A ton of bricks

Grief hit me again last week, like a ton of bricks falling out of the sky and landing with a thump onto my chest. It took my breath away, spun me around to a direction I wasn't planning on going.

Its the first year anniversary of when my father got sick - he had a series of strokes that we were just learning about - in the middle of last April. He died a month later on May 20. I had been feeling mostly fine for several months, missing my father but in a more joyful less sorrowful way. I didn't expect such strong grief to wash over me yet again just because of this anniversary. It didn't seem right or appropriate that I should feel so lousy after so much time had passed - feelings which inevitably made me feel even worse. I told some friends. Each one reminded me that it does make sense to feel hard grief again and again and in unexpected ways. Knowing this makes it easier to endure.

Its like earlier grief in tone but not tenor, less sharp and overwhelming and harder to unearth because its not so fresh. It seems to get worse in the afternoons and makes me want to take to my bed until the hardest part passes which I (guiltily) do sometimes when concentration on anything else becomes impossible.

Yesterday at the corner store, an old man took my money for the juice I bought for E.and gave me back some change. He had hands like my father's with thick fingers that make picking up dimes and quarters difficult. I miss my father's hands, his eyes, his gorgeous smile. How lucky, I thought, that this man has such old hands for someone who loves him to hold.

A Glue the Mends Us

I read in Tuesday's NYT that a handful of scientists are looking at insects to learn more about glues to mend us. There is a tube worm that lives its entire life in a tube that it creates from grains of sand. It excretes a glue like substance from the top of its head to secure each grain in place. Another insect creates a firm and flexible egg case from grains of river sand held together with the silk like filaments its body creates.

A glue to mend us must be both strong and flexible, like shoe letter, and cure in water. If discovered, then someday, there may be a pill you can take to stitch together torn fibers of a thigh muscle, holes in the lining of the stomach, detached retinas.

Other tears will prove harder to mend with only the silky filaments of katydid glue like the pull at the throat when words get stuck, the spill of shame into the chest, the hole carved in the back of the heart from loneliness.

The glue that mends these tears is also offered up from the earth waiting for us to discover in the melting of winter ice, a mother's embrace, the bulbs you planted the summer before you died.

A baseball cap and a kiss

We are coming around to the time of year when my father fell ill and then died. This first anniversary hits me hard, unexpectedly so. Its like slamming into the brick wall you hadn't seen because you weren't paying attention (you're texting while driving or fooling with the CD player.) I am filled with an unsettling scratchiness that doesn't seem like sadness but boredom, unease, allergies, anger. Its only when I am pulled beneath skin- maybe by the old man walking shakily down the street or the women in the YMCA locker room discussing chemo treatments) does the sadness bubble up to the surface, dissolving the confusion and agitation.

Today, I am thinking about when my mother, aunt, uncle, and myself sat in the funeral home parlor, planning the wake, making arrangements for the casket, the prayer cards, the obituary for the Boston Globe. My mother brought the charcoal wool suit from home along with a pair of bright new underwear. There was also the white cotton socks that my father favored, a cotton button up shirt, a tie whose color I cannot remember. He would be dressed up as if going out to a wedding or anniversary celebration - maybe what he would have worn to his 50th wedding anniversary which was instead spent in the nursing home where he was sent after the first strokes.

On that anniversary Sunday, he was working so hard to do everything that the physical therapist asked of him; push up and down from the chair, stand by the table and reach diagonally to the right and then the left, walk down the hall with the walker. For their anniversary, J and I gave my parents a soap stone carving of three figures holding hands and dancing in an endless circle. In our family, there are several threes that could make up that circle. My daughter wasn't there that day but would visit the next week on mother's day, to share the chocolate honey cake she and I made for the occasion. Father was too nauseous to eat but a few crumbs of the cake but E couldn't tell he was ill. He wore a navy blue baseball cap when he went down to meet her which hid his drooping head. It was hard for him to hear the conversation but he asked her the old questions about school, the dog, chess which made it seem like, to her at least, that he was pretty much his old grandpa self.

When it was time to leave, E and J. said good bye at the elevator while mom and I brought father back up to the darkened room he shared with an elderly bedridden man. Mother changed father's clothes while I waited by the nurses station offering them the left over cake. We helped father from the wheel chair into the hard back chair he liked to sit in to watch TV. He still had the baseball cap on when I went to say goodbye and with his head drooping, I couldn't see his eyes but only his chin and lips. Before I could lean in to kiss his cheek, he took my hand and pulled it to his lips to kiss. Quietly, almost shyly, he said goodbye to me for the last time.

The Moose, the Bear, and the Salamandar

Last spring, in early June and soon after my father had died, I went for a walk with "Penny" in the woods and fields by the house. I walked as if in a bubble not feeling the breeze or smelling the fresh wet earth. Colors were dimmed, the forest many shades of grey, and I wondered how it was that the body stops breathing and where my father had ended up.

My dog and I walked directionless along familiar paths; Penny stopping to smell this or that pile of leaves or twigs or running into the woods after a squirrel or chipmunk. Grief moved like a low toned vibration under my skin and through my spine. Suddenly, Penny froze several feet away from me and up the trail. I thought maybe there was another dog approaching but when I looked up saw the large eggplant shaped head of a moose staring at me and Penny. For seconds, we all stood still and looked at each other, the moose looking as curious as myself and Penny. But Penny couldn't hold still for long and soon sped towards the moose flushing her back into the woods. Wow, I had never seen a moose so close to home and in these woods I have walked now for almost ten years! And it hit me that the moose had been sent (somehow) by my father to let me know that everything would be okay, eventually, just fine.

Deeply comforted by the moose's visit, we turned to head back home. After a while, Penny stopped again, stock still. To our surprise, a black bear lumbered towards us through the woods. What luck! another visitation. If this bear could make due in the little patch of woods between our town and highway, I surely would be okay. Penny chased that bear away. Almost back to the edge of the woods now, color began to seep into my field of vision; vibrantly green mosses, yellow lichens, and the orangest of salamandars alert in the mud.