A Fantasy About Grief and LossTHE WINTER DOLDRUMS
I woke up early today to the sound of rain hitting the deck outside of my bedroom. It was still dark so when I peeked out through the curtains I couldn’t see the rain. I was hoping for the snow predicted in the weather reports, something that has only happened twice in the 40 years I have lived in California, but whatever was out there was clothed in predawn blackness. My head is in that blackness too. It’s like being in a dream but totally awake. I am in a weird space between depression and acceptance, craving adventure. It’s called the winter doldrums. MY FLYING RECLINER Yes, I want adventure, but I want the safety and security of my cozy home too, so I created an adventure in my mind. My fantasy adventure would involve a flying recliner. It would be one of those chairs with a lever on the side. Pushing the lever in the opposite direction of recline would make it airborne. I could steer it with subtle body movements. It might even be a time machine that would make it possible to travel back in time as well as space. My flying recliner adventures would be like dreams, but more real and less confusing. I would know where I was and people would act in a reasonably predictable way. What about danger? I don’t know. I might want some danger as long as it didn’t kill me. What the heck. This is a fantasy and it can be whatever I want it to be. I imagine that I would feel safe flying through the air like I do in an airplane, looking down at the landscape below, or picking out recognizable shapes in the clouds like the time I saw Elvis waving at me on a flight to Minnesota. GOING WHERE I WANT TO GO So where would I go in my airborne recliner? Oh dear, my first thought is that I want to go to heaven. I want to drop in on Mom and Dad and my sisters Sue and Lin. I’d like to talk to the ancestors who are the focus of my family tree research, but I don’t want to be dead in order to do it. I have been thinking a lot about Mom and Dad and Lin and Sue. No wonder I am feeling lost and in need of adventure. February is the anniversary of Lin’s death. I re-read what I wrote last year at this time (Finding Joy in the Smallest Things). I was lamenting that the zest for life I had felt after her death had been replaced by a dull sense of acceptance. This is not just the winter doldrums. This is about grief and loss. I want what I can’t have; I want to see my family and talk to them, to ask the questions that have gone unanswered, to touch them and hug them. I want the impossible. The only thing I CAN actually do is imagine myself in the flying recliner, zipping through the clouds, hanging out in heaven for a while and then getting back down to earth to do my real life.
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February is the month that Lin died. I have been dreading this month for a while. The whole holiday season was colored by my list of firsts: November, first Thanksgiving without Lin; December, first Christmas; January, first birthday; February, first anniversary of her death. Last year, although her loss was devastating, I had a surge of energy, a new feeling of wanting to engage in life. I didn’t have this feeling when my sister Sue or my Mom and Dad died. It was unexpected and a driving force in my life. As the holidays approached this year that energy faded and was replaced by a dull sense of acceptance. This is life without Lin. What now. I don’t want that energized feeling to go away. I want to live my life to the fullest. It is a gift that Lin gave me and I want to treasure it. I think I need to bring it into a conscious part of my brain instead of just expecting it to materialize on it’s own. I wrote in my Christmas cards that this feeling of a new energy and the desire to embrace life wasn’t about “bungee jumping and mountain climbing” it was about finding joy in the little things. I can do that. Spring is just around the corner. In another month I will be getting my garden ready for planting. I can plant some seeds right now in my BRAIN, about remembering to look for joy. We are experiencing an atmospheric river storm. That means massive quantities of rain and as a result, massive quantities of ants trying to find a dry place to hang out. I knew the ants would be coming. I see the scouts wandering around my house. I know they are lurking nearby looking for a way in. I have had this battle before.
There is something else I am battling too. This is the first holiday season without my twin sister Linda. Over the last few years she has been coming out to celebrate Christmas and our January birthday, but even when we couldn’t be together she was always in my heart and mind at this time of the year. I spent a lot of brain time planning Christmas and birthday presents and remembering past celebrations when we were kids. This will be the first birthday I will be celebrating alone. I really miss her. I didn’t realize I was slipping into a state of depression. It’s been nearly a year since she died and I thought I had come to accept the fact the she is gone. Then December and January started looming and I found that my gift list had a big hole in it. I knew I was feeling empty but I didn’t know how to fill the void. This morning the ants arrived. They marched past any previous places I had caulked and sealed. They discovered a couple of handy electric outlets in the living room and snuck into the kitchen somewhere under the sink. I was grossed out but not undone. Methodically I counter-attacked with Windex. It took me two hours to wipe out the initial surge all over my house and scrub the heck out of my kitchen. Then I went for the big guns, ant traps. I usually don’t use them but this attack required desperate measures. As I write this they are lined up in mass to dine on whatever weird liquid is in in those little plastic containers and bring it back to their nest where they will hopefully disappear into ant heaven. I do feel a little guilty about using the traps but this is war. There are millions of them and just one of me. I used to avoid using the traps because I didn’t want Kitty to mess with them, but Kitty is no longer with me. That is another loss to ponder and feel empty over. So what is ant therapy and how did the ants save me? They gave me something else to focus on besides feeling sad and empty. There is nothing like taking on a challenge to bring me out of self pity and depression. I didn’t realize this until tonight when I was reviewing my day and noticing that my battle with the ants was a wonderful distraction. It helped me move on and focus on something besides feeling sorry for myself. I wish I could share this story with Lin. In some way I guess I am. Writing my blog has been a way to share my memories and struggles in somewhat the same way I did with her. Whenever I do something creative like writing or art it makes me feel my feelings more strongly and clearly. Although that is sometimes painful, it is also healing. I believe that my battle with the ants and the process of writing about it helped me move past some of the more difficult feelings of loss and grief and saved me today. My latest binge TV show is “The Repair Shop.” It’s a heart warming and inspirational do-it-yourself show on steroids. I love that it’s British and there is an undercurrent of history. Magical things happen when they take on someone’s precious treasures. In each episode people bring in a special antique and the staff of the Repair Shop return the object to it’s former glory. The staff who do the repairs each have a specialty. There is a clock repairer who can actually make teeny tiny replacement parts, a woodworker who meticulously carves new decorative pieces to fill in missing ones on antique furniture, a museum quality ceramics expert who makes repairs that are invisible, plus skilled leather workers, toy experts, miracle upholsterers, and smithies. You name it they have it. I love the way they keep the integrity of the objects they are repairing and consider the history behind them. The people who bring them in usually want to be able to pass these treasures on to future generations and preserve the memories of their ancestors through them. There is a great deal of love, respect, and creativity in the process and a true joy in the faces of the owners when they come back to retrieve them. Things are not just repaired. The broken is healed. I feel the healing when I watch the show. I want to be able to repair things with the same love, respect, and creativity in my own life. I am working on restoring some mosaic stepping stones I made years ago. They have been outside quite a few years and have lost some of their pieces. I want to be able to pass them on to my relatives and friends like the people on the show who bring in the physical reminders of their own loved ones. Luckily I don’t need the skills of the professionals on The Repair Shop to bring back some of the original beauty of my stepping stones, just some elbow grease, epoxy and a little new grout. It does feel healing to work on the stepping stones. I originally made them in memory of Mom and Dad. I put a lot of love into them to begin with, but now working on them again is helping me repair more than just the stepping stones. I miss my sister Linda and my Kitty and working on them is mending my broken heart too. Welcome to the Repair Shop VideoYesterday I visited the cemetery, not because of Halloween, but because Lin is going to be buried this week and I wanted to make sure everything was ready for her. This is the place where my Mom and Dad are buried and also the final resting place for my sister and me.
When I was a child my family visited the cemetery in our neighborhood often. It was only a few blocks from our house and my Mom’s family was buried there. In the summer Mom and Dad would bring a large planter full of geraniums to put on the family plot. It was carefully maintained until the winter snows hit, usually about this time of year, and then it was stored in the basement until the next year. I loved exploring the cemetery when I was a kid. I liked to read the tombstones and plaques and imagine who these people were and what they might have been like when they were alive. This is a bittersweet time for me. It’s good to know that Lin will be in her final resting place, but it’s another step on the road to accepting the permanence of death and the deep loss I am feeling. I am happy she will be close. At the time my parents selected their burial plot we arranged for another double cremorial (that’s the cemetary's name for the bronze container with a plaque on top that they put your ashes in). Our ashes will eventually spend “eternity” together in this little box next to Mom and Dad. It’s a little weird seeing my name on the plaque with an empty space for the death date, but that is part of the process of aging. I have watched other people go through this deep acceptance of the fact that we are not immortal and that death is actually a part of life. I feel OK about it, not happy, not sad, just OK. Of course this cremorial only holds the dust of who we were. Our spirits will be someplace else. But there is something comforting about having an actual physical place to visit, like I did as a child when we went to see my grandparent’s and my Uncle’s graves. It makes me wonder if there will be people in the future looking for the stories on the gravestones the way that I did. Will they notice that my last name is the same as my parents and realize that two of their children are buried next to them? Will they figure out that Lin and I were twins, born in the same year but with different last names? How long will this burial place survive and what will the world be like when even this futile attempt at leaving something permanent disappears? We certainly won’t be studied like the Egyptian mummies. They tried a lot harder than us to leave something permanent and even their graves are a mystery. There isn’t much to be learned from the small piles of dust we will be leaving behind. Only the names on the plaque say something about who we were and they don’t say a whole heck of a lot. I’m good with that. I’m happy to just be on this planet right now. Tonight I will hand out cutie oranges to the handful of costumed kids that make it to my neighborhood, happily wearing my leopard ears and shoes and my tiger striped top. I am still a “cat woman” even though I am cat-less at the moment. It’s a good reminder that despite these mind bending realizations of what life and death are all about, life is good. ![]() Life is tenuous. Too bad this realization didn’t come earlier in my life, but I sure get it now. Kitty, my last remaining fur baby, is slipping away. I made her a comfortable spot in the living room, snuggled into blankies in the recliner by the window. Her most desired needs are close at hand, her food bowl and litter box. Although she can still get up and walk, she can’t go very far. I am nursing her with pain meds and subcutaneous fluids, which she is not too happy about, but they make ME feel a lot better. And I really want to feel better. It’s hard to deal with another loss right now. In the mean time my cousin and her daughter have made a special 70th birthday visit to California. My cousin’s trip is a birthday gift from her daughter and I feel honored to be a part of it. Sometimes I take living here for granted so it was good to see the beauty of this part of the world through someone else’s eyes. We did the grand tour, driving along the ocean, checking out the surfers, shopping in cute little beach side shops. It was a joy to share this wonderful birthday gift with them. It’s good to have fun and celebrate life. This really is what life is about, joy and sadness mixed together. I don’t always experience them so close together so it is a good reminder for me. My natural tendency is to avoid throwing myself wholeheartedly into either one, but I’m learning to do both - sometimes at the same time. In a way this is my gift, going through the experience of loss. It’s not a gift I ever wanted but I can accept it. The idea of unexpectedly finding those mixed emotions reminds me of an experience I had with my family in the mid 1980’s. Mom and Dad were on their way to California and had stopped off in Detroit to see my sisters. Mom ended up in the hospital having surgery. It was a gut wrenching time. My Dad and sisters and I were having lunch in the hospital cafeteria while Mom was recovering from her surgery. As we talked about Mom, someone remembered that she always wanted to get her ears pierced but she was too afraid to do it. She used to tell us that if she was ever in the hospital under anesthesia to ask the doctor to pierce her ears. We all started laughing hysterically trying to imagine actually doing this. “Oh by the way doctor, while you’re in there removing the tumor could you please just pierce her ears too.” We were in tears and they weren’t tears of sadness. That moment when we were able to break the spell of grief with laughter was something I will never forget. I am my father’s daughter and I inherited his tendency to avoid expressing feelings on both sides of the spectrum, but this journey through grief and loss is a new adventure. I am learning to embrace every part of the journey, the joyful “good” celebrations, the not-so-“bad” challenges, and even the difficult “ugly” crying times. It’s what life is all about and it’s all OK. On the Anniversary of 911I remember how I felt 20 years ago on September 11, 2001. An overwhelming sense of fear and uncertainty gripped me. I remember where I was and what I was doing. I remember watching the news 24/7 and witnessing, live on TV, events that I thought could never happen in the America I knew. It was all too familiar. I had experienced exactly the same thing on Nov 22, 1963 when president Kennedy was assassinated.
There is something about that kind of shared experience, no matter how devastating it is, that unites us. Like the people in the Titanic life boats, we are all literally in the same boat no matter how different our backgrounds may be. The fear, sadness, and loss bond us in a a way that brings everyone together. I am finding the same is true for personal loss. Although I can’t begin to understand what the loved ones of the people killed on 9/11 experienced, I do know the deep emptiness of loosing someone close and the overwhelming sadness loss brings. I also know there is hope. There is a big part of me that wishes the feeling of sharing a common loss will somehow bring us together in the way it did on 911, but the reality is we are in a different time. It doesn’t seem very likely that that will happen. I can’t help hoping, however. My hope is about trusting that despite the conflicts that pull us apart, be it politics, religion, cultural differences, or ethic backgrounds, there is a common human thread that ties us together. I see it in the grief groups I have been going to and I see it in the way people honor the first responders who gave their lives to save others. We don’t all have to believe the same things in order to share the feeling of loss. We can respect the human being even without sharing their beliefs. My hope is that by remembering and honoring the personal losses in our lives and the lives of others, perhaps we can learn to recognize and accept our similarities as well as our differences. I have a long “to do” list and I don’t want to do any of it. What I really want to do is talk to my sister Linda, who died in February. I am lucky that I can still hear her. I have been listening to some audio tapes she made in 1989 when she and her family lived in Osaka, Japan for 9 months while her husband did research at the University of Osaka. That’s how we communicated, mailing cassette tapes back and forth. It was the easiest and most personal way we could stay connected. There was no internet or FaceTiming in 1989. ![]() In the tapes she described her daily life. It was challenging just to do simple every day tasks. Laundry was one of them. The apartment had a mini washer but no dryer. She hung out the laundry on the balcony of their student apartment. Despite all the modern conveniences in Japan, for some reason clothes dryers were not considered a high priority. Everyone hung their clothes outside, rain or shine, even when it was snowing. Getting clothes to dry was like climbing Mount Fuji. Grocery shopping for a family of five that didn’t eat fish was another hurdle. She walked to a super market in her neighborhood where there was an entire aisle of seaweed but no peanut butter. Strawberries cost $1.00 each and a single cantaloupe was $45. Hamburger, a staple for her family in the US, was $10 a pound. She would buy a chicken breast and turn it into curry to feed the whole family. Their apartment was tiny, with five people squeezed into two small bedrooms. The kitchen/living room/dining area was only a little bigger than the size of their bathrooms at home. She had a two burner stove and a mini oven where she could bake 6 cookies at a time. The toilet was by itself in a little closet, with the bathtub in a separate room. It was one of the few places for some privacy. The tub was a Japanese soaking tub, short and deep. You showered outside the tub before you got in. Lin liked to take baths as a stress reliever. What surprised me was that despite the hardships she loved her life there. For the first time in her adult life she wasn’t working and she could just focus on taking care of her family. She talked about actually having time for herself. Even though the demands of being a Mom in a completely foreign culture were incredible, every day was a new adventure. She enjoyed exploring when she could, taking a train to Kobe where there were American goods available, including that elusive peanut butter. The apartment complex they lived in was for foreign students and there were lots of activities for the family. They met people from all over the world and would often get together with other families in the apartment building. The kids went to Japanese schools and had friends from the apartment and from school. They each learned varying degrees of Japanese and when they walked in the door, they all yelled “Tadaima!” (basically “I’m home!”) a traditional Japanese greeting. On one of the tapes she described a trip to the store as if she was on a travel channel, walking past the Budist cemetary with it’s tightly packed grave stones, seeing the women gather on the corner for a chat, and watching an old farmer in his garden. She noticed that many of the older women wore simple traditional kimonos while everyone else was dressed in modern clothes. On a rare occasion she would see someone wearing an elaborate expensive kimono headed to some special occasion. She had many opportunities to meet new people and got to know quite a few women during her time in Japan. And she was invited into their homes, a very special honor. She talked about a high school boy who came by regularly to speak English with her. His father wanted Lin to tutor him but she didn’t want to do that and instead spent time just talking with him. She learned a lot about the pressure put on Japanese kids to do well on tests that determined their future education and job opportunities. He went to school day and night and rarely saw his father, a “salary man” whose job included drinking with his fellow workers every night and golfing with them on weekends. It all seemed to be an accepted part of life in Japan. She was looking forward to the future and going home too, hopeful that she could get a job in the new school where she had helped develop their curriculum. As I listened to her tapes I wanted to warn her that the future was not going to be what she hoped. She didn’t know that 1990 was going to be one of the hardest years of her life, that our sister Sue would die, her family would be torn apart, and her life would be turned upside down. But you can’t talk to a cassette tape. You can only listen.
What I wouldn’t give for a chance to tell her how much I miss her and how much I admire her willingness to embrace and enjoy the challenges of living in a completely different culture. The tapes are a treasure. She is IN them, her triumphs and her disappointments, her strengths and her weaknesses, her humor and her anger are all preserved. Because of the tapes she still has a voice even though she isn’t here. You never know what the universe has in store or where inspiration is going to come from. This week I found it on ancestry.com. One of the people I was researching turned out to be a man who’s life was saved by a Cheesehead, that chunk of foam in the shape of a cheese wedge worn by Packer’s fans. He was involved in the crash of a small plane and the Cheesehead saved him from serious injury. He was someone I found in passing, vaguely connected by marriage to one of my cousins. I never would have known about him except for my passion for genealogy.
The man was returning home from a Packers game when the Cessna he was a passenger in encountered bad weather. As the plane was going down he grabbed the Cheesehead he had worn at the game and used it to shield his face, which helped him protect his head and chest. He more or less walked away from the crash. So many feelings have come up after seeing this story. I am a somewhat anxious flyer. I always watch the safety demonstration the flight attendants give at the beginning of the flight. I check the map of the plane and determine the best exit just in case I might (God forbid) need it. Thank goodness once I am in the air my anxiety lessens as I watch the clouds slip by under the plane and wonder at the teeny tiny landscape below. I’m fine until it’s time to land and then I slip back into fear mode. Not being a Packers fan I know I wouldn’t have a Cheesehead handy for emergency use. I am intrigued by the sheer randomness and life changing aspect of his surviving the crash. It made him famous. He was interviewed by the news media and appeared on the “Tonight Show” with Jay Leno. He became a spokesperson for a company selling Cheeseheads. I am sure having such a close encounter with death affected him in other ways too. Did he see life in a different way? Was he more adventuresome or more fearful? Did he value his family more and did they treat him differently knowing he could be taken away so suddenly? These are questions that come up as I deal with my own loss. I am trying to move through the loss of my sister. Sadness comes up as unexpectedly as finding a story about a guy saved by a Cheesehead. In some ways that story saved me. It gave me a moment to laugh at the sheer absurdity and unpredictability of life. Laughing is good. It’s just what I needed. |
Leslie Masona woman in search of her post-retirement future Guess what! By subscribing, you get notices about the latest Little Old Lady with Cats posts sent to your mailbox!
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