Remains

I marvel sometimes at the way grief changes; how it changes over time, how it changes those grieving. How it differs between the bereaved. I've had a lot of time to reflect this weekend with P out of town. My schedule hasn't really changed that much with him gone for a long weekend--study, dishes, laundry, run, walk the dog, Netflix, a few social outings with friends--but when I've been at home, I've been alone. With no one else to hear my thoughts, they've expanded, or perhaps maybe collapsed in on one another. I don't know which best describes it. Ballooning, or a rabbit hole fall?

With a big change just around the corner for us, I've naturally begun to take stock of the chapter of my life that very naturally feels like it is ending, with a new one awaiting me. I have been nothing but excited about this change. I've wanted it to come quicker even, wishing away months of my life, which I know is never wise. And this weekend, my unanticipated gift to myself was to wish some of that time back, to slow down, to appreciate where I am as the cumulative harvest of where I have been. To analyze what it has all meant. To remember.

I see my life very starkly now, BC and AD, or "Before Carol" and After Death. When someone tries to orient me to a time in history my first reflexive thought is to place it before or after my mother died. As I age and, my god, could this be possible?, I reach a point where I've lived longer AD than BC, I wonder if I will still do this. I wonder if it will still matter the way it matters now. It will always matter. But maybe it won't always be the moment by which everything is oriented.

As a moderately tattooed woman, I thought rather soon after my mom's death about what tattoo I would get to honor her. I have one for both of my parents, but I considered one in her specific memory, and to mark my surface the way my experience of losing her marking my being. I contemplated getting her signature tattooed somewhere. One of my fondest thoughts is of her meticulous, beautiful, nun-taught handwriting. But I could never make the commitment. I wondered why. For someone with as much ink as I, why was a small signature, what could be less than an inch wide, giving me pause? 

I discovered recently an online company that takes drawings or signatures and stamps them into a necklace pendant. Immediately, I pulled out my credit card. It was as I was taking the photo of her signature with my phone to upload, staring at her steady handiwork for the billionth time in my life, that it came to me. Somedays, it's just going to be too painful to look at it. Somedays, it's just going to remind me that I will never receive another card in the mail signed in her hand. And on those days I can leave the necklace in a drawer. 

If I can move beyond BC and AD, maybe then I'll be able to stare at her in such an intimate way each and every day. When I recognize with a heart drop and a stomach flip that I have already forgotten the sound of her laugh, I see why some hang on to their grief. It's what remains. 

The trouble with setting up a blog around a specific premise is that once you've said a lot of things about that premise, the blog becomes abandoned. Another scrap on the pile of detritus that was that issue, that topic, that moment. But it seems that few things in my life have been consistent enough to orient around, really. A good friend of mine writes The Feminist Midwife. She's in practice as, you guessed it, a midwife. She has consistent material. I was a want-to-be writer and corporate shill for a while, then went to grad school, and for a while I was my grief, and sometimes I'm a wife and a friend and a dog owner and a reader and always a feminist but there are so many people talking about that online so why not go back to trying to become a published writer with those existing sites?

Sigh. Deep breath. Swig of beer.

Maybe once I'm in practice as a social worker I can orient around that. Yet I am one now, albeit still learning and working for free. I often think there isn't enough time. But I've always known I am a better person when I make time for writing. I want to be a better person.

I have been exercising 5 days a week for over a month now and that makes me excited. The most obvious reason is the actual release of endorphins when I do it. But it also relieves my constant depression. That constant (and I mean constant) niggling in the back of myself that says I'm not good enough or doing enough and that everyone is smarter than I. It says that few things are worth all the trouble of life. It says I've had a hard road. It heard of Robin Williams' death and was sad for the reasons everyone was, but also because I can imagine sitting alone in a room with that thought before making that decision. The only thing to keep that in check is moving my body. I've made excuses in the past, and they aren't untrue. I have a genetic syndrome that limits the range of motion in most all of my joints, or causes stiffness and pain. But I have found things that I can do, at least 5 days a week. I find that deeply satisfying. I am a better person when I've sweat.

Tonight I'm getting some reading done for school, and of course my last semester is proving to be the most difficult and laden with words to read and write. But I love it. I love how I become giddy over an idea and want to explain it to the next person I see (sorry, husband, that you are usually that person). I think big and then the depression gremlin worries that I'll think so big that any job I get right out of school is going to feel small. Useless.

A friend told me her neighbors abuse their dogs and that has haunted me for about a week now. I love dogs. I worry about those dogs. I can't wait until she makes a report. This is why I need to run an hour a day to keep myself near functional: I worry about dogs I've never seen who live 300 miles away.

I hope to write more. The writing will take a turn from grief. I suppose that part of grief though--the next part. The part where it isn't the only thing.

And yet.

My husband brought a cake home from a coworker. It was billed as lemon bread but when I opened the Tupperware and smelled it, touched it, even before I tasted it, I thought of my mom. She made about a handful of recipes, and mostly from boxes. This was one of them. Her lemon cake. It was confirmed as soon as I put it in my mouth and a flood of cookouts and Fourth of Julys and her annual luau parties came flooding back to me and I calmly thought, I'm never going to see her again. Isn't that strange? Three years ago I would cry without prompt. I'd not get dressed for a few days in a row. I'd stay home from work. And now I can stand in my kitchen, undoing some of the calories lost during my mental health run, and think a very concrete and true thought, and hold it together. In fact, I don't even have to try. It's just there. It's a part of me, and it's just there.

I still have days and moments where I miss her so much it hurts and the unfairness of it all piles on me and it too is detritus but now I reach for my sports bra, I run it out, I kick box it out, and I am able to enjoy the memory of cake and Midwestern deck parties and the sound of a burbling hot tub underneath her laugh.

I'm starting to forget her laugh.

Birch

I had a dream about you last night. It was very corporeal. I woke up realizing that the loss of your form is something I perhaps have not death with, and not even realized that I must.

You were my mother. And our relationship was--no, is--essentially corporeal. As I witness my female friends yearn to carry children under their hearts, and see that burden change their bodies and their philosophies, I realize how my presence in you changed your body and your self. And now your body is no longer. The one that I altered with my existence. The idea that you yearned for that transformation is comforting, oddly, and yet also makes me miss you more.

When you were born, you were born with a piece of me already there. And so was your birth mother with a piece of you. The fact that she gave you up for adoption, that the two of us never met her, does nothing to disrupt the Matryoshka path to her, or the women before her. One after another, tumbling out of one another after the creaking, stubborn release that makes ones face twist with effort. And it's hard to conceive of something that is so mighty yet delicate as thin birch.