Not my picture, but looks like my tree and hummingbird.
I don't really like that statement. It's way overused and not too original. How about another simile? Or is it a metaphor? Analogy? Floundering like a fish out of water. Hanging on by a thread. Grasping at straws. Oh yeah, man, I'm spent. Totally, utterly, pathetically spent.
People told me that grief and mourning would come in waves. It that is so, then I am at the low part of the wave. The trough, I believe it's called. I feel like I'm just moving through the days, feeling nothing and seeing nothing. Everything seems to lack dimension. Flat. Everything is flat. To someone looking in, I suppose it seems that I'm "getting on" or "moving on" or whatever verbal garbage (well-intentioned, I do realize) people insist upon throwing my way. I'm functioning. I'm not laying around sobbing and sulking. I'm getting stuff done, I tell you! But my heart is hurting.
My favorite person is not here with me. The person that I shared everything with. I cannot just pick up the phone and call him to tell him that Sarah has another loose tooth. Or that Jon is really improving at playing catch. Or that Jack and I built a new fence. Or that Madeline went back to work. He cannot advise me on when I should plant the peas and potatoes or how to install the fan in the bathroom. He can't take Jack to buy new baseball cleats because he's outgrown his again. He is not here to tell me that the pumpkin bread Sarah and I baked last night is really great. He is not here to rub my feet on the sofa while I knit and he watches crap TV. His clothes still hang in our closet and his boots still sit by the back door. But he is not here.
The days are getting longer and the trees are all budding out. There are violets and snowdrops and daffodils everywhere. I love spring. But this year I hate it. I hate how the seasons change, how the Earth keeps on spinning, and life around me keeps on moving forward. Actually, that's not entirely true. I am comforted by the familiar rhythms of the world around me. The consistency in which things change is grounding to me. But now, I feel like a single person standing in one spot, watching everything and everyone moving around me. And all I can do is stand and watch. Alone.
2 comments:
His boots still sit by the back door.
As if he will walk in. As if he just went to take a shower. As if he'll go out to shore up the fence a little after he has a sandwich.
Because that is how he should be moving through your house, through your life.
How does anyone begin to move out of that trough, with the boots right there? Is it even time yet? The gravity is so large -- the feelings can only be felt so much at a time.
Small odd story: my Mom died in August and her house sold fairly quickly, and so we suddenly had a life's worth of belongings to go through in her well-organized home. We are currently in a temporary apartment due to husband's new job, so we shuttled a lot of stuff to the mountain house. But occasionally the way the trips worked out, I ended up bringing an odd bunch of stuff back to Richmond with me to the apartment.
Including my dad's WWII army uniform. And his....boots.
Now the thing is, these things were never prominent in my childhood home. They were in the attic. I was aware they were there, vaguely.
But now my fathers boots are in my apartment closet, where I mostly have only real necessities, this being a temporary living space. The boots he wore in England, flying bombers over Germany, some seventy years ago.
Any time, he might slip in to change the oil in my car or touch up the paint on the window sills. If it didn't move, he painted it.
His boots are in my closet.
He was not my life partner in the way Bill was yours. Not at all. And yet, he was, too, in the way dads can be. In the way their boots stay with you, and the things they do for you, and the things they don't understand about what you are doing but they just try to help anyway, sometimes just saying, okay well then -- let's get started.
That's the boots, Julie. They're just saying Let's get started. Started on the garden, started on the grief. It's all a mix of muscle and crap TV. And of course it's too corny to say about boots: just putting one foot in front of the other.
But. That's where you are. That's ok. And sometimes one or three steps back, too.
His boots,leather sentinels, not saying you'll ever finish this most impossible work, but saying just, Let's get started.
Jeanne, my dear friend, you understand. Thank you for getting it.
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