing

And while THIS PIECE is about grieving, try reading and substituting the word griever for caregiver. Caregivers, it seems to me, are grieving incrementally. Caregiving involves weeks/months/years of various traumas large and small, interrupted sleep, medication management, household and financial duties, sacrifices, and life or death decisions--all of which create a mountain of a million griefs.

For some reason I'm surrounded by people who say and do (even more important) the right things. You know who you are.
I present to you an ocean of gratitude.

Today's view from the sand

One Year Later

Deodar planted last summerin Dan's honor by the Tai Chi Chuan Association.
It looks healthy and strong and a little bit taller.

I drove into Hollywood this morning and met M for an early lunch. Afterwards we went to Bronson Canyon to Dan's tree in commemoration of the anniversary of his death. We didn't really have a plan for what we'd do there other than depositing a small amount of Dan's ashes, but M pointed out that someone had tied a small white ribbon to the tree. Maybe someone else had visited and left it as a tribute? What could we leave? Locks of hair? Thread pulled from our clothing? We wanted to leave something too, so we tore thin strips from our business cards and tied the ends of the ribbon around them.

As we stood in silence for a couple of minutes next to the tree, I could hear a raven calling. I saw a lot of ravens on my trip to Alaska and also heard the story of indigenous Tlingit people's creation myth wherein the Raven brings the world into being by stealing the sun. The Raven is sometimes called the Owner of Daylight and is thought of as the creator of the world. So there we were, the raven, the tree, M, and me.

When I got back home and checked my email, the daily poem from Poets.org was this:

He Prefers Her Earthly Thomas Hardy

This after-sunset is a sight for seeing, Cliff-heads of craggy cloud surrounding it.      —And dwell you in that glory-show? You may; for there are strange strange things in being,                Stranger than I know. Yet if that chasm of splendour claim your presence Which glows between the ash cloud and the dun,      How changed must be your mortal mould! Changed to a firmament-riding earthless essence                From what you were of old: All too unlike the fond and fragile creature Then known to me….Well, shall I say it plain?      I would not have you thus and there, But still would grieve on, missing you, still feature                You as the one you were.

Alaska: the Tundra Bus, A Big White Mountain, and Other Wonders

That's not a bank of big white clouds in the center--it's a mountain--well, part of a mountain.

Which one is Denali? we asked at our first chance to view big mountain. If it were visible right now, you wouldn't have to ask, was the answer. We finally saw most of it today as the Tundra Bus drove us into the wilderness.

We also saw a grizzly bear and her triplet cubs, 3 or 4 small groups of caribou, a couple small gatherings of dall sheep, a big bull moose with a dewlap the size of a pup tent (good god, animals can be weird,) a rare gyre falcon, a willow ptarmigan, and just for good measure an arctic ground squirrel. The landscape itself was the true wonder. It's vastness defies description. At one point our guide/driver pointed out a large rock in the near distance. If I'd wagered a guess, I would have said it was as tall as a big SUV and easily reached by brisk walk. It was actually 3 stories high and 3 miles away. 

Last year my world was not composed of such vistas. Hospital rooms, the room in the nursing home where the man who loved me spent a few nights before we were able to get him to my house. I stared down at the forms I was filling out, and for some minutes now and then into the eyes of a man who was already beginning to leave this immense and amazing world. 

My heart was stone or dust or perhaps vapor for what seemed like the longest time--like maybe you'd have to spend a day on a bus in driving into the wilderness to catch a glimpse of it. The landscape of my heart has been surprising me lately. There are storybook forests of perfect spruce trees in my heart. There are aspens shaking their greenest of green leaves and rivers made of silver. The blue sky there is a new blue, and I just want to throw my arms around it.

Photo by my friend Ellen--if you want to see more of her great Denali photos, follow her on Instagram:ellenslevy

Repair Central

A favorite piece of art by I Made Arya Dwita Dedok

Things are breaking here in Margaritaville. The microwave, the toilet. The sinks are dripping which is a criminal, given the drought. And last night I felt as though I was breaking, a crucial leak sprung, unstoppable.

But the microwave repairman has just left and charged me nothing even though he replaced everything (a re-repair.) And the plumber has made off with a hundred bucks. Not a terrible price for the assuaging of guilt and fixing a toilet and a sink.

I have friends coming to dinner and I'm lying on the couch, flattened by some kind of cellular recognition in my body that last year about this time, it was the beginning of the end for Dan. I feel it in the slant of the sun, the way the wind blows, and in how the fog rolls in. I feel it in the way the world looks as I walk in the surf, knowing that my feet are falling in the same places on the sand.

I keep hunting for ways to feel better and the only idea that sounds good is living outside. I googled it. I like the highlighted suggestions of other things to try. I feel hemmed in. It's hot in my house and stuffy. If the door opens for even a minute, my mother asks if the air-conditioning is on. The ceiling bothers me and I think the sky would feel better. I always think a second glass of wine, or a third will relax me out of sadness and I'm hardly ever right. I might pitch a tent on my patio and give a friend the key to my wine refrigerator for safekeeping.

My mother, thank god, is feeling well. Remember the moaning that has driven me insane for the past three years? She's stopped. And last night we had Chinese food for Mother's day and this was her fortune.

My fortune is more puzzling. 

I'm not sure where to find this merry heart medicine.

But I do think of one of my favorite pieces of art (see above.) My heart is heavy these days, and I thank those of you who are helping to carry it. Especially those bent beneath the unwieldy heavy end. A million thanks. I'm going to get up now and set the table.

The State of the State of Margaritaville: 2014 vs 2015

Mother's Day was nice. Quite lovely, in fact. A visit from M and lots of Skypeing with other family members. My mother thinks Skypeing is the best thing ever.

Then the caregiver came and  I went to my dance class and M made her 100 mile drive back to her place. There was the foxtrot and the swing and holding hands and standing close to this man whom I dance with yet know nothing about. "Find a boyfriend," my mother yelled to me as I went out the door this evening. "For me or for you," I said under my breath. I want to soften myself toward the possibility, and yet it seems ridiculous.

Because there was THIS. One year ago there was this. Once upon a time in Margaritaville, I kissed a dying man and he said,  "You knock me out."  When I remember the way he looked at me, I simply cannot get up off the couch.

Monday Morning Grief Report

Mondays. Bottom of the crater. Mondays. No salvation.

Dan always spent Sunday night at my place. Awake before dawn. The lingering. Out of bed at the last possible moment, bolting through the shower, then downstairs to the coffee pot. We took our coffee into the car, me always reminding him that the clock in the car was twelve minutes fast. Driving in the pale light. Warm coffee. Warm hands. Train station kisses. Call me, baby. Or I'll call you, doll. Sometimes he liked to say my whole name: Good-bye, Denise Emanuel Clemen. My name seemed so extravagant next to his. He signed his emails to me d--. I signed mine D--.

The dawn sky was pure drama this morning, but I could not get up. Sit up and take a picture from bed, I told myself. I did not. C'mon. No. When you argue with yourself you always win.

At 6:06 I thought about reaching for the phone. Thought about calling the caregiver and canceling. Skipping yoga. Staying in my pajamas all day. Telling my mom she could stay in hers. I thought about it a long time. At 7:30 I bolted into the shower, then downstairs to the coffee pot. Still brushing my teeth when the caregiver arrived.

Yoga is always good. Body. Mind. Spirit. I hate that we divide ourselves that way. Whatever. Afterwards I sat in the hatch of my car. Outdoor office, the yoga teacher said. Room with a view, I said.

I declined an invitation to walk with friends. Made a doctor's appointment for my mom. Ordered one of her prescriptions. All the while fighting the sadness billowing inside. Errands. Errands are the cure. Do what must be done. One does not weep while shopping for a toilet seat riser in CVS. Well, one could. I did not. Study all the slippers. One does not weep shopping for slippers. Maybe there's a pair that would be better for her. Feel all the soles. Feel all the souls. Too slippery? Too much grip? What else? What else can I buy to make her life easier?

Finally I make it to the beach. I walk with a cup of coffee, warming my cold hands. The day looks like this.

The Play's the Thing

I tried out a bereavement group yesterday. It went really well. As well as bereavement groups can go, I guess. Still, if there were a pedometer on my heart, it would have read well over 10,000 steps. I came home and did this:

Today I'm doing this:

because I feel guilty when I go up to my room and put a pillow over my head. I mean, my mom spends a lot of time in her room, and I think I should be around when she comes out. From this vantage point, I can see her immediately if she heads for the kitchen, so it's a chance to check in. I have a lap desk that makes it kind of comfortable to lie on my back and write. So yeah, here I am, flattened by I don't know what. I'm not actually sick, just...flattened.

I had an actor's nightmare last night although it's been years since I performed in a play.

I missed my entrance and heard the actors on stage making up lines and re-cuing me. I entered in my underwear instead of my costume and began improvising. It was sort of a plot to cover up my mistake  because it was my fault that I'd missed my entrance, but I wanted to make up an excuse about a stuck zipper in my costume. So we improved and got the scene back on track, all the while the three of us on stage were eyeballing one another with that actors' panic. When I exited I didn't have long backstage before my next entrance and I was so rattled that I really needed to look at a script so I could read over the next scene. I asked everyone if they had a copy and no one did. "I really need to see the scene in print before I go out there," I said. "I have to see it on paper." I said that over and over again to everyone, but all the other actors were off book and no one could help me.

At the end of yoga this morning, as I lay on the floor in savasana, it occurred to me that yeah, I would really love a glimpse of the next big scene in real life. What to say. Who'll be there. Do I stand, or sit on a pretty chair, or lie on the floor in a heap? What does my costume look like? Do I have any props? Is the play a tragedy or a comedy? Anyone? Does anyone have a copy of the script? I just need to see the words in print. I need to see it on paper. I promise I'll get up.  I won't miss my entrance.

24 Hours

This is the So Cal talk of the town this evening. But not for me.

I slipped out the door yesterday morning, simply telling my mother that I was off to an evening of theatre with old friends. (M is here.)

It was a much bigger day than that. It was a drive through the past, recent and not-so-recent, in a grid-lock through L.A. way where you have time to inhabit years of your life, taking it all in, remembering this and wondering if you'll ever forget that.

I had lunch with my dear friend Elizabeth, a friend I know "in the memoir way." You want to get to know someone? Take a memoir writing class. Write down your story. Read it. Listen while they read some pages from their story. Repeat, repeat. Thereafter those words will always hover between you. They are the basis for how you know them. How you trusted them with your story. How they will always be able to trust you with theirs. Sprinkle some of that over your Greek salad.

She and I went to the memorial service for the husband of the beautiful and fabulous women who taught that first class we took something close to a decade ago. This must be hard for you, Elizabeth and other friends said, acknowledging my own recent loss of the man who loved me. A dark place I chose not to step into. One cannot go to the service for another's beloved and wail. T'ai Chi Chih has taught me to place my feet flat on the floor, to feel the earth beneath the floor, and connect with the energy there. To breathe. To recognize my t'an tien. Your friend's grief is not your grief. All grief is all grief, said the voices in my head. Both are true. So I let those voices just talk it out while my feet stayed flat.

There were prayers, and poems, and remembrances. One learns so much at a memorial. Memorial. Memoir. Both peel open the story. The music, performed by the church choir and a soloist from the Los Angeles Opera was probably the most stunning I have ever heard at a church service. The soloist, a beautiful young soprano, was from South Korea. Dan's face seemed to materialize from her face in the moments I felt most transported. There he was in front of me, my beloved.

Then came the driving. I drove through one old neighborhood after another on surface streets, crawling along in traffic that seemed just one car short of gridlock, contemplating the three decades of my life with a man who discarded me like I was nothing. How incredibly lucky that was in the bad luck good luck sort of way. I shuffled my plans around to this and that as if all the time travel was unhinging my brain and after, a stop at a favorite museum, ended up in the new incarnation of the very restaurant where, for years, I ate dinner nearly every Sunday night with The Someone, Finally, I went to the theatre with friends and saw a play that I performed in myself forty years ago. I slept at the house of those dear old friends who gave me oranges and almonds this morning that I ate in my car with a perfect latté I bought at an old-haunt coffee shop.

It was a lot to think about.

And 24 hours later, an empty cup in my cup-holder, I was back. Not singed from the re-entry, but warmed.

In Which I Dream of an Apartment

Dream:

I went back to Dan's apartment (except that it wasn't his real-life apartment) and was amazed at how beautiful it was. His ex-wife and her husband had moved in and covered the bedroom walls in a textured white fabric that matched the bedding. There were twinkle lights around the edges of the ceiling like stars in a snowstorm. The other bedroom (in real-life, there wasn't another bedroom, but in the dream it had always been filled with boxes) was cleaned out and there was toilet in one corner with a shoji screen around it. The walls and the upholstery on a chair were the most beautiful sea foam green. There was a white daybed and on top of it was a tabletop size old-fashioned pinball game. "Novel plots at the flip of a switch," it proclaimed in fancy script. After you launched the ball, it would ping around and land in a slot marked with some life event or plot twist. Heroine poisons ex-husband. Beloved son killed in car accident. A entire game board of terrible things. It was a beautiful vintage thing, this pinball machine. Used, but well-cared for, and everything seemed to work. He'd probably gotten it for me at a garage sale and had planned to give it to me for a present, and forgotten about it when he got sick. I kept wandering around murmuring about how beautiful it all was, feeling impossibly sad. There was a little secret garden out the door and down a narrow flight of steps. Ferns and colorful mosaics. And in the kitchen, the faucet was a sleek red bird. You pulled up on its tail feathers to turn on the water. It was a piece of art, so lovely that I cried when I saw it. 

I woke up feeling so confused. Why the apartment that wasn't really his apartment? Why the red bird? Why the apartment and not him? It's been forever since I've dreamed of him.

Absence and Presence

this morning

I'm grateful for the honest question: Is it still really painful being without him? (Answer: It's horrible.)
I'm grateful for absence of the question. For just the being. For just the doing.
I'm grateful for the birds I see on my morning walk and how the sky looks each particular day as the sun rises.

the same clouds, reflected in the water with two bufflehead ducks

Below are some photos from earlier in the week:

Coots. I think I had some fun with filters here. But maybe not.

Mallard Hang-Out

Grebes. Maybe grebes and coots. I can't focus with my iPhone worth a damn.