Laurustina

Yesterday marked the three month anniversary of Ashlie’s death.

That knowledge rolled around like a big boulder marble in my chest since the sun woke me that first time around 6:30 a.m. The night before, I dreamed of her, all complicated and vivid; I could smell and see and hear her, and yet, even in the dream, I knew that she was gone.

I remember distinctly the sensation of waking abruptly that first time I dreamed one of my children had died. Twelve, maybe thirteen years ago. And I was shouting at someone in the dream, just before I woke, how nothing will ever be OK again. It won’t. No matter how happy or exciting or illuminating a future perfect moment may be, everything will never be OK again for me.

This is the thing, which will forever divide US from EVERYONE ELSE. My sister and blood brother could tell you this, as could Aunt Vickie, and dear old Geraldine. Time is no great friend. The loss does not get easier to live with. Rather, my body, my whole self in fact, has begun the task of rearranging itself, creating new chasms to contain the grief.

I am not the person I was three months ago. I have less energy for niceties, less tolerance for platitudes, and little interest in what used to be the consuming task of worrying about what other people think of me. At the same time, I have become acutely aware of the smallest acts of kindness and evermore appreciative of those quiet souls around us with unexpectedly deep wells of strength.

If you want to know how we are doing, all I can say is that we are still working on finding that “new normal”, that we are still fragile, that we talk about Ash every day…sometimes casually, sometimes jokingly, often sadly, tiptoeing around the edges of that great well of grief that now resides at the center of our little family. But always she is with us and this three months has been both a lifetime and the blink of an eye.

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.