year one/one year

I was unpacking the grocery bags.  While removing the lemon juice, I looked at the clock.  5:24 p.m.  Rich died at 5:25, one year ago.  What does one year mean?  


My body knew.  I howled as the razors ripped through, now deeper than before.  The entire scene re-played, of his last breath, his sweet smell, of his body on the undertaker's gurney, the last time I would see his face.  And my mind, never one to be shy, whispered yet again you didn't do what you should have, you screwed up, what were you thinking...not much, not in the Chordoma years.  Because thinking meant considering the impossible.


How much alike, I now realize, is love and pain.  The first year I knew Rich, I believed I loved him.  But that was only the beginning, a laughably thin layer; if the full power of love exploded in us, all at once, I don't think we could survive.  Only as we learned to let love infuse all of our days, together and apart, did I grasp its power.


The same for pain.  To absorb it all at once is impossible.  Last year was a warm-up.  Not that this year and the next will be "harder," but I expect it will go deeper, slicing into places I can't yet go as I gradually release its power upon me and allow it to fade away -- into love, I hope.


Each night at dinner, Rich and I would light candles, hold hands, and say, another day, love, another day.


So -- another year, love, another year.


Candace

an open heart

Tonight, a dinner invitation I rejected.  Not when the anniversary of Rich's death is three days away; I cannot pretend to participate in conversation that doesn't matter with those who didn't know him.


Instead I will scream the only prayer remaining:  Open my heart.  To break open a pain that can be tolerated in small doses, lest the supplicant go mad.  To allow admittance to a future of glistening shards, unlabeled, waiting for me.


I will light a candle, seeing in it the container that once held it all, and always will.


Tomorrow, I will drink wine with friends to remind myself that this is the stuff of now and the future, and I had better get used to it.


I will look back on my list of a year ago and laugh.


I will never forget -- my final prayer.


Candace

answers

Grief makes for dull reading.  How could it be otherwise, when the author's brain and senses are numb, the ending unknown, the energy-giver gone?


We read about grief (I include myself here, thousands of words read on the topic) because, I expect, we want "an answer."  Not "the" answer, that's not possible, but yearning for a possibility of light inside the cave.


Surprise:  No answer.


And the only ones who offer one haven't been where I am.  Those who have only say:  It's hard.  Sometimes, they add: You're brave.


It is hard.  I am not brave.  Neither pain nor courage are options.  


Candace

waiting for the plumber

Almost a year.  All that I have planned for the day is a visit from a repairman for the pellet stove.  Why not?  It's hard to get on his calendar, and at least it's practical.  

I am post-ritual.  I've opened every door that I know, and behind all of them is a sheer cliff.  

Then look at photos, a friend suggests.  Bathe in the memories.  

Torture. I don't look.

Ditto for Rich's clothes.  For talking about him.  For not talking about him.

There is no escape, no comfort.  

There is only pain, bathing in it, breathing it in, waiting for the cleaning, waiting for the exhale.

Waiting. That's the job of grief.

Practical, too, in this life alone.  I spend a lot of my time waiting for the plumber, waiting for a repair of this or a cleaning of that.  

This may be the only ritual that matters now.  Waiting -- to be cleaned, to be repaired.

Candace

sunset

At a recent neighborhood picnic, several neighbors expressed ecstasy about the sunsets that could be seen from our homes.


Sunsets?


I notice, sometimes.  As I occasionally acknowledge trees, birds, but never sunrises, not if I can help it.  Which makes me wonder where my mind is most of the time, and where I want it to be, and when will sunsets matter again.


Rich and I used to take our sleeping bags outside and watch meteors.  And our after-dinner tea, most warm days, to watch sunsets.  And he, alone, to see the sunrise, and give me a report later in the day on what I missed.


Now I'm missing just about everything.  Because I don't yet know what I should be seeing in this world, alone.  And because I'm pissed at the sun and the moon that they don't know what's missing in this world, and damn them for pretending everything is normal.


Candace

carved in stone

Today I contacted the stone carver to mark Rich's grave.  It is a rectangular-ish flat stone, one I pulled out from the muddy hole, six weeks shy of a year ago.  Not much room on it beyond the basic information -- his name, his days among us.  If room permitted, I asked "Beloved" to be carved, too.


Sweet Rich is gone.  I can say this a thousand times, and still my heart is strangled. Pain eases, then drops to another level in a bottomless hole.  Setting the stone in place will be my last "official" act of grieving. Everything else is done.  But not finished.


Candace

rushing

A few months ago, I noticed I was rushing.  Rushing, that is, with no reason.  Through brushing teeth, showering, walking from one room to another -- galloping through my days for no purpose.  A remnant of days past, I realized.  Because for years wherever I was, it wasn't the only place I needed to be.  Always I pressured myself that Rich needed me to be there, do that; sometimes this was true, but mostly I was running against death.  If I didn't keep moving, Rich would be taken.


Slowing down still takes mindful effort.  Part of me remains manic, forgetting that he's gone.  Someday I will catch up.  Meanwhile, I try to live deeply into this beautiful life that will vanish, too quickly.


Candace