Grief

So this is rapidly becoming a grief blog. Huh.

A friend of mine started blogging after the death of her daughter. She also had the foresight to get herself into therapy immediately. Both of which were either not an option (blogging) or not something I realized one did after a death (therapy). Instead of starting therapy, I bounced in and out of my doctor's offices, freaking out about this ailment or that one, convinced I was going to need an appendectomy, or that I was coming down with bowel cancer, or that I had systematic candidiasis. I finally found an internist who patiently scheduled me for tests and then said "I can't find anything wrong with you, perhaps it's time for therapy?"

I was actually relieved. Oh, this could all be in my mind? Phew. And then confused -- why, now, after the death of my mother (I hear you rolling your eyes, smacking your forheads, Duh!) was this happening? I was relieved she was gone. No more ridiculous battles that were about to culminate in me cutting her out of my life. No more tense phone calls as she tried to talk to me as if nothing was wrong. No more sobbing into Mr. LSG's shoulder after a confrontation. Gone was the overarching feeling of being grossly misunderstood, by my own mother.

My therapist did what therapists are supposed to do, I suppose. I cried. She listened. I raged. She listened. And one day, I looked out of the window and saw... sunlight. Blue skies. Puffy White Clouds. That's the day I stopped seeing that therapist.

There have been other therapists since then, and I now know what to do in the event someone else dies. But I can't help wondering, if blogs were around when Dad died, would I have been able to use this as a grief tool as well? I could have gotten the poisonous thoughts out. Mom's all-too-brief courtship of her second husband and hasty chucking-out of all things Dad, my wedding, my first relocation to London and Mom's final bout with melanoma all would have been rather juicy topics, and frankly, things I would like to have written about then so I could look back now.

I thought this blog was going to be about my life now, but almost every time I write something it comes out through my grief filter, which makes me realize I have unfinished business. It's not like I don't know that, as I watch an Alzheimer's drug ad and think about how I will never (get? have?) to go through that with my parents, or every time I see one of those crown air fresheners in the back of a car I think of my Dad and one of the last conversations I had with him ("What the heck *are* those things, anyway?").

Interesting.

Events

I am sure you all have them, moments in time that you remember with such clarity that you can relive them in your mind. Those of my parent's generation often point to Kennedy's assasination as one of those moments. They'll ask "Where were you?" Out will come the story from that person's point of view. It's like time telescopes down, from the normal running to some perverted second by second, breath by breath time. What sounds like it might take a few hours, really only took 10 seconds or 5 minutes.

My (growing) list, in chronological order:

1. Space Shuttle Challenger I was home from school on a snow day, watching the shuttle launch on TV (back when shuttle launches were newsworthy, preempting all TV). I remember seeing Challenger disintigrate and not believing it, and running upstairs to tell my brother, and he didn't believe it either.

2. The Fall of the Berlin Wall This was in my first year of college. I walked into my dorm room and saw everyone gathered in front of our little 19inch TV (a luxury in those days!) watching Regan say "Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

3. OJ's verdict Posting our wedding invitations will always be inextricably linked with OJ being declared Not Guilty.


Of course, the most important to me was the moment I knew of Dad's death. My boyfriend (now Mr LSG) and I had just spent the weekend at massive Phish concert, The Clifford Ball, renting a Winnebago with some friends and enjoying a little crunchy hedonism at the apex of the summer. We drank, we watched the concert, some smoked, the guys wore mumuus. We laughed (gagged, swore "Never Again!") about emptying the waste receptacle of the Winnebago before returning it.

Mr LSG and I checked our voicemail after arriving home, because this was before cellphones were ubiquitous. We actually had a cellphone, one of those book-sized bag phones, but had neglected to give the phone number to our families because, well, it was before you thought to do that. Even now, I can feel the creeping dread as one by one the messages became gradually more tense -- starting with "Hi it's mom please call" and "Hi it's your brother please call", leading to "I don't know where you are but your father's been in an accident" and ending with the painfully terse "please call as soon as you can". From what I now know, Dad was alive when the first message was left, and dead by the last. I remember my legs giving way, the pit in my stomach, the whirling silence in our (dark, we hadn't even turned on the lights yet) apartment. I sat on the (off white, wide wale corduroy hand-me-down pull-out) couch while Mr LSG called to find out what was going on. His look when it was clear it was bad. Me saying "no no no no" and the long stunned drive out to my Mom's house.

There. I've just relived it.