It has been a while – weeks (a month?) since I’ve completed a prompt-based writing. I feel my grief so much, but I look at the prompts and the words just don’t want to form. They get stuck in my chest, where the knot forms when I know I’m about to tear up. But today I want to write, I do. I’m sitting at my dining room table with Sara’s laptop. I guess technically it’s mine now, but it will always be hers. It has her stickers on it, and the one time I brought it in to work because my work laptop died, a coworker saw it & laughed, knowing that it was Sara’s immediately (this was when she was still alive).
I look at the prompt, and bits and pieces speak to me.
But the silence is certain.
So much silence in my life these days. I am missing the noise that comes with being an us, of being more than just me. Today I sit, not technically in silence – I hear sounds of the refrigerator, the icemaker, the regular inhalation and exhalation of a dog sleeping in the next room, my fingers on the keyboard. But the absence of the sounds of us is deafening. No longer do I hear our conversations, occasionally across multiple rooms, or the sound of Sara in the shower, and never again will I feel that pang of excitement at hearing the garage door open knowing she has arrived home. I miss her snoring when she starts to fall asleep while watching tv and even the annoying noise from her cpap when it slips out of place and leaks air in ways it isn’t supposed to.
There’s someone here who is trembling.
I know I write a lot about my grief here, but in day to day life I’m pretty good at putting on my mask – my “I’ve got to function in the world” mask. People ask me all the time how I’m doing (sometimes knowing my circumstances, sometimes just making polite conversation), and it’s become instinct to give a generic answer that discourages further inquiry. I like to redirect the conversation and ask people questions about them, or I’ll purposefully stay light and “cheerful” – talk about my pets, the weather, the latest news about when the office might reopen.
I just don’t have the energy to answer that question – “How are you?” – honestly most of the time… because most days, inside, I’m still trembling. I’m quaking with sorrow over the loss of Sara, of George, of our futures as individuals and together as a family. That just doesn’t make for good conversation, now does it? Even if someone knows my circumstances, and genuinely wants to know how I’m doing – is it even the right time for me to lift up my bandages and expose my raw, bleeding, painful insides? It takes time to bandage things back up and tuck them away and get my mask back on – often there’s just not time to get into all of that.
All these gestures by my body & my voice just to turn me into the offering…
I know I am my own person, I am more than the tragedies that have befallen me. I have to somehow figure out how to continue living, and find things that allow me to anchor my soul to this life, to the present. But some days – some days I slip into the waters of my grief and I bathe in it, and I almost feel like I exist in these moments solely as an offering to the universe to keep the memory of Sara and George alive. George especially. Besides the hospital staff, Sara and I are the only two people who had the honor of holding him and seeing him in the flesh. He mattered to us. With Sara gone, I am responsible for remembering him. I am the offering – my tears, my body, my actions, my heart.
There is nothing loss does not touch.
I write this on a Friday afternoon, a day I took off from work. The animals are all sleeping peacefully nearby. Earlier I took a short drive and allowed Elvis the beagle to come along, who so joyfully stuck his head out the window, allowing his soft long ears to flap in the wind. I do feel a sort of peace, and I have moments of joy and happiness, but life is still so heavy. So heavy. I feel like the world doesn’t know what to do with people like me – we’re supposed to be able to pull ourselves up and brush ourselves off and turn tragedy into victory (or so the narrative goes). Grief is my constant companion now, for better or for worse. Yesterday I had a particularly hard day, and all I could think as I got ready for bed was that it was one of those days where, in the past, I would’ve crawled into bed with Sara, cuddled up to her, and told her that she made everything better – because she did. I miss her so much.