Tag: loss

Amputations

~ sehaldorson ~ Leave a comment

Last fall, I visited a friend and we went to meet her lover. We found the woman squatting over her sidewalk like a clam, using her fingers like pincers to pull tiny weeds from between the slabs of concrete. She looked up with red, wet eyes as we approached, and she swiped at tears with a bent wrist, keeping her dirt-blackened fingers away from her damp and florid face.

“I miss my father,” she said to my friend, and since I didn’t know her, I pretended not to hear. During the visit, I pieced together that this day was an anniversary of his death, and that her father had died many more years ago than mine.

I have never been overcome by tears in the middle of the day while thinking about my father. In fact, I’ve never been overcome by tears at any time when thinking about my father since his death. Then and now I wonder what is wrong with me. I loved him. I had love for him.

My journal entry on the date of his death was this:

182lbs.
My father died.

I can’t be certain that I wrote down my weight early that morning and then learned of my father’s death later in the day. I can’t be certain I didn’t note that my father had died, and then sometime later that day, got onto the scale, and then entered the numbers at the top of the page like I did every day. I can’t be certain I wasn’t, as I always am, still thinking about my body’s weight, even under the weight of knowing, knowing my father was dead. I can’t be certain I didn’t grab a fold of skin and wish I could just trim it off like I might my bangs, or the fat off a roast. I can’t be certain that I didn’t just carry on after he was gone.

Last week I dreamed my father was a homeless man, strumming a guitar on the I-94 freeway leading out of Milwaukee, and I was afraid he would be killed.

Of course it was a dream because my father was dead, died of a bleeding colon. We donated his eyes to science. And he never lived in Milwaukee, nor did he ever play guitar, but I have spent the last six days since the dream wanting to rush out of my life and go looking for him, like a lost dog, like a missing limb.

Material as Memory

~ sehaldorson ~ Leave a comment

There are four blue opaque Tupperware tubs stacked in my basement. They contain all that is left of my mother and father’s house, my brother’s and my childhood. Four boxes of musty memorabilia picked out from mounds of decaying mess in the basement of the house that flooded, it seemed, every spring as my father aged there alone, unable to reverse the tide of time and its subsequent erosion. Mostly the tubs contain my mother’s things; she brought the most to their marriage, both in terms of stuff, and the stuff a life is eventually constructed from: history, health, hurt.

It has been thirty years since she died. It has been four years since I packed up those four containers, bought hastily after googling the nearest Wal-Mart, brought hastily back to our house in Milwaukee, full of musty memories. Just days after his death, a dumpster lay out on the yard, crushing the sea of dandelions, welcoming all that we threw out. My husband and uncle worked in the basement, using shovels to scrape the decayed material, mold, and mice, from the cement floor in the basement. I worked upstairs, separating the destroyed from the desirable. We filled a dumpster that day.

I made decisions, then and there, standing in the aftermath of my father’s death, of what these things meant, and what these things might mean enough to keep, after the land—the corn and bean fields, the tumble-down trees in the unproductive apple orchard, the caved-in roof of the granary building that once housed litters of feral kittens—and the house where we lived, were no longer ours. There, my mother had wept, attempting to stave off an early but inevitable death with a small, brown bottle of nitroglycerin tucked always into a pocket. There, my father had sat, maybe waited, until a neighbor stopped by when he didn’t come to church that morning and found him bleeding into his easy chair.

Strangely I am afraid when I open the containers now the smell will take me back to before my mother’s things—her antique china cups, her travel pamphlets from Denmark and France, her hand-crocheted and glue-glittered stars that adorned our Christmas trees, her boxes of costume jewelry worn by generations of women who lived through wars and childbirth—, became nothing but detritus, when each pretty thing still begged to be touched, admired. I am afraid that to touch might reanimate what now sits passively in my basement, encased in impenetrable rubber, deprived of air, each item empty like hollowed-out milkweed pods along our driveway, the seeds long since lifted into the wind, like bodies absent souls.

Maybe some day patience and pragmatism will override my superstition, and I will bring life to material as memory.

Ad infinitum / Vigilance

~ sehaldorson ~ Leave a comment

Ad Infinitum

The first time it happened, we got out the books. Each one of them said this was likely to happen. Well, maybe not likely, but possible. Babies have seizures. They just do. Most of the time when there is a fever; and he had one. No one talks about it, but it’s more common than you’d think. That’s what the nurse in the ER told us after his second one, and his third. They gave us a DVD and a booklet. Our doctor told us her brother had had seizures as a child, and he was just fine. So we tried to believe we were normal. That what was happening was normal. That the panic was normal. Oh it was there, that fluttering bird, like Millay’s but with less hopeful feathers. But we talked ourselves down each time, like a negotiator on a bullhorn shouting to the suicidal that everything would be all right, that bailing out was not the answer, that we should just back away from the ledge. We convinced ourselves that as long as we didn’t panic, this very abnormal thing, this thing no one talks about, would move along. Nothing to see here but a dark cloud briefly obscuring the sun. The brain, like a hard drive, just needs to reboot sometimes. But after the next one came a CT scan and an appointment in neurology. It’s difficult to convince yourself that that is normal. Then the blood tests, the MRIs, the medications, the therapy, the special classrooms, the emergency phone calls. That time on the plane, already taking its place on the runway, and the pilot and all the passengers forced to return to the airport: that felt nothing like normal.

At no time in my fantasies about parenthood did I predict this sort of dissonance. Isn’t that why I took vitamins and said yes to those screening tests? A co-worker asked one day, “What, had you thought it was all going to be perfect?” And what do you say to that? No? Yes? Maybe? So we lived in a kind of maybe for a long time. That maybe things would be ok. That maybe babies grow out of these things, even though the DVD and booklet warned us that a child who has one seizure is more likely to have another, and so on. We would have to be watchful. We would have to be diligent. One of us would sleep with him at all times. We would keep our phones near us at all times. By the fifth, I suppose the likelihood of his having more had grown so exponentially I should have known then that the panic would soon find a place to perch, it’s tiny talons clutching on my aorta, its beating wings drowning out the beat of my own heart.

***

Vigilance

The night is quiet, the hum
of the air-conditioner in the window
is like no noise at all. I watch your chest move
rhythmically beneath the thin sheet, the sheet
pulled up over your thin arm, your arm
pulled up alongside your cheek. I can’t
see your eyes. Your small foot twitches again, against
my leg, and I stop, don’t move a muscle, don’t
take a breath, the quick rhythm of my heart
beats loudly in my ears. Slowly,
lightly, I press my leg against your leg and wait, wait
for the next rhythmic twitch, but the next
doesn’t come. I should reach over, put my finger
in the soft crook of your arm—at 8, still
more meat than sinew—, and slowly, lightly
pull your arm down from your cheek. I should look
at your eyes, see if your lashes beat rhythmically
against your cheek, a sight that sounds
an all too common alarm so quiet
you make no noise at all in the night.