Today Philip died. I went to visit him and say good-bye. He was still alive when I left. I didn't want to leave when I did, but I felt like I should, and then I had an appointment anyway. I feel sad and tired, and my chest feels heavy, but every once in awhile like it is swelling up and it seems scary. I don't know why, honestly. Why grief is so strange and random. I met his friend who came to visit periodically, and was coming to visit. He was supposed to pick her up from the train station, but he wasn't there. She is taking care of his cat, Cooper, who is 23 years old and thin as a rail. Cooper didn't get to have Philip all his life after all. I touched his hand and said they were so gifted, they had so much talent. I brushed his head, and covered up part of his side that got uncovered. I touched his arm, and it felt warm and smooth. My mother's arm was very soft when I was sitting by her bedside.
When my husband's brother was dying, I cried for 3 days straight. It felt like this. He didn't know why it hit me so hard, but it did; I felt as sad as when my dad died. I didn't get to sing to Philip because people were in the room, but I did talk to him. My church bulletin listed the pieces he was supposed to play on Sunday, when he fell, and they were: How Brightly Shines the Morning Star by Buxtehude; Two Preludes from Bible Poems from J. Weinberger; Andantino by Cesar Franck. We will never get to hear them, but I listened to Buxtehude yesterday while writing that entry.
Wednesday, January 9, 2019
Tuesday, January 8, 2019
8 January 2018
Right now I am sad. Right now I am wanting to say something, but I've already said it in my mind many times before I went off on a tangent. Right now I want to write what I was feeling half an hour ago, but I need a quiet place in my brain and, by extension, my home. Right now I want to write well, but I know I am already not writing well. So let me back up...
Do you remember when you were a child, and sad things seemed so sad that dealing with the feelings was insurmountable? But then maybe you learned to compartmentalize at the same time. Feelings were confusing. Sometimes I didn't know if I really loved anyone; I wasn't sure I knew what it felt like. I knew what love was supposed to be, but how do you feel this overwhelming explosion of warmth for people in your life? What I felt mostly, was fear, sadness and happiness, occasional hurt feelings, some envy or jealousy, insecurity, all variations on sadness and fear and anger. I don't remember feeling anger or rage as a child the way I do now. I think my anger was mostly fear and sadness. But the way I knew I loved people was to ask myself a question: How would I feel if that person died. I would be sad, I would cry. I knew I would cry. I knew I felt afraid because I didn't want to feel sadness. And later, when anger was a big part of my life, I hated it so much. I did not want to be angry, and it made me angrier.
Right now, I feel sadness, but in the way of all people, it is not overwhelming. It is easy to keep going past and doing what you have to be doing, and smiling and laughing because life is often smiling and laughing, even when it is at odds with what is happening. I am always trying to joke, and I am no stranger to gallows humor--it got me through my miscarriage and my mother's death.
People tell me I am hard-hearted. Sometimes I feel that way, but then other times I feel like I'm way too weepy over sentimental things. Things always end, so I always look to those endings and try to feel the enormity of it all instead of just living in the moment, because it is just so damn easy to live in the moment. We have to live our daily lives, always. There are times I wish I could wallow in the full enormity of grief, like I did at that one point when I was a child and the grief was so overwhelming that I couldn't deal with it, other than to draw a picture. I drew a picture. My heart healed. Maybe it has a scar now, many scars. Because sometimes the tears won't break through, they just sort of leak. The last time the tears were copious and free flowing was when I was keeping vigil at my mother's bedside as she was dying. It took a couple of days, sleeplessness, and then people were worried for me. They thought something was wrong. They couldn't accept my full-fledged grieving, but then they had a hard time coping later. I felt at peace.
I don't really feel at peace about my mother-in-law. There is more I wanted to do, wish I could have done, still feel sad about. Sometimes things just feel hard and tight inside of me, but not like I'm really sad when I know I should be sad. I go on living and think it will come out, but then the hard lump just gets harder and I go on, and maybe that is why the older you get, the easier it is just to get more pragmatic about it all.
My parents had a friend couple for most of their time together. Bud and Trixie. Bud died first. I thought my dad would have a hard time with it, and I wanted to see him just to see and understand the pain of that kind of loss. When his daughter died, he sat at her funeral with tears just rolling, and said she was not supposed to die before her parents. But when Bud died, of a lingering illness, my father said to me, "Guess what, I'm using the razor of a dead man." I felt sad, but it was like he took it in stride. Trixie gave my dad Bud's razor, and my dad was using it. His tone was odd to me, this mix almost of wonder and maybe a bit of pride in the fact...I don't know. It confused me, but then I thought that since my dad was old, maybe this was his way of dealing with it. Things are always coming to an end, and you have seen it so many times by the time you are near your own end. My dad didn't use Bud's razor for long...he died not long after.
I have long put my love into inanimate objects that I can feel at once a deep-seated attachment to while being able to detach emotionally from them. They are little emotion banks...I can't get rid of them because they are precious stores, but I don't have to carry them with me. I feel like inanimate objects have feelings and a soul of sorts, but they don't have a soul of their own, I guess what they really have beyond their own functionality and aesthetic pleasingness is my consideration of their worth. I still have a stuffed cat from when I was very young. I am old enough that I don't want anything else to come into my life that I could get attached to, and I want to break attachment to what I have. I feel sad, actually, when I look at all the things I haven't done with what I have, and I realized that time is past and I will never do those things, and what did I even do instead.
My biggest hoard of anything, though, is photos. I always wanted photos of things, even when I was young, and I probably have about 30,000 digital photos on my computer. I have a lot of video from when my mother was dying, and even if I never watch anything I record, it's more about the fact that I have some sort of record of it, however spotty. If I ever lost these things, I feel like all the emotions would come out like souls trapped in prison, and it would be a violent upheaval of emotion. My sister donated some clothing that I was specifically saving, and I had a lot of emotion over that that I still haven't overcome.
Today I found out that someone I value and like for is dying. It was a shock. I thought the person talking about it was talking about someone else. I thought it was sad for the person before I knew who it was, but then I found out it was someone I care about. And I'm sad, but I'm also restless. I don't want to be sad, I want him to be fine but if he is not, I want to be able just to sit and contemplate his life and the sadness of his departure from it. But then I feel restless and my brain moves on. I feel the turmoil of people I like dying and not being able to go back and capture the memory of the last time I saw the person. I only have a bad quality photo of him from behind. I wish I had a recording of his voice. Somewhere I have a recording of my dad's voice, even though I can't find it. I have a recording of my mother singing happy birthday to me on my answering machine. And, of course, I have all the regrets of things I could have done differently with my parents and my in-laws.
I want there to be a miracle and for him to recover. I want things to stay the way they are, for just awhile longer. Things always change, and I am always the one sitting and thinking about endings at the peak happiness of moments, just to remind myself not to be too happy. But then when sadness comes, I am always doing things that remind me that life goes on, and grief is not transformative for most situations. If my children died, if my husband died, then my life would be forever changed, but I keep living life even when I want to be able to feel sad.
I also feel this restlessness, wondering if there was something we could have done that would have changed things. Sunday morning, I was sitting outside my bedroom, singing a song, waiting. I felt a need to go to church early. I knew he would be there. I wasn't able to go early, and the song I was singing had the line We know that pain reminds this heart that this is not, this is not our home. It won't be my home after awhile. It won't be Philip's home for much longer, either, and that is a loss to many people who knew him better than I. I always have a hard time with those kinds of losses.
Do you remember when you were a child, and sad things seemed so sad that dealing with the feelings was insurmountable? But then maybe you learned to compartmentalize at the same time. Feelings were confusing. Sometimes I didn't know if I really loved anyone; I wasn't sure I knew what it felt like. I knew what love was supposed to be, but how do you feel this overwhelming explosion of warmth for people in your life? What I felt mostly, was fear, sadness and happiness, occasional hurt feelings, some envy or jealousy, insecurity, all variations on sadness and fear and anger. I don't remember feeling anger or rage as a child the way I do now. I think my anger was mostly fear and sadness. But the way I knew I loved people was to ask myself a question: How would I feel if that person died. I would be sad, I would cry. I knew I would cry. I knew I felt afraid because I didn't want to feel sadness. And later, when anger was a big part of my life, I hated it so much. I did not want to be angry, and it made me angrier.
Right now, I feel sadness, but in the way of all people, it is not overwhelming. It is easy to keep going past and doing what you have to be doing, and smiling and laughing because life is often smiling and laughing, even when it is at odds with what is happening. I am always trying to joke, and I am no stranger to gallows humor--it got me through my miscarriage and my mother's death.
People tell me I am hard-hearted. Sometimes I feel that way, but then other times I feel like I'm way too weepy over sentimental things. Things always end, so I always look to those endings and try to feel the enormity of it all instead of just living in the moment, because it is just so damn easy to live in the moment. We have to live our daily lives, always. There are times I wish I could wallow in the full enormity of grief, like I did at that one point when I was a child and the grief was so overwhelming that I couldn't deal with it, other than to draw a picture. I drew a picture. My heart healed. Maybe it has a scar now, many scars. Because sometimes the tears won't break through, they just sort of leak. The last time the tears were copious and free flowing was when I was keeping vigil at my mother's bedside as she was dying. It took a couple of days, sleeplessness, and then people were worried for me. They thought something was wrong. They couldn't accept my full-fledged grieving, but then they had a hard time coping later. I felt at peace.
I don't really feel at peace about my mother-in-law. There is more I wanted to do, wish I could have done, still feel sad about. Sometimes things just feel hard and tight inside of me, but not like I'm really sad when I know I should be sad. I go on living and think it will come out, but then the hard lump just gets harder and I go on, and maybe that is why the older you get, the easier it is just to get more pragmatic about it all.
My parents had a friend couple for most of their time together. Bud and Trixie. Bud died first. I thought my dad would have a hard time with it, and I wanted to see him just to see and understand the pain of that kind of loss. When his daughter died, he sat at her funeral with tears just rolling, and said she was not supposed to die before her parents. But when Bud died, of a lingering illness, my father said to me, "Guess what, I'm using the razor of a dead man." I felt sad, but it was like he took it in stride. Trixie gave my dad Bud's razor, and my dad was using it. His tone was odd to me, this mix almost of wonder and maybe a bit of pride in the fact...I don't know. It confused me, but then I thought that since my dad was old, maybe this was his way of dealing with it. Things are always coming to an end, and you have seen it so many times by the time you are near your own end. My dad didn't use Bud's razor for long...he died not long after.
I have long put my love into inanimate objects that I can feel at once a deep-seated attachment to while being able to detach emotionally from them. They are little emotion banks...I can't get rid of them because they are precious stores, but I don't have to carry them with me. I feel like inanimate objects have feelings and a soul of sorts, but they don't have a soul of their own, I guess what they really have beyond their own functionality and aesthetic pleasingness is my consideration of their worth. I still have a stuffed cat from when I was very young. I am old enough that I don't want anything else to come into my life that I could get attached to, and I want to break attachment to what I have. I feel sad, actually, when I look at all the things I haven't done with what I have, and I realized that time is past and I will never do those things, and what did I even do instead.
My biggest hoard of anything, though, is photos. I always wanted photos of things, even when I was young, and I probably have about 30,000 digital photos on my computer. I have a lot of video from when my mother was dying, and even if I never watch anything I record, it's more about the fact that I have some sort of record of it, however spotty. If I ever lost these things, I feel like all the emotions would come out like souls trapped in prison, and it would be a violent upheaval of emotion. My sister donated some clothing that I was specifically saving, and I had a lot of emotion over that that I still haven't overcome.
Today I found out that someone I value and like for is dying. It was a shock. I thought the person talking about it was talking about someone else. I thought it was sad for the person before I knew who it was, but then I found out it was someone I care about. And I'm sad, but I'm also restless. I don't want to be sad, I want him to be fine but if he is not, I want to be able just to sit and contemplate his life and the sadness of his departure from it. But then I feel restless and my brain moves on. I feel the turmoil of people I like dying and not being able to go back and capture the memory of the last time I saw the person. I only have a bad quality photo of him from behind. I wish I had a recording of his voice. Somewhere I have a recording of my dad's voice, even though I can't find it. I have a recording of my mother singing happy birthday to me on my answering machine. And, of course, I have all the regrets of things I could have done differently with my parents and my in-laws.
I want there to be a miracle and for him to recover. I want things to stay the way they are, for just awhile longer. Things always change, and I am always the one sitting and thinking about endings at the peak happiness of moments, just to remind myself not to be too happy. But then when sadness comes, I am always doing things that remind me that life goes on, and grief is not transformative for most situations. If my children died, if my husband died, then my life would be forever changed, but I keep living life even when I want to be able to feel sad.
I also feel this restlessness, wondering if there was something we could have done that would have changed things. Sunday morning, I was sitting outside my bedroom, singing a song, waiting. I felt a need to go to church early. I knew he would be there. I wasn't able to go early, and the song I was singing had the line We know that pain reminds this heart that this is not, this is not our home. It won't be my home after awhile. It won't be Philip's home for much longer, either, and that is a loss to many people who knew him better than I. I always have a hard time with those kinds of losses.
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