Laurustina

I had lunch with my friend Shie last week. After lunch, we sat out on the porch and talked about this and that and whatnots. Shie’s best friend died suddenly, just a couple of months after Ash did, and that connection helped bridge the awkward conversational gap, which I’ve become accustomed to, the one where people hem and haw and I hum a lot and no one seems to know what to say.

“You know what I remembered today?” Shie said, “Giving her (Ashlie) my boobs.”

I cannot tell you how surprising and refreshing and soothing it was to have her say such a thing so casually and I laughed out loud. Because yes, as the parents of a dead child, I know that i am now scary to most people, and as the parent of a complicated dead child, i suspect that i am sometimes downright terrifying. And the more I try to explain the best way to bridge this awkwardness, the more I realize that I often don’t know it until I hear it.

The first bit, I’ve said before, which is that the worst thing people can do is to  not not say her name. I think this weird thing happens, where people completely avoid mentioning her because they think its too sensitive a subject, that if someone  mentions her, I will fall apart and drown them in my grief. Its not true.

In fact, for the next ten minutes, after Shie brought up her falsies (the in-lieu-of-a-bra-stick-on kind) we laughed and I recounted a particular afternoon when Iggy escaped into the backyard with one of them and ran in circles around our then-landlord and his kids, begging them to play tug of war, while Ash and I tried to sneak up on him and extricate the flesh-colored piece of gel-stuff from his mouth before anyone noticed.

Go ahead. Its ok to laugh. We laughed. Me and Ash on the day it happened, and then me and Shie, last week as we talked about it.  And then, we rambled off on some other subject, the road of which had been paved with a casual, comfortable understanding.

What I mean to say here is that what makes me saddest is when people avoid me completely rather than risk offending or hurting me or accidentally releasing some overwhelming ocean of emotion. I don’t want you to be  afraid of mentioning some silly memory or asking an honest question. I don’t enjoy those awkward, guilt-ridden moments when I run into someone who has been avoiding me and they admit (or don’t) that they would have called or stopped by, except that they didn’t know what to say.

Say something. Say anything.

I still like great books and zombie movies, old blues singers, spicy food and stiff drinks. I still curse like a sailor and believe in the Loch Ness Monster. I still sometimes laugh so hard it makes me cry. I am admittedly not the same person that I was two years ago, but I am also not as fragile or scary or as foreign as you might think.

That’s all.

For now.

When my uncle died unexpectedly a few years back, his wife and a nephew stayed up late the night before the memorial, burning a CD of some of his favorite songs to play before and after the service. In the rush of the next day, however, the CD got forgotten and their labor of love got left behind. A couple of years later, I found myself making this mental list of songs I would want someone to think to play if I was the one who’d made my early exit.

I was still working on the list when Ash died, and some of the songs I see on here now have become hers in my mind.  (In particular the Hans Zimmer, the Dylan and the Pink Floyd). Even now, I shy away from all Pink Floyd. This post has been sitting in my draft box for nearly two years now, except for the last couple of sentences. I am sick of looking at it, feeling the horror that comes with the realization that i was worrying about the music for my own memorial, not knowing that Ash would make her escape before i did, and the guilt, of course, of even considering it “my escape” in the first place. Anyway, without fanfare, or further self-flagellation, i’ll post what was once intended to be my eulogy mix, back when the idea of a memorial CD was theory rather than reality.

• I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free – Nina Simone
• The Happy Land – Nick Cave and Warren Ellis
• Ave Maria – Aaron Neville
• Latter Days – Over The Rhine
• Scarborough Faire/Canticle – Simon and Garfunkle
• You Belong to Me – Bob Dylan
• Nitemare Hippie Girl – Beck
• Muhammed My Friend – Tori Amos
• It is Well With My Soul – Mahalia Jackson
• Under the Milky Way – The Church
• House of the Rising Sun – Lester Norton’s (by personal request) cover
• If You See Her, Say Hello – Bob Dylan
• Wish You Were Here – Pink Floyd
• Rivers of Babylon – Sublime
• Lithium – Nirvana
• Variations on a Theme from Paganini – Rachmananov
• Leonard Cohen’s “If It Be Your Will” – Antony Haggerty’s cover
• You’re So Cool – Hans Zimmer

So there it is.

woke up from a dream crying. couldn’t find her. was being held by these people. interrogators. my mother and fathers and sister were waiting in some outer room while these people interrogated me, but before that, before that i saw her, and she had been hiding out. she was alive and well but had been hiding out. could have come home but didn’t want to. and now these  interrogators were trying to figure out what i had done to make that happen, what i had done to make her do this, play this trick.

Tonight is all about the chutneys. Actually that’s not exactly true, but it IS the first line that came to me when I decided to sit down and write while simultaneously sweating an onion on the stove. Ok, so it started out about chutneys, which I had to Wikipedia for the most basic understanding, before I went off in search of a decent chutney to accompany the potato and pea samosas that I conquered  the last time i went on one of these nervous energy late night cooking sprees.

Mostly, it is a way to stop thinking of all the things I spend most of the day thinking about … the overwhelming, the sad and scary, the things I can’t do anything about late at night … if I am worrying about measurements and sauté pans and spice mixes (i have used more garam masala in the last month than i did in all the years which proceeded it.) somehow everything else manages to fall away for a little while.

I was looking for a spicy chutney recipe tonight, something that would compliment the mildness of the samosas that I wanted to make for my nephew’s wife tomorrow. But with what was stocked in our cupboards, I could only make a tomato/onion one (turned out way too italian-ish for these purposes) and the same basic minty raita i always make. At that point, i decided to up the heat in the potato/pea mash, hopefully making the samosas worthy of a nice cooling minty/cucumber dip.

Two hours of this kitchen putter and the sink is full of dirty utensils, the counter cluttered with spice jars, and the last of the nights creations ready to be snapped up with Tupperware lids and relegated to the refrigerator for the night. My hands are sore and protesting the evening’s labor. My feet remind me that they would someday like some fancy slippers with arch support. My whole self feels old and tired and achy.  But once again, I have outwitted, sidetracked and subverted worry, sadness, fear and grief until such time that I can fall exhausted into bed and a half-decent sleep.

Some days, that (and a tasty Indian appetizer with a halfway-decent dipping sauce) is the most one can hope for.

Update: As it turns out, the perfect accompaniment for the samosa cups (which is how i served up the taster version of the spiced potato/pea filling on the night in question) was a dollop (yeah, i said dollop, what’cha gonna do about it?) of plain Greek Yogurt. Who knew?

today should have been their 18th birthday.

i mean to say more, but find that i can’t.

Last night I found her tennis shoes in the bottom of the hallway closet, a pair of white and pink K-Swiss, ladies size 9. Her blue Converse hi-tops have been kicking around out in the open since the day she left, but these were buried under a pile of other abandoned things and somehow the surprise of unearthing them unexpectedly punched me in the gut. We bought them at an outlet in Tracy and I still remember the wrangling and begging involved in the purchase, how I went through the whole mental juggling of bills and necessities to find the justification for such a purchase when she had perfectly good shoes on her feet, and in her closet back home.

There was a lot of that, in that last year, scrimping and splurging, wanting to make up for fifteen years without pink and pretty, without bangles and lace, things I would have given her if I’d known. But I didn’t. And even now, all this time later, I cannot go into a clothing store without seeing things that I want to buy for her, colors and shapes and sparkly things that would have delighted her. Every once in a while I’ll buy something small and tuck it away in a box filled with her things, a small secret gesture made too late.

And yesterday, when I thought of all those Mother’s Days spent with my boys, the little things they did for me in their little boys’ way, I found myself missing my daughter most of all.

i am so mad at you today – like that time you went down to the river with your friends when you were ten and you didn’t come home until after dark, and i had imagined all the horrible things that could happen to you lost in the woods alongside the river at night – and i had cried myself into such a hysteria that when you finally showed up, whistling and laughing, i wouldn’t speak to you for an hour – mad like that, except this time i know that the horrible things HAVE happened and you are not coming home – which makes me even madder.

Of all the questions Ash left behind, the one which that haunts me most is whether or not she intended to die that night.

She didn’t leave a note; she left years worth of notes. Her last MySpace update, hanging frozen in cyberspace from Feb 14th, says simply: dying alone

I am psychically stuck.

Paralyzed.

Today marks eight months since Ashlie’s death and my “To Do” list is still full of items like: finish Thank You notes … respond to letter from transplant family … send Brianna those photos … go through the keepsake boxes in the garage and find stuffed Blue dog.

I have passed the one-year mark of unemployment. Six month old mail sits unopened on my desk. Each day bleeds into the next, marked only by the passage of calendar pages and rare occasions (a baby shower here, a dinner out with friends there). A good day is one in which nothing specifically rotten happens and dinner is tasty and my sister consents to watching some silly reality schlock or a decent detective show with me before bed. Entire days pass during which I speak to no one beyond these four walls. I still sleep 8 to 10 hours a night and often nap  in the afternoon. The easiest hours of any day are between 5 and 10.

I haven’t cleaned out my car or had a hair cut, gone to the movies or written anything longer than a six paragraph e-mail.  The herb garden that died on   the side porch in June is still a terra cotta graveyard of twigs, now half-hidden by the branches of the rose tree, which spill over the fence from the next-door neighbor’s backyard. I am incaipable of making decisions. I frequently drop things for no discernable reason.  I rarely pick up the phone when it rings, no matter who might be on the other end of the line. I check my e-mail once every couple of days and have stopped trying to explain myself to old friends who take such things personally.

Anger is still the easiest emotion to sink into , or maybe I should say that it is where I feel safest. And there are plenty of things to get angry about. The state of our healthcare system, the state of the union, the state of my relationship with this person or that one … yes, angry suits me just fine and is a fearless barrier to the terror of grief. Tenderness is ok sometimes too, especially in light of the baby girls that have been popping up every couple of months, ’round the edges of my life, first Noelle, then darling Eilidh and now a grand-niece Christine. What I feared might be too sad, is surprisingly soothing and sweet.

The grief though, stalks me day and night. Always over my shoulder, or winking from some corner, even at the best of moments. She is my silent companion, waiting and hoping and begging for you and I to say her name.