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.

“The main thing that ever helped mothers was other people mothering them; a chain of mothering that keeps the whole shebang afloat.” -Anne Lamott

This one went to my amazing friend Alana. My son was scandalized that I sent her mail with nudity. Ah, 8.

“When we’re with people who bring out our essential selves, our words flow effortlessly, the energy is positive, we tell funny jokes, people laugh. There’s a sense of complete understanding that comes from being on the same wavelength with two essential selves.” –Martha Beck

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