I went for a run two hours after the call came from Curtis that his dad was gone. I covered familiar ground, sticking to the sidewalks through the neighborhood nearest the village library. I just learned (I read every single installment of the library e-newsletter, of course) a water pipe to the fire suppression system burst and released a large volume of water into the library. I have never heard of a fire suppression system, but mostly I am sad when I think about that wonderful building holding my heart on every single page on every single shelf. I don’t know what new and temporary location will hold space for us when we gather as lovers of words while we wait for repairs and replacements to be made. Recovery takes a long time and I’m still mentally preparing for and reminding myself of that truth. A couple of months ago, I gave my spare library card to Curtis for safekeeping because you never know when I might need him to run down the hill or swing by the village on my behalf: my library proxy.
Have you ever noticed how much space we humans take up? That space occupying was all I could feel, see and hear while running my library-adjacent route: the man walking three tethered-to-each-other dogs, the two women pushing double-wide strollers (coffee mugs in-hand, too consumed with their conversation with each other to notice me using the same sidewalk), the jumbo-sized SUVs in the morning school line (stretching endlessly-adjacent to the sidewalk I was running), the distracted drivers with no crosswalk awareness cruising straight through their right and left turns (completely oblivious to my permission-granted blinking light trajectory, swiftly dodging their swift deli meat slicer moves), the overly-cologned man leaving a trail for my nose to unwillingly follow (with the window of his truck cab down all the way), the wailing siren somewhere in the distance (unseen but felt in an instant in my heart — my sharp breath intake, breathe out a silent prayer for peace, for grace, for love), the laughter of a cluster of middle-schoolers making their way through the same crosswalk as me (but in opposite directions). Trapper Keepers took up more space in my backpack than their clever commercials promised, but I had to have one.
We’ve been walking Curt’s dad to his next adventure, Curtis and I, these past few months. Taking up space in his room, where he’s gradually occupied less and less of it: walker-assisted walking, to a fall that rendered him bedridden, to therapy to move that hip, to reassert dominance over a wheelchair, sitting upright with self-propelled mobility, to nursing station hangouts, filling that hallway with his jokes and quick retorts, inciting laughter and delight (both space taker-uppers), and then back to bed, curled up in the fetal position, refusing food and water because they take up too much internal space.
Love (and grief — because grief IS love) takes up space and moves between and among us, filling us all — all at the same time, with no limit to its capacity. It might be the great mediator among us, Love. While we wait for repairs and replacements to be made to our hearts, I remind myself that healing, if there is such a thing to be achieved, takes a long time. I’ve noticed that my dad, who’s been gone three years now, and that Curt’s dad, who’s been gone just eight days, are still tethered to us, taking up a lot of space inside of us, holding our hearts on every single page of this story we’re still living out loud and writing in real time.
Kalanchoe Vibes
I’m sitting at the quaint two-seater table on our back porch, a pot of recently-watered blooming yellow Kalanchoe in front of me, listening to a dozen different bird species greeting the morning (and each other) in full surround sound.
I love this start to our Monday morning and to our week with everything possible in front of us, like an advent calendar whose individual doors are hiding a surprise I can’t see until it’s just the right time.
We spent all of Saturday and Sunday sitting with Curt’s dad as he transitions; Hospice says it will be today. I wonder if there’s a word for this watching and waiting window, like sitting shiva, but before they’re gone. It’s certainly a sacred time of honoring, whether there’s a word for it or not.
The call just came. He’s gone. Now the birds’ extra-buoyant chatter makes more sense.
hell with a little heaven in it
“As I Lay Dying”
That’s what I’d call this chapter
His chapter
We’re just reading it
Out loud
As a group
Gathered
Witnesses
Heartbroken
Just go
Finish the chapter
Please
We’ll write the next bit
On your behalf
Grateful
So much material
Exists
With you
Displaced
The bathtub’s water line exceeds its limit,
my body heavy with hot wet,
displaces to overflowing,
my ears full with rhythmic chants,
pound in time to my heart’s beat,
the candles’ lights flicker,
the dark chamber illuminated,
as if in collusion with
the heaviness
my heart
holds,
floats,
flees.
Knocking On Doors
Not to keep on about this
Door knocking and
Us opening said door
I hate to think it; let alone say it
But is it possible
You’re wearing out your welcome?
Not that we welcome you
Except when we do
Which of late is the case
House and heart guests can be wearying
Like fish, they say
But please, make yourself at home
We hear you banging
Beating repeatedly, incessantly
Coming heavy-hearted to the entry, or is it the exit?
Opening to you
Closes us to him
The intersection of breath and death
By the way, we received your hostess gift:
Grief arrived before you
Barely visible beneath all that baggage
Dimentia
Our sweetest Easter
He doesn’t know it’s today
He always knows us.
Lotion on each hand
I gently massage his feet
Hours he will forget.
Who needs Easter eggs
We found joy in front of us
Spending time with him.
Tofu and the Three Ghosts
My immediate future is bringing me a delicious stir-fry for dinner. I started preparations for that future several hours ago when I removed the tofu from the freezer and set it on the counter to thaw. I learned the hard way that frozen tofu doesn’t actually unfreeze itself by sitting in the fridge overnight or for 24 hours. Not gonna happen. But counter-sitting for the tiniest amount of time — like an hour or an hour and a half — the package is leaking like a sieve! And do you know what’s so funny is that I wrote leaking as l-E-E-k-i-n-g, because I was also thinking about leeks. I’m often thinking about leeks in my future, full disclosure, although I’m not planning to include leeks in tonight’s stir-fry.
When, about two hours ago, that formerly-frozen tofu showed all the signs of being ready, I liberated it, along with what always seems like a gallon of water, from its sealed package. I own square dinner plates that individually weigh five pounds. No joke. These plates are not messin’ around. I do not own a tofu press, unless you count my homemade press built out of eight dinner plates piled on top of one rectangle of tofu, their combined weight approximately 40 pounds. That tofu will be good and squeezed in my near future.
I sometimes fear looking farther afield than tonight’s supper plans, much like Scrooge when he said,
“Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead . . . . But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you show me!”
I can see the perseverance of other plans playing out — my birthday trip to the beach, my weekly conversations with my far-from-me mother, my completing my repeat reading of my favorite Dickens’: David Copperfield, and no matter how much my boyfriend doth protest (he doesn’t at all, actually) our protagonist will not magically become the magician David Copperfield incarnate at the story’s end. Although, wouldn’t that have been a triumphant foretelling of future’s tidings by Master Dickens, himself?
What else might the future bring, unchecked and unchanged as our behaviors and patterns and choices might be right now? The crystal ball’s illuminations are so dreary as to wish me right back to Kansas with a dog of my own to hold and to unsee such tidings. Supper plans, be they stir-frys or salads, mean nothing next to the harrowing pile (not that we would pile them, but imagining them that way isn’t difficult) of bodies, dead at our own doing, our own civil war being fought and waged in the hand-picked and preferential battlefields — in the classrooms of children, in sanctuaries of peace, and even in the produce aisle.
I know I’m future-gazing, but that future has me turned around, looking behind me, remembering a picture taken of my then-five-year-old sitting on her school bus looking at me through the window with the grin of all grins, her moment of ecstasy was that moment. Nothing else compared to that future in which she had arrived, fully-prepared, in complete ownership — and the look of triumph on her face will be one I never forget. I do have the picture, but I don’t need to look at it; that face is forever in my heart and in my head.
Yesterday’s future moment seared in my mind forever: an image of a similarly-aged to my once-little girl, her face looking through the school bus window, tears of sheer terror running down her cheeks, her future forever-changed, no triumph or victory awaits.
So what might the future bring? It took Scrooge three visits from three different specters to understand and to grasp the reality that in order for the future to change, he had to change his right now — his behavior, his choices, his opinions, his rhetoric, his investments and his collaborations.
My future is bringing lots of delicious dinners, for sure, but my future-gazing also has me constantly turning around, looking behind me, around me, avoiding places of public gatherings for any purpose: churches (okay, I don’t go to churches for other reasons, but still. . . ), movie theatres, and concert venues.
My tofu and my heart are leaking today, both of us releasing our water-logged selves of the grief that seems to be the ever-present ghosts of our past 24 years, our present living nightmare, and our future accumulation of more senseless murders. But perhaps the ghost’s visit yesterday will be the one that scares us into a different future and we can all get off this carousel, whose only mounts are intricately-painted forms of PTSD, Terror and Grief, whose patina of money, freedom, thoughts and prayers is worn down to the original surface showing through in broad patches. My future self is done crying and done being dizzy.
Being Human
Seen: the tears I can’t not cry whenever I speak my brother Peter’s name.
Unseen: the clinch that tightens around my throat with my tears’ falling.
Is this a cause and effect? or is it simply Grief’s calling card?
Seen: their 59th anniversary prompt on today’s calendar.
Unseen: the lump I swallow around, thinking if I swallow hard enough I won’t cry.
Is this going to happen every March 14 until I, too, am not here to swallow?
Seen: me hugging my almost 25-year-old daughter so hard.
Unseen: the internal argument I’m having with myself because I no longer have her all to and by myself.
Will I ever learn to share what is definitely my most precious thing ever? Do I have to?
Seen: the most amazing man loving me, walking with me and holding my hand all night long, every single night.
Unseen: the terrorizing thought gripping my chest that he will leave.
Do trauma triggers and PTSD ever go away?
Seen: shelves upon shelves of books behind and around me.
Unseen: my fear that I’m not smart enough yet so I rage read to wrack up more volumes finished.
There’s a reason I set a limit of 52 books per year. Maybe this year I’ll not exceed it. Not likely.
Seen: me holding the microphone and singing loudly, “Maybe This Time,” and “I Feel Lucky” in front of the room.
Unseen: my pounding heart that’s not pounding so heavy it blocks my throat like before and before and the time before that.
I hear me as I open my mouth, like there’s an Oreo sitting on my tongue. Just like that.
Seen: my friend is sad and says it’s hard for him to be with himself.
Unseen: my immediate walk back in time to all the times I struggled to be with myself, too.
That journey is hard and lonely. I know. And I know it will transform you. You will Become, just like the Skin Horse. And just like me.
Seen: documentaries, podcasts (heard) and news stories about Mormons, Fundamentalists, origin stories and current events.
Unseen: the weight of my emotional separation from my family and their rights, their wrongs, their moralities.
Who can ever say when the crushing wound will happen to you? Or how it will splay you open, exposed and vulnerable to the man behind the curtain. . . .
Seen: me living my best life, finally.
Unseen: me living my best life, finally.
Can I bottle this up and stock my own shelves with it? Self-Preservation is the gift that keeps on giving me my Life.
The Dark Side of the Moon
Years ago, and for many years, my brother and I were partners in business. We always joked we stayed in business for years longer than we wanted to be in that particular line of work because we loved being together every single day. Work was merely our vehicle for relishing and growing our friendship as brother and sister.
I could write an entire book on the escapades we shared growing up, the jokes we coordinated and played on our favorite teacher (#sorrynotsorryMrsOsborne), the fact I was even in that class as a sophomore alongside my senior brother, the locker we shared at his insistence — and the love notes he would leave for me reminding me every day how important I was to him and how happy he was to be my brother — the open arms and heart way he completely took me in to his life, to his friends’ circle, to his love of soccer and the NFL, the late nights we spent discussing politics and SNL as a commentary in the late 1990s, and the way he picked up the phone and took my call all the way from North Carolina while he was in the middle of South Korea. My brother was my best friend.
We worked primarily with middle managers and taught them the soft skills of leadership, the things no one teaches yet expects you to know when you find yourself in a position of management. There’s also a pretty big distinction between management and leadership, but that’s a rabbit hole I don’t want to go down right now. I’m only talking about this because I wanted to give you some context for what it is I want to tell you.
So during these monthly training sessions, we would often play games to engage everyone together at their tables to work together, you know soft skills in action. And one of the games we used was an exercise in deductive reasoning. We showed a clip from the gripping movie, “Apollo 13,” starring Tom Hanks — you remember the scene in which they realize they need a square peg to fit into a round hole in order to make it back through Earth’s atmosphere without burning up like a brisket on the barbecue? It’s tense. And it’s all about cooperation and truly coming together to create the solution that saved those astronauts’ lives.
Anyway, we gave everyone a piece of paper that included a list of 15 supplies on the space ship. The assignment (designed and used by NASA) is this:
Scenario: You are a member of a space crew originally scheduled to rendezvous with a mother ship on the lighted surface of the moon. However, due to mechanical difficulties, your ship was forced to land at a spot some 200 miles from the rendezvous point. During reentry and landing, much of the equipment aboard was damaged and, since survival depends on reaching the mother ship, the most critical items available must be chosen for the 200-mile trip. Below are listed the 15 items left intact and undamaged after landing. Your task is to rank order them in terms of their importance for your crew in allowing them to reach the rendezvous point. Place the number 1 by the most important item, the number 2 by the second most important, and so on through number 15 for the least important.
I’ll go ahead and tell you — yes this is a spoiler — but your numbers 1, 2 and 3 must be #1: two 100 lb. tanks of oxygen (remember there’s no gravity on the moon, so these aren’t going to weigh much at all and will be easily carried), #2: 20 litres of water (apparently you lose a LOT of liquid on the light side, so you’ll need this to replace what you’ve lost), and #3: is a stellar map (because obviously the stars are your only navigational tools in that location).
Next time you’re given this test of your mental agility, you can impress everyone with your celestial knowledge. You’re welcome.
But anyway, that was a lot of back story to tell you that I’ve been thinking about the dark side of the moon as a place that actually exists, and that you and I can’t exist there, at least not for long and not without the right supplies. And I was thinking about my brother, who loved facilitating this exercise; he would always get so excited talking about the possibility of being on the moon in the first place, and then showing the movie clip, which he illegally spliced together, seamless blends between the chopped-up scenes and portions of dialogue — he was always so proud of that compilation and made sure to tell me after class had ended and we were left alone cleaning up our supplies and laughing, how proud of that illegal clip he was, not because it was illegal, but because he’d made something without seams. He was like that with his driving, too — from the moment I started driving he demonstrated on repeat the importance of pressing the clutch and shifting the gears without anyone knowing or feeling it had happened. I think I’m such a good driver because of him.
Ever since his accident, the seamless bond that always existed between us got ripped. It can’t ever be repaired and that’s only the fault of the driver who ran the stop sign on that clear morning five years ago. My helmeted and lighted brother on his bicycle both went down as court evidence. Even now, and since then, I do feel like one of us is on the dark side of the moon — separated from the other, and no amount of oxygen, water or stellar maps will ever bring us safely back together.
This heart of mine aches for and misses my brother who traveled to death and back again. He’s physically here still, but forever changed. If I could take a trip backwards, I’d just use it to make a quick phone call. But I don’t think space ships or mushrooms as modes of transportation travel backwards, either one. We’re only always moving ahead in time and I’ll keep using my right now moments to close my eyes and remember all those hours we spent together imagining which supplies we would need to have when he and I get stranded on the dark side of the moon: laughter was our favorite one, every single time, and it’s not even on NASA’s approved list.
2020: A Personal Review
1. Like Rip Van Winkle I awoke in February-ish after a long (not) sleep — which sleep is 2019 in review, which was the year I released (not by choice) more than half the blood in my body. Doozy of a year that 2019, but I’m here to review 2020. And it was in 2020 (after aforementioned almost died in 2019 when I couldn’t walk from my bed to my sofa down the hall without the wall’s assistance and a four-hour nap on arrival) I laced up my runners again. I exhaustingly ran one mile, took a nap, and two days later ran it again. I must have run that beautiful mile with a nap fifteen times! Then I woke up and ran three miles on a Monday in June. My naps got shorter the farther I ran (but I’m not sure the correlating factor wasn’t the homegrown hugs and fresh garden produce I was consuming on the daily). And suddenly it was September and I was bent over weeping while full-out living at the base of a mountain on which I had just run FIVE miles. In October I decided to run 13.1 miles. I didn’t run them, but I decided to. It was a good year for empowering and powerful decisions. Socks were an unexpected major theme of 2020 and consumed not a little of my online content and crowd-sourcing solutions for my blistered toes.
2. Another decision — profound and powerful in its creation moment — in March, which I’ve always known comes in like a lion, delivered details to me about my parents’ (then) current situation, which details (dad’s cancer diagnosis was our Christmas gift in that 2019 year I’m still not reviewing and his journey with it was already very much underway, mom full-time giving and giving and giving and getting I could see not enough in return) initiated a divine download and I decided (or was it already decided as things divine often are?) I was moving back home, back east, back in with my parents, back into the home and the hearts (my own at the fore) that have received, held, and helped to heal me more times than one Arminda in one lifetime might reasonably expect. And as my Self, for the first time in all those times, I came home, covering 2,458 miles to get here, wearing no socks at all.
3. Weeding, seeding, growing, (re)planting, watering, weeding (always with the weeding), cultivating, mulching, harvesting, cutting back, then the dying. This, the life cycle of our garden, the garden about which I cannot write right now without weeping, could be the simple summary of my 2020. For my dad, the master gardener, I donned gloves fitted for my small hands, and went to work. I cleared brush, I pulled weeds, I laid a brick pathway, I moved dirt, I dug holes, I watered the entire greenhouse, I hedged potato mounds, I created new beds for planting, I built a retention wall, I hauled yard waste, I organized by color, size, and shape, I took instruction, I wore out my first pair of gloves, I spread mulch, I measured rows, I planted sweet peas, beans, chard, tomatoes, peppers, squash green and yellow, cucumbers, flowers, flowers, flowers, flowers, and five more pepper plants we definitely did not need but he needed them planted. I placed the first green bean in his unresponsive fingers, on the underside of the surgical tape securing a needle whose purpose was to deliver nutrients that bean (could but) would never give to him but so desperately wanted. I took a picture of that bean in my dad’s hand. I still have that picture.
4. Being alive and sad and happy and running farther than I have ever run, while wearing socks when I decided to wear socks. I got all the way up to ten miles in one consecutive run. I did those ten in December 2020. I’ve never felt so alive and fully wholly conscious of my aliveness, of what my body did in its own behalf — how it regrew itself from the inside out — just so it could support my decision to be alive and sad and happy and running as far as I want — all at the same time. Good times, 2020. Good times.