That’s not happening.

Instead, this week, I’ve spoken to his mother,and traded messages with his wife, whom I’ve never met. I cannot imagine their grief. Or, perhaps I can, and that makes it even harder to wrap my head and heart around. I am remembering moments that I thought were lost a long ago to time, separation, or stubborn anger at the ways things ended. My husband says I can hold a grudge better than anyone. He’s right. I held a grudge against this man, because, you know, things ended badly, as they often do, though in our case, mostly because we were 21 and torn in a million different directions by our two different lives. That was hard to see at the time; it’s bright and clear with more than 20 years’ distance and the harsh light of a death.

And though we were not actively in each others’ lives any more, the truth, if I can bring myself to think it, is that I thought about him, not all the time, but a lot. He took care of me when my father died. We were deeply, headily in love. We were young, and passionate, and adventurous, with what we thought were many cares but again, with time? Not so many. We were central to each others’ lives for a brief, intense period when we were leaving childhood and becoming adults. We loved each other.

And now, I am immersed in grief that I haven’t felt since my father died 27 years ago. I remember thinking then that grief was like a tsunami, an unpredictable and overwhelming wave of feeling, but unlike a tsunami, grief often sweeps in and over without warning. And when the death also occurs without any preamble, maybe the onslaught is even less predictable. I am struggling with where to put my grief, how to label it. He was no longer my love, now just a distant friend, but there is that nagging feeling of just how important we were to each other once that rises over and over. I am remembering him, analyzing what made him special, in a way I haven’t done since I was 20: his enthusiasm, his energy, his ability to lock into and hold onto emotions, his or another’s. I’ve looked at pictures and letters over the last week that transport me to a reality that is intimately familiar and still not quite mine.

There’s no “what if” to these feelings; he and I separated when we needed to and went on to live the lives we wanted. We loved, and love, our spouses. There’s no romanticized sense of “if only”, none at all. But the grief is there, disproportionate and awkward, hard to carry without tripping, and falling down.

I am pondering this great post from The Sister Project, “The List that Helps With Loss“, as another way to process my sadness, contemplating (but not yet writing) my own list, to help with a very peculiar loss.

My friend Cynthia came for a visit with her adorable son, and while the boys played in the pond (frogs! newts!) Cynthia decided to give me a long-desired painting lesson. She’s an amazing artist (this is one of my favorite of her paintings; the colors of the forsythia are so incredible in real life) and has been telling me for months she’d help me learn to put paint on paper, something that absolutely TERRIFIES me. (This is not a rational fear. This is not even an articulated fear, meaning, I don’t have words I can put it into. But paint scares the shit out of me.) When she arrived, as it happened, I had paint out for the Babe, who was busily painting a rock she found by the pond, and, oh, her entire body. Cynthia, bless her, jumped in. She painted the Babe’s picture, the Babe painted hers, and then she directed me to get a piece of paper and a brush for myself. She set up a still life, and started teaching. I was so irritable, and tense, and not particularly gracious about the enormous gift I was being given. By the end of what felt like hours but was probably only 45 minutes, I had a semi-lucid portrait of a papaya, and a headache. I felt like I’d been run through a mangle.

I was so visibly on edge that I felt terrible for my friend; I couldn’t even fake ease, so stressed was I by the paint everywhere (The Babe had taken to pouring it out on the paper, applying to her legs, and so on), the sudden appearance of my mom, who is incredibly supportive of my artistic efforts but through no fault of her own makes me feel like I’m a big fraud, and my own anxiety at how hard it was to process and replicate patterns of light and shadow and color. In the end, I produced something that, from a good distance away, looked plausibly like its subject. I will try again. But meanwhile, I love working in the ultra-forgiving, cut and paste world of mixed media collage.

The piece above arrived at my friend Hilary‘s today. She is all heart, all woman, all breathless living-with-a-capital-L, and I love her. She and Cynthia, I realized tonight, remind me of one another;  though they are so different,too, they share a quality of creative passion that I treasure.

Mailed week of May 10, 2010

“Confront the dark parts of yourself, and work to banish them with illumination and forgiveness. Your willingness to wrestle with your demons will cause your angels to sing. Use the pain as fuel, as a reminder of your strength.” –August Wilson

I don’t usually have much interaction with the anthroposophist (Rudolf Steiner devotées) communities which abound in this area. I like the people, usually, very much, but the dogma is too heavy for me. Camphill is a Steiner project that cares for developmentally disabled adults in a village setting, where they live and work side by side with normally-abled adults and their families. Its presence here (about 10 miles from my house) means that we often see the residents out and about, which I think is a great thing for my kids, and for me. (In California, I now realize, I almost never saw disabled adults, and rarely children. Where were they?)

Anyway, the people at Camphill tend an herb garden and make wonderful teas (really, tisanes) with lyrical names like Douceur de Fete (one of my favorites.) They also make the prosaically named Tea for Colds, which seems to actually help. So, with my head stuffed and snotty with a cold, I made myself a cuppa just now, using my newest (non-local) fave acqusition, my Tea Stick. (Pricey, but genius. If you drink loose leaf tea, get one.) And I poured the nearly-boiling water into my favorite new mug (one thing you may not know about me is that for years now, I’ve been searching for the perfect mug. It’s more challenging than you might think, but I think the search is over.) My mug was made by a potter/friend down the road who gave it to me in exchange for using my home as a location for a photo shoot for her new website. So my soothing tea was in my perfect mug, which soothes the palm of my hand in addition to holding my medicinal tea, and I thought: this is all from right.here. If I had a younger horse (and, let it be said, was a better rider) I could get to both of them in an afternoon. And that thought just made me so happy that I live in this random, odd, lovely place.

Meanwhile, last night I made a discovery that also has everything to do with where I live and what I do here, and it also made me shiver with quiet joy.

Mary Oliver is one of my favorite contemporary poets, but I only recently discovered this work of hers. To make it even better, I found it on a work of art made by my teachers and friends Karen Arp-Sandel and Suzy Banks Baum. If you live near me, check out their collaborate mail art show, Femail, at the Berkshire Art Kitchen.

Praying

It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patcha few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorwayinto thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak

~ Mary Oliver

Patience from Glowing Heads on Vimeo.

I have little to none these days, not patience, not time to create, but this is a beautiful reminder of the immense pleasures in both. Hoping you are all having happy holidays.

That’s more than I can say about most of the last 30 days preceding. The last month has, in a word, sucked. Between the H’s terrifying accident, and its aftermath, both physical and emotional, I am completely spent. I used nanowrimo as intensive therapy, escaping into my fictional world every.single.day, even if I didn’t commit any new words to my draft. It was an amazing outlet, and exhilarating to prove to myself that I could actually write a piece of fiction–something I literally haven’t done, save fragments, since high school.

This month, I’ve got a new immersion project, which I’ll reveal at some point, and I am, as a wise friend counseled, just trying to get through the month.

Today, I drove all four of us to the kids’ school. The H and I had breakfast, then went to the market and I dropped him in Great Barrington while I went to see my shrink (how badly did I need that appointment today? Oh, badly.) I picked him up, and drove him an hour to catch the train to NYC where he has a meeting tomorrow morning. I drove back to the kids’ school (an hour and five minutes) to pick them up to take them to get their flu shots. I drove them to the pediatrician (20 minutes.) We drove back to school, so Dido could finish his day. The Babe and I went for lunch (for me) at 3 p.m., and then to her ballet class. We drove back to school, and then home. Let’s not even discuss my carbon footprint, shall we?

I am quite relaxed, actually about all this; my biggest dilemma is how to manage the animals: the dog can’t stay home alone all day, so she’s going to need to ride along with us most mornings; I will hike her (good for us both) and then leave her with the H at his office while I go about my day. The horses have to be fed and turned out in the morning, every morning, so I now have to do that before taking everyone to school, rather than my prior routine of doing it after they leave. But there’s no way for me to get up early enough (5:30? not happening) to do stalls before school, too. As a result, over the last few days, the kids and I have gotten into an evening routine. Dido does his homework, then we all go down to the barn together. They, who have steadfastly resisted much barn work for the last eight months, have suddenly gotten with the program (fear of maternal meltdown perhaps? though that’s never had an impact before, really) and have started helping, a lot, with cleaning stalls, feeding, watering and stocking the paddock with hay and water for morning. By the end of the half hour “shift”, they’re done working and are just running and playing by the barn while I finish the last details, but that’s lovely, too; then we go back up to the house for dinner. Between that and the time change, they’ve been falling into bed at 7:30, and mostly are asleep by 8, which is, no exaggeration, bliss.