Today I was marveling at how your perspective changes when you are grieving.
I went to the grocery store, the same one I visited for the first time with Papa Fender a week or two before he died. In the car on the way there, we had argued, because he tried to give me some pointers about doing a u-turn in the street (my approach was not as efficient as it could have been) and I told him I hadn’t signed up for driver’s ed.
Today of course he was not there, he will never go there with me again. He will never sit next to me in the car again, we will never argue about anything again.
I feel as though our lives are made of fabric, and someone has torn off a huge chunk of my fabric and the ragged edge is wildly battered in the wind. I cannot grasp it, I cannot tame it.
At the checkout, the bagging person asked me how I am. On autopilot, I said, “good, how are you?” and he looked at me pointedly and he said, jokingly, “Just terrible.” And I thought, I’m terrible, my stepfather has died. My father, my father has died, and I am terrible. But instead I said, “I’m sorry.”
We can’t talk about this pain that consumes us. We can, but it just brings on tears and creates awkward moments.
Today, a Freecycler came to pick up a media cabinet that was Papa Fender’s when he married my mom. She turned out to be a professional herbalist, a woman built like a tank who used to work in the steel industry and, with two leg braces, managed to take this cabinet out of our house that my husband and brother hadn’t been able to take out together.
She was so self-assured; I told her she’d need some muscle, at least two people, and she said, “I can do it,” and she came, and at every step she insisted she could do it, and we helped a little bit in our puny ways, and she did it. She got it out and I didn’t watch her but she loaded it onto her car.
She is a holistic practitioner, and as it turns out, also ordained. I told her that my stepdad had died, and this had been his shelf, and he’d love that you will be using it. And that’s when she told me she is ordained and she offered grief counseling, and said that she doesn’t charge.
I keep thinking that every little spider, every moth, that I see in our house is my Papa Fender. And now I suppose he has sent us this woman.
My husband says people look for patterns. And I have seen so many patterns now. I am looking for them, trying to make sense of what happened. And there are moments of peace, like this week when I dreamt of Papa Fender and we cried together and he told me that he is happy and that he is in heaven. I don’t even believe in heaven, not the Christian one anyway, and I assume that isn’t what he meant anyway, but in any event the dream brought me a moment of peace.
So it comes in waves, and as that torn jagged edge of fabric waves and slams against the wind I try to hem it. Somehow I must hem it, somehow I must tame it. It will always be missing a piece but maybe someday it won’t hurt so much. I hope some day it doesn’t hurt so much.
