Practicality

So my parents are coming into town tomorrow, which means that sometime before I leave to pick them up at the airport, I have to put away some of my pictures of A.  I have a lot in my office, and one on the dresser in our bedroom.  E's never said a word about them, and I'm grateful that he understands that I need them, even if he doesn't understand why I have to have so damn many.  (He may not have ever given it a second thought, but I wonder sometimes.  I try to avoid crossing the line of "too much A," much as I did when he was alive, and I did the same with A in regards to E.  E is understanding and supportive, but I have no desire to abuse that understanding and support through insensitivity.)  I had a single picture of A in the house when he was alive, but after he died and we couldn't chat every night on webcams, I still needed to see him, and suddenly, I had a bunch of pictures of him framed and displayed.  There are the 3 pictures amongst the guitars, the one on what amounts to an altar, the one with my family pictures in my photoscreen, the 3 little ones on my desk, and 3 more on a picture rail across the room, and then there's the digital frame, when it's on, though that one includes pictures of E as well, and all the dogs.

 

It is enough pictures to make anyone wonder.  Why so many pictures of one man in one room?  Why so many pictures of a man who is not E?  I don't want to have to answer those kinds of questions, even unspoken, so I will put away about 6 of them in the office, and maybe the one in the bedroom, as I did the last time they visited.  I resent doing it, and I feel disloyal to A doing it.  But I tell myself I'm doing it in anticipatory self-defense, and that A never had a picture of me up anywhere in his apartment or office.  That he wouldn't disapprove of me doing what I feel I have to do to keep my own peace, because he did the same.  I wonder sometimes if he wishes he'd gone another way.  Would it have made this easier?  Or just hard in a different way?  I suspect the latter, honestly.  But maybe we would've felt braver in our honesty, and that would've made up for it.

 

When new people come over to my house, I always ask myself if I should put some of the photos away, for the same reasons I put them away when my family comes.  I don't generally bother, counting on people's hoped-for manners keeping them from giving voice to whatever nosy questions that they might be thinking.  I can't blame people for being curious; I am curious about a lot of things, too.  But if they're rude enough to to interrogate me about it, then they'll get whatever answer I feel like giving them at the moment.  So far it hasn't been a problem, fortunately.

 

But family, at least my family, is rarely bound by such conventions, so best to avoid encouraging them to ask questions they really don't want the answers to.  And at this point, I am long over the fantasy that sharing the details of the death of a loved one is likely to lead to great support and greater closeness with anyone other than other widows.  People get bored with it so fast as it is.

 

For the most part, it doesn't come up anymore.  Everyone who needs to know does.  The people I worried most about telling, I'm no longer in contact with.  But still, I have to keep this secret, and I hate it as much now as I ever did.  It's the practical thing to do, of course, when you don't know how someone's going to react (or you do, and you know it won't be good).  It was practical of me to stop hoping his family would be kinder than they were.  It was practical of me to stop reading his horoscope.  It was practical of me not to go to camp only for sentimental reasons related to him.  I am practical, but I'm not practical enough to feel these things as actions that don't really matter, that don't really comment on how I truly feel about A and how he felt about me, and that they are simply actions taken to minimize potential problems.  Not and believe it, anyway.  I get it in my head, which is why I do it.  But my heart doesn't like it.  So often, being practical seems like a betrayal of my own soul.  A small and temporary one, but they add up nonetheless.

Excuse me while I ramble

It is my 38th birthday today, and I couldn't be less interested.  I mean, it's a given that birthdays stop being the big deal they once were starting at about 25.  You get to a certain point, and nothing new happens just because you get older; or rather, nothing new that's good happens; nobody really looks forward to aching bones and menopause and death.  But this is different.  Deeper.  Approaching this week, I thought of a hundred things I had to do, and kept forgetting that my birthday fell among them.  It wasn't important and I didn't care.

 

I'm not in a good place, and I haven't been for about 2 weeks.  I have no idea if it's related to this birthday (though I don't generally have birthday/aging angst), to grief, to life, to Seasonal Affective Disorder, to the physical pain I again find myself in more often than not, or perhaps just plain old depression.  Of these, the latter scares me most, because I've been there and done that, and it was pure misery.  Maybe it's all of the above, or none.

 

But I don't know what's going on with me.  I don't know why I am exhausted, and yet am having a hard time falling asleep.  Why all I want to do is watch TV and not think, because thinking only has me mentally running in circles.  I am seized by a cold apathy, and I just don't give a damn.  About anything.  I had a birthday dinner with friends last night, and basically faked my way through it (because it was too late to cancel it and stay home and eat a peanut butter sandwich, which is what I wanted to do).  Why I don't want to talk to anyone, and spend a lot of time just staring into space.  I have even less motivation to get my tasks done at work than usual, which is to say, my motivation can only be detected by electron microscope at the moment.    At best right now, I'm going through the motions.  All of them.  The only time I feel at peace is when I'm curled up in my beanbag and a blanket, watching TV.  I prefer watching other people's fake lives to living my own.  I keep waiting for someone to notice, to notice my dropped hints, to hug me, and ask me what's wrong.  But it doesn't happen.  And I don't know what I would say even if they did. 

 

It's not the numbness or emptiness I felt in the early days of widowhood.  It's kind of a resignation that this is it.  This is life, and I've lost hope that if any surprises remain, they're likely to be good ones.  It's an overwhelming neutrality, a giant shrug and sigh, but instead of feeling the joy the Zen monks do of accepting that things are exactly as they should be, my acceptance of that merely leaves me asking, "Got it.  Now what am I supposed to do with all my free time?"

 

I am not feeling any overt grief, nothing that I can identify as having set me off, but I am irritable as hell, and there are only two reasons I get like that:  PMS and grief, and I am definitely not PMSing.  The trigger and target for my irritability is most often E, and it's been pretty difficult for us lately.  And as much as I hate to admit it, sometimes I think I get double-angry at something he does because a) he did it, and b) A would've never done such a thing.

 

Now, I never lived with A, and intellectually, I know that if we had lived together, day in, day out, irritating things would've cropped up between him and me, too.  That's how it is.  But the reality is that we didn't, and we never had to deal with that dynamic.  I'm not romanticizing the relationship overmuch; that's how it was.  He and I never bickered.  That's how it is when love is new.  I totally get that it's an unfair comparison, but it's there, nonetheless.   

 

Maybe it IS the birthday.  Maybe it's because now there are 17 years between me and my sweetie, instead of the 20 there should be.  Maybe it's because when I met him, I was 32 years old and I felt young and invincible, so young that sometimes I felt like a big dork and wondered why he'd put up with me, and now 6 years have passed and I don't feel young.  Not at all.  My friends, so many of them older than I, mock me when I comment on how old I feel, like I'm being overdramatic.  But I'm not; I feel ancient and weary in my soul.  I understand what "world-weary" means, and I am there.  I look at the future, and all I can see is me slogging through it day after day.  Sheer endurance trial. 

 

I have achieved every dream I ever had, and I don't know how to dream up any new ones.  And I don't know how to protect my wonder from the mundane erosion of days and weeks and years.  I can still see the things that have inspired me.  I can see the love that surrounds me.  But it's not getting in; it's not touching me; it's not setting anything aflame within me.  I've got a big ol' "that's nice dear" to offer the world right now, and not much else.

 

God, I need something really good to happen.  I need it like air.

Changes

I got my flyer for guitar camp in the mail today. Ordinarily by this time I would've had mine filled out, sent in, and my flight reservation made, but B and I decided after last year that if the camp were held in the usual venue, we wouldn't be going. Camp is held in Northern California in an antiquated farmhouse that is so cold that you can see your breath indoors, thanks to a single inadequate woodstove meant to heat the whole place. There is also something in the house, some combination of age and the ever-present dampness, that has made the place into a sick building. Several of us suffered severe allergy attacks last year, including myself, and it was bad enough that a couple people actually had to leave.

The place was quaint the first and third year; the second year I spent cozied up in a B&B in town with A. The fourth year camp was cancelled, and B and I were comfortably ensconced in a hotel in The City, and last year, though I loved camp and my fellow campers, I was really over the quaint, and the cold, and the tricky toilets, and the allergies.

But although our presence at camp was debated between us, I really wasn't ready to NOT go last year. I wasn't ready to NOT make that pilgrimage to the roads A and I had wandered together. I wasn't ready to give up my only reason for going to northern California anymore. I'm not sure I'm ready now, but I do know, at least, that practical considerations are outweighing the nostalgia. All told, it costs me about a grand to make the trip. I don't want to spend that kind of money to find myself wheezing and freezing.

I knew before I left last year that was the case, and I made a point to say my goodbyes to the place. B was a dear, and walked through all the shops A and I had peeked into, and ate at the restaurant he'd said was good with me. Some places I had to do on my own, like the B&B. I can still remember how the rain sounded on the street outside our window as we cuddled in the yellow flannel sheets.

There are ghosts of memory there, and in some ways, I think it might not be such a bad thing to not keep going back and stirring them up. I had hoped that camp would be moved, as it was discussed after people left camp early because of getting sick, and then I'd still get to go to Northern California, but in a new context. But that plan seems to have evaporated.

The flyer arriving sharpened the point of my awareness of what is NOT happening this year, and I have to admit, I'm a bit wistful. One more thing I'm letting go. I've felt so much anguish over being forced to let go of all kinds of things beyond just A himself, but there's a quieter angst, a resignation, to those things I have let go voluntarily because it's no longer sensible to hold on to them. It's easier, because those things I've tended to do in their time, but it's not exactly easy.

B and I have plans for that weekend anyway, involving a little road trip up the interstate and music, and I'm looking forward to that. Still, it will be different, and I will feel it. It's a sigh and a shrug and another step. So far, I'm not regretting not going; I'm regretting that things just don't stay the same. I suppose that it was foolish to ever think they would, but I can't help but notice that there are a lot of things in my life, mostly annoying things, that seem to have unbelievable endurance. I suppose its some kind of blessing that I'm one of them.