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I did not go to sleep early as I had intended. I just couldn’t face it. Maybe as “Pops” said in Moonstruck, “Sleep is too much like death.” Not my sleep, usually, and not last night when I finally succumbed. My nights are filled with images, words, loud voices. The rain and wind that I wasn’t expecting because I’ve been too distracted to check the weather lately woke me up last night.
I thought, “Well, good. I’m glad I’ve kept my garbage can in the garage all this time. Now it won’t go tumbling down the alley.”
My child is showering. At about 10:20, I’ll head to the school and call for her and her two friends, sign them out, take them to the church for their friend’s mother’s funeral.
I want to write about this experience/situation/whatever in a way that makes sense to me and maybe to other people, but I’m having trouble getting around the thought that my daughter’s 13-year-old best buddy no longer has her mother.
“It’s just not fair!” the little girl in me wails.
But what can you do? When hearts give out, hearts give out.
The calling hours yesterday were a testament to our friend’s kind, open heart. The line to greet the family and to view her stretched out of the church doors.
Her son is in college at our big state university. I think he’s a junior? Maybe even a senior. He’s on the cheer leading squad, a big deal at this school. They’re an award-winning team.
His teammates rented a van and drove from the big city to our little city for the calling hours and the funeral.
My daughter’s friend’s soccer team came in a clump. My daughter’s others friends, the band kids (my kid included), the random buddies, all visited with the girl in a clump.
One well-meaning mother tried to nudge my child toward the casket as I approached it so that she could say “farewell” with me. I had told my daughter, who couldn’t tolerate the idea of seeing Lynn lying there dead, that she didn’t need to “view” her, that it wasn’t necessary. Another of my daughter’s good friends scooped up my baby and let her weep onto her shoulder.
OK. This is all too sad and too personal to put out into the world like this, to strangers. For … judging?
Most likely not.
By 1 p.m. or so, the rituals will be over, and we’ll be able to start picking up the bits of our soggy selves that we’ve scattered across town all week.
It’s still so unbelievable that Lynn is just … gone. Snap. Like that.
*
(reminder: this is not a blog; it’s a journal.)
Our life is a little sad and complicated right now. Before I even returned from Texas where I attended my friend’s funeral and stayed with her daughters and husband for a few days afterward, my own daughter sent me a text message telling me that her best friend’s mother died suddenly of a heart attack Sunday night while watching the Oscars.
I don’t know why it seems important to mention the Oscars. It tells me more about her life, maybe.
I struggle to help my daughter figure out how to cope, what to say, how to take care of herself emotionally without abandoning her stricken friend. She’s quite mature for 14, my kid, but says she and her friend’s other friends are simply too young to know how to handle this kind of loss.
There is no guide book for this kind of situation. There is no precedent in my life except my own experience of losing a mother.
But I was 35, not 13. It’s a whole different shoe box filled with completely different crap (you’d have to understand that I sometimes store old letters and old mementos in shoe boxes to get that reference).
I’m tired, and I know that this is an unfinished and unsatisfying kind of blog post…
…which is why I remind anyone who happens by here that this is not a blog; it’s a journal.
It’s already 1:47 p.m. the Saturday before I board the plane to Texas to join my friend’s family. I should be flying through my to-do list. Instead, I sit and sip coffee, write, make more lists in my head.
The funeral is Tuesday morning, I think. I wonder if they scheduled the funeral for Tuesday so that I wouldn’t miss it since I missed saying goodbye to her, will miss visitation today and tomorrow, missed connecting more strongly before she took this sudden turn. It’s not about me, though, so I don’t know why I even consider that.
Meh.
I need to call one of them to check up, one of her daughter’s, her husband. Hate to intrude because I know that I wouldn’t want to have to use my voice to reassure or confess or share at this time if my mother had just died.
I remember sitting in that Bob’s Big Boy with my father just hours after my own mother died. We sipped strong coffee, his black, mine with just a little sugar. We ordered food, I’m sure, but I doubt either of us ate.
I have been up and awake for two and a half hours, have accomplished nothing more than showering, getting my daughter to school, both of us fed, a little free writing. I feel as if my thoughts are circling a drain. I lose them as soon as they form. Normally, I tell myself that lost thoughts are meant only to be thought in that instant, not saved or savored. But today, I need to weave all of my thoughts into some kind of safety net or maybe one of those rope ladders that we see in adventure films like Indian Jones or even Shrek
When I fly to Texas next week to be with my ill friend and her family, I don’t know if she’ll be alive or dead. Today and tomorrow will tell. She is in ICU because of sudden internal bleeding. Her body stopped the bleeding on its own, so despite the failing liver (she has autoimmune liver disease), she is still able to clot. Now she has an infection, and as far as I know, is still on life support.
On my bed are piles of clothes, piles of towels, piles of books, piles of papers. I walk in my room before bed and stagger backward as if the pile has hit me like a baseball bat, knocked me out of my own park. But when I look closer at the piles, I see some things that matter. The piles of papers are short and are mostly paid bills or cards from friends, nothing that stresses me. The clothes and towels are clean and folded.
And in the center of all of this … stuff, my cat lies curled, front paws touching back paws. He leans against one of the piles, and I know if I move it, he’ll feel less secure.
I have a thing I want to say, but I am in another one of those phases where I find too many words bubbling up. I choke on them or garble them or simply swallow them back down before I realize I would be better off if I vomited them onto the page.
I am sorting through the lessons I’m learning right now. Love lessons, forgiveness lessons (including self-forgiveness), fear of death lessons (not mine, a friend’s), lessons of family, of poetry, of prayer, of music.
Last week, I was accident prone and a little crazy. Light bulbs broke under my finger tips; I sliced my thumb on the cardboard cutting edge of my plastic wrap dispenser, dropped bags of sugar on my head, stubbed my toes on the concrete floor in my laundry room.
So I went to sleep. I slept off my accidents and my fatigue, and in my sleep, sorted out what I needed to do with a long-term project that hasn’t been working, dreamed of my dead parents, missed my daughter who was at her father’s.
By the end of the week, I guess I was ready for some kind of transformational experience. So that’s what I’m giving myself next week. It is a gift to myself to go spend the week with my possibly dying friend and her exhausted family. It’s much more a gift to me than a favor to them. Does that make any sense?
Does it matter if it makes sense?
I don’t think so.
(reminder: this is not a blog; it’s a journal.)
Is it really possible to spend six years writing 95,000 words on a novel and then decide you have to give it up?
I watched Eastern Promises tonight. It sort of fell off the shelf into my hands at the video store yesterday. This only happens when I go to Hollywood Video, I’ve noticed. Family video just doesn’t have that magical lure to me, though it’s cheaper.
When I read Viggo Mortensen’s words and see him interviewed, he seems like such a gentle soul. But fuck me does he do some hellaviolent scenes. The one in the sauna (spoiler), holy Jesus! Really. I know that beautiful man was totally nude, and his glorious dangly bits were a-dangling, but I couldn’t watch because I had to cover my eyes until I knew his character wasn’t dead, until all the stabbing and choking and beating were over.
What a complicated film.
What a beautiful film.
I can’t figure out how David Cronenberg manages to make these films that are so violent, I have to bury my face in the palms of my hands and inhale the scent of soap to get through them, but at the end, what I think is, “Wow, that was a beautiful film.”
Naomi Watts puzzles me. She is either totally on and amazing or completely off and annoying. I liked her in this film. She was like the thread on which all the characters walked with their huge, hob-nailed boots. She never broke, somehow, but you kept expecting her to. By the end, you realized that she wasn’t just cotton or nylon or silk thread. She was some kind of unbreakable wire.
It was a beautiful film to me despite the violence and the gray tones of the video.
I’m glad it fell off the shelf at me.
Now, I should either work or maybe watch Richard Jenkins in The Visitor. I suppose I could go to sleep again. Am still so exhausted from whatever I am trying not to have, virus, cold, allergies.
I can’t find my thermometer, so I’ll just pretend that there’s no way a hardy plant like me can have a fever.
(reminder: this is not a blog; it’s a journal)
Since girl left Tuesday for her dad’s, I have been sleeping 12 to 14 hours a day.
The sun is out.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg has pancreatic cancer.
I need to return a phone call to the librarian at the middle school about some work one-on-one that she would like for me to do with a student (the girl needs help writing an essay). Need to make sure it’s not that student. If I were getting paid to be annoyed and creeped out, that would be one thing. But since I am volunteering, I have a right (and a duty) to keep myself feeling safe. Odd that a skinny, 12 year with bad teeth and an inability to focus can make me feel off balance that way. I swear I’d rather work with the tall boys who have lip and eyebrow piercings than this “off” little girl (bad me). But I think this child is in Ms. H’s fourth-period class, not her fifth-period class, so it’s a moot point.
It’s 19 degrees out there, but so sunny it makes my skin hurt. Tomorrow? 40!!!
The kitty crept into bed with me this morning. I had been reading but fell asleep (again because, yeah, I think a vampire is sucking out my blood while I sleep. Poor vampire must be desperate. Would think he’d want young, rich blood, not this stale, wasted, 50-year-old blood – I’m reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula). Kitty curled up in the curve of my knees at about 9 and that was it. I was out until nearly noon.
Spoilers Alert (but only if you haven’t seen the original Manchurian Candidate):
I rented four videos yesterday that I don’t have time to watch. I always mean only to rent one, but then I’m there in the store, and I so love film. All those stories and characters brought to life, so tempting, like doughnuts (often crave doughnuts, but rarely, rarely eat them. I figure film is not as bad for me as doughnuts). I wander the aisles, read the backs of the cases, try to taste my mood, end up picking a mix of new releases and old movies. Sometimes, I can hear the characters talking to me, trying to coax me into bringing them home with me.
Last night, I watched The Manchurian Candidate, 1962 version. I’m certain I’ve seen it before, but I only remembered about every other scene. Didn’t remember the opening, did remember the amazing mixed up garden party/lecture scene/dream where the speakers and audience kept morphing from Chinese and Russian scientists to women discussing gardenias. I didn’t remember Eugenie (Janet Leigh) picking up Capt. Marco (Frank Sinatra) on the train, but I did remember when Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey) shot his new wife and father-in-law. Didn’t remember much at all of Raymond’s horrible mother (Gawd! Angela Lansbury was amazing!). It’s an exhausting movie. And I was already exhausted. So I went to bed right after “The End” popped up on the screen.
I didn’t mean to read until 1 a.m., but I am under Bram Stoker’s spell. I can’t fly through his scenes the way I can fly through “pulp fiction” like Charlaine Harris. Usually when I’m caught in a book’s spell, I feel as if I’m devouring the words. This time, I feel as if the words are devouring me.
But I love it.
(reminder: this is not a blog; it’s a journal)
I can’t seem to stay awake. So much for the work I planned to do today.
Appear to be battling a cold or something. it’s the only explanation for this kind of exhaustion because, damn it, I want to work. But it’s hard to see the words or to remember your place in the story when you can’t keep your eyes open.
Oh well.
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Monstrous creatures
young teenage boys,
with their repulsive charm.
They wear their T-shirts and jeans baggy
to hide their fickleness.
They can carry loads of wanting someone else
in the sagging seats of their pants
and a sweet girl
won’t notice
until her guts get that twinge
that her guts get
when a boy is about to …
Well, boys. I’ve never known a boy
who wasn’t capable of shredding a heart
with one hand and making a sandwich with the other.
And, no, that is not a euphemism for “spanking the monkey.”
