Laurustina

I have been thinking about this space for a while now, mulling over its purpose at this point in my life. The joy of my “bloggy youth” is long gone. Even before we tore down lilywhiteintentions I had gotten lazy and disenchanted. Everything got too public. People I never intended to engage were suddenly peering over my shoulder. My words became weapons more than once. Then life got more complicated and I pulled up stakes, wandered around a bit and finally ended up here. I never did find my groove again, which left me frustrated and even more unmotivated to write.

Then, of course, the floor fell out of everything and I find myself changed, barely writing at all, only writing about Ash, and writing out of grief when I do manage to string a handful of words together. Its how I process. That bit hasn’t changed. And I suppose that half the truth is that I’ve been “processing” pubicly for so long that it is second nature, somehow part of the whole, um…process.

And so, I have been thinking, mulling…trying to decide if it is better to give this space up completely or change how I think of it and in doing so, how I use it. I realized tonight, how easy it would be to go back and fill in the blanks of the year before this one, a year of unimaginable changes, whirring and whirling so fast there was never time to write it all down. It would be good to do that. Therapeutic anyway. Not necessarily a spectator sport though.

I guess what I’m saying is that I’ve been doing this for so long (however infrequently these last couple of years) that I hardly know how to write anymore without it. But that doesn’t feel like enough to a reason (or the right reason, if you will) to write here, to keep this space alive.

This morning, I woke around 7:30. My dreams weren’t particularly memorable but an opressive depression lingered. It was only 73 degrees in the house, but the bedroom felt hot and still. I stumbled out onto the back porch, where it was already in the mid-eighties in the shade.

Yesterday was one of those “good” days and I’m starting to notice that the really bad days tend to follow the “good” ones.I don’t know quite how to explain the really bad days except to say that they start with a paralyzing sadness and sense of hopelessness…the first wave registering the loss, followed in quick succession by a measured assessment of aches and pains (my body being in full, furious breakdown…muscles screaming from lack of use, joints groaning at the thought of the simplest tasks), the panic of ever-spiraling external pressures…need a doctor, and a job, and new tires and what the hell am i going to do about every-other-fucking-thing that comes into my head in the three minutes between the moment i wake up and the moment i give up and decide to throw out the orchid that my brother Kenny and his wife gave us back in February, which has been sitting out on the back porch for two days because i meant to try to figure out how to keep it from dying despite the fact that it was already mostly dead.

I don’t actually get rid of the plant until later tonight, just before midnight, when Mr. J. carried it out to the bin for me and tossed it in. But at 7:35 this morning, I knew it was doomed and I stopped caring that I’d failed to keep it alive. I stubbed out my first cigarette of the day, went back inside and laid down on the couch beneath the ceiling fan where at least the constant air movement made it cool enough to sleep for another hour or two.

Twice, in the last month, I have been visited by you in my dreams. In the first, three weeks ago, you were maybe four or five, with that blond bowl haircut and giant grin. From across the room, a crowd between us, you flashed me that grin and mouthed the words “I love you” to which I replied, also soundlessly, “love you, love you, love you too”.

In the second dream, just two nights ago, you were younger, toddling alongside me with a group of others on a bluff overlooking some sea. Immediately, I swept you up and cuddled you, nuzzled the back of your neck and breathed in your still-just-a-baby smell.

Both times, the dreams were lucid, in that I was fully aware of your absence in the waking world, and yet the pain and grief could not break through the joy of your presence in that moment. Upon waking, each time, these little gifts…this tiny measure of bliss has stayed with me for the remainder of the day.  Is it any wonder that I want to sleep all the time?

If you see her, say hello, she might be in Tangier
She left here last early spring, is livin’ there, I hear
Say for me that I’m all right though things get kind of slow
She might think that I’ve forgotten her, don’t tell her it isn’t so.

When I first sat down to write this, I typed the following: Tomorrow would have been her seventeenth birthday.

I was still sitting here staring at that sentence fifteen minutes later when Micachu came into the room and put his new Pain of Salvation DVD into the PS3 to play their cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Halleluah” for me.The song is, of course, beautiful. The guitar solo alone, so delicate it could make you weep, even if you weren’t prone to weeping, which I am these days. Afterwards, I erase that first sentence and start again.

Tomorrow is her birthday. I do not know what I am supposed to do about that. The date has been creeping up on me for months and I have dreaded more than any other.  I have written and erased and rewritten the rest of this post six different times. Nothing seems right. I am beginning to suspect that I shouldn’t have tried to write it at all.You see, it’s midnight now and so…

today is their birthday and it is all that I feared it would be.

I spent the first half of the day with an old old friend. (Not that he is any older than I am, a handful of months at best, but we have known one another for twenty-some-odd years now.) In theory, we were meeting up for coffee as he came through town. In practice, we filled up on well-iced and caffinated fountain drinks and tooled around Mo-town in his sister’s air conditioned car, stoping at a handful of favorite spots for smoke/pee breaks.It was a good day for such things. Warm, but not hot, at the tail-end of the most recent heatwave.

I talked about Ashlie. A lot. More than I do most days or at length anyway, which I don’t do most days, because I spend most days with people who know all the “at length” stuff. At one point, my friend innocently asked if I wanted to go run an errand at Winco (the grocery store) with him and I winced. That wince devolved into a twenty-minute explanation which included my last visit to Winco with Ash, six days before her death, and then the series of events which followed.

I had told him the basics back in February, but for whatever reason, I found myself recounting the details of that week, not something I had intended or expected to do, not information he asked for or pried out of me, but things I wanted to tell him nonetheless.And my instinct afterwards was to apologize for having rambled, for having answered a simple question in that manner.

See, I kind of don’t know how to be around people anymore without “faking it” and I really didn’t want to fake it today. I really didn’t want to do the small talk thing, avoiding talking about the one thing that takes up / makes up / fills up my entire life and self nowadays. So I didn’t.

What I mean to say is that if you say “Winco?” and I say everything that follows that mental marker in my internal dialogue, please take it as a compliment that I am NOT editing myself at that moment, that I want to be honest and real and bullshit-less with you, that I trust you enough to NOT fake a smile and say “sure”, that I MIGHT even feel ok enough to walk through The Villa with you, chainsmoking and letting the ghosts run wild, no matter how spooky it feels.

I’m so frustrated tonight that i could spit or scream or stomp someone’s head if the wrong someones crossed my path. And it’s stupid really, but then again, it’s not.

I need new contact lenses. Have needed them for months. The one I’m currently wearing in my right eye is ancient and all fucked up and I can only stand to wear it for three or four hours at a time. After that, I’m back to my glasses which aren’t much better, as they are ill-fitting and falling apart.

This would be a minor distraction and easily fixed if we hadn’t lost our health care coverage at the end of February. But we did, and as it sits now, I can afford to buy new lenses but NOT the eye exam necessary to get the prescription.

Mind you, I am ridiculously nearsighted and have a nasty astigmatism on top of that. If I had been born before the invention of corrective glasses, I would have been eaten by some wild animal I mistook for a tree.

You see, even thinking about health insurance infuriates me these days because on the long list of contributing factors to Ashlie’s death is the fact that our insurance company refused (despite our lengthy battle) to cover even a portion of the recommended in-patient drug treatment she so desperately needed. They’d cover detox in a psych ward for 72 hours with a $200 co-pay if I could convince some arbitrary assessor that she was suicidal (which I did three times in as many years). Then each time, although the doctor recommended in-patient drug treatment, the insurance company would deny the request as “non-covered services” according to our $400/month healthcare plan.

It’s one of those things I go round and round about, and even when I’m trying not to think about, when I’m trying to focus on other things that need to be done, I end up right back where I started. Frustrated. Furious. And wanting to bite the head off of someone or something as if that would magically make things right.

I am starting to understand what they meant, those friends who told me that the grief of losing a child is a thing which never lessens, but IS something you learn to live around the edges of. It isn’t a thing you notice all at once, but maybe one day you spend four hours making Leeky Potato soup and then, as you are transfer the soup into a serving bowl, the potholder slips and the whole thing spills out onto the floor, so that you have to spend the next twenty minutes mopping up the mess. And maybe you spend the next fifteen hours pissed off about Spilled Soup and then it hits you that you really ARE bummed about the damn soup.  That for those few hours it actually seemed to matter. Not matter most. But matter.

And all of this is to say, I suppose, that I am slowly but surely learning to live around the edges of the grief and that fact both comforts and horrifies me.

My friend, Susanne The Scot is out of town and I am taking care of her Guniea Pig. It isn’t much of a task. I drop by once a day, top off the water bottle, refill her straw ball, clean the poop out of her cage and refresh her dinner dish. I also chat her up, though mostly she stays in her cardboard box and eyes me suspiciously. This is the second time I have been entrusted with the care of The Guniea in Susanne and Steve’s absence, and to be honest, I like it. Such a small thing. Silly, no?

Still, in my attempt to become a better kind of friend, I thought I’d leave a little Welcome Home / Happy Easter gift to surprise them upon their return, so I picked up a little straw basket for a buck-fifty, some green plastic grass for seventy-nine cents, the traditional yellow chickadee Peeps (c) and a variety of foil-wrapped chocolates. I was feelin’ good as I carried my purchases out to the car.

And then…it struck me how every Easter of my children’s childhood, I had somehow relied upon my mother for providing an appropriate Easter experience. Maybe I should explain here that an “appropriate Easter experience” in my childhood had much less to do with chocolates and bunnies than it did with starched dresses and stiff leather shoes. There were always a couple of candies made available after breakfast and before Sunday School, but Easter egg hunts and gift baskets weren’t our tradition. Not that we didn’t want them. Not that my children didn’t want them…they just weren’t how we celebrated. A lamb-shaped cake maybe. A nice ham. A Cadbury cream egg or two. But mostly, it was about The Christ and The Cross and The Palm Fronds and such.

And so, as I’m sitting there in my car this afternoon, with the makings of a proper little Easter basket in the plastic bag in the passenger seat, I find myself suddenly  in tears over all the Easters that I didn’t go overboard on with pastel-coloured egg hunts and bunny suits, all the Easter Bunny polaroids I didn’t drag my babies to the mall for. All the little suits and dresses and leather shoes they didn’t strut crosstown in.  All the holidays I blew off or didn’t fully celebrate or were simply underwhelming because Mommie was too consumed with her own shit to take the time and energy to make them as joyous as they should have been.

I look at the damn basket and fucking plastic grass in the bag beside me and all I can think of are the baskets and grasses and foil-covered chocolates that I did not surprise Mouse and Ashlie with and I hate myself deeply and furiously in that moment.  So much I did not give them. So much I considered unimportant at the time. So much I can never make up for.

I collect myself after a while, and I come home, bringing the bags inside and shoving them into a corner for the night; half intending to put together the little basket and present it to Mouse in the morning. Half convinced that doing so would be a sad, awkward attempt long after such things ceased to matter.

It is easier to try a being a better friend than it is to try being a better mother.  Especially when you have recently failed hugely and publicly and with a certain finality at the latter. At which point, the things you do TO and FOR your remaining child are all processed through the lens of loss. They seem overwrought because they ARE overwrought. They seem desperate because YOU are desperate. There is nothing else, nothing more you COULD be.

And so I sit tonight, with my cream eggs and bunny ears; not knowing if I should present them tomorrow morning to my grown son on his way to work or my Scottish friend’s guniea pig who refuses to let me nuzzle her but takes my offering of fresh spinach without recrimination. The truth is, of course, that the only person would still appreciate  such things is no longer with us to give a shit about any of it and there is not a damn thing I can do about that.