I live in a converted barn. When we first started working on it, I learned about supporting walls. These are walls you can’t knock down unless you put a beam in, and walls you can’t move. And walls that need a lot of structural support.
We had a few. They were the bane of my existence. There were walls where I didn’t want them to be. Coming up with a floor plan was daunting.
Finally, I had a Eurkea! Moment. I found the floor plan that worked for everything I wanted except one thing.
The main entrance to my house, the front door, opened into my kitchen.
I have a beloved sofa. The arms are very high. I sit sideways with my knees bent and my feet on its newly upholstered surface. I am wearing the ancient headphones – the curly corded ones that plug into the stereo receiver. I have on jeans and a black t-shirt. The lights are off except for the china cabinet. The flames of a dozen candles also shadow the room.
I have a glass of cool Merlot. A beautiful glass. A full-bodied wine.
The Cowboy Junkies are filling my head. And then AJ Roach. And then Leonard Cohen. And Robert Plant and Alison Krauss. The official mourning albums. Beautiful music, rich instruments, stunning voices all with an underlying sadness.
I sink into the sofa. I sink into my grief. Those four CDs have lived in the player for years now. The official mourning quartet.
When sadness hits me, my first instinct is to avoid it. Being busy. Being social. Being this, being that. But I have learned that sometimes I just need to wallow in it. Embrace the grief, the pain, the memories.
Eventually, the pain lessens, the memories make me smile and the grief becomes the love I can no longer share.
When we reach the beauty of grief, I will sometimes play Mozart’s Jupiter. Waving my hands in the air and conducting the invisible orchestra in my head. Reveling in the joy of the notes.
Great pain can be beautiful. A terrible beauty, a stark beauty, film noir. And then it emerges transformed into a different beauty. One to wrap my heart in. Almost a joy to behold.
They used to call them the small hours of the morning. 2, 3, 4 am…. small numbers, big eyes. All night long, I am up and down, rolling over, blankets on, blankets off, unable to sleep. Brain churning. Too late? Too early? To take a sleeping pill. Tomorrow–.today is going to be hell.
The talk radio inside my head gets especially loud in the small hours. I replay scenarios from the day, 10 years ago, my childhood, and ones that haven’t happened yet. I worry. I fret. I’d bite my nails but I gave up that habit decades ago.
My clearest memories begin when I was about 8. Things before that are just blurry snapshots of isolated events – none of them particularly memorable which makes it a mystery as to why I remember them.
Fifth grade is especially vivid. At school, they had started a new program for 5th graders. Funny, I remember the acronym SQ3. It involved us going from classroom to classroom for different teachers. I didn’t like it. Though we didn’t know it then, I was ADD and that disruption of moving from one class to another was a form of sabotage. While I remember my 3rd and 4th grade teachers, vividly, I have no idea who taught me in the 5th grade. Mostly, I just remember moving from one class to another. I do kind of remember the guy who taught us History. I wrote an extra credit report on Marco Polo. He questioned whether I wrote it or not. He said it sounded too grownup. I was shocked that he would think I had cheated. I assured him I had written it.
