When I’m angry I run.
If it’s warm enough I run the terraced stairs outside the athletic
buildings at the women’s college. But in
the bleak midwinter I am often forced inside the hundred-year old gymnasium
where I sprint suicides under the volleyball nets hoisted to the vaulted
ceiling. At the end of each length I
lunge to touch the painted lines on the soft wood floor, turning from the hip
to brace my knee for the push off in the opposite direction.
But yesterday I wasn’t running in the old gym, I was just
walking across. I was carrying my
handbag and my work tote and my breakfast and a hundred pieces of outerwear
because it is cold, so cold in this late-arriving winter. I had my cell phone out because that’s the
only spot that has reception, and I called Sweetie to see how her mom was
doing.
I heard Sweetie say, “She died.”
I fell down onto that soft floor then. I dropped all my bags and packages, my
slippery coat and long scarf. I fell
down onto the ground stunned not just by the news but by my experience of it,
by the suddenness of pain in the middle of a tired workaday morning. I fell down in sadness for Sweetie’s sadness,
for the fact of marriage that ties us one to another and makes her pain my
own. I fell down in astonishment that,
again, I would be grieving.
Turns out that our in-laws become our families too, the
motley crews connected to the one we love become our own beloveds. Sixteen years ago, I wasn’t looking for another
cranky, nutty old lady; or a heap of funny, hulking brothers, a generous older
sister, a couple of get-it-done sisters-in-law, some nutty nieces and a few shy
and handsome nephews. I was looking for
love in the big city; I was looking for the one to share my solitude.
My Sweetie, the quiet loner living simply in one room in the
East Village, turned out to hail from a tribe of quiet loners. And now my life is littered with brothers and
others, enriched by a cranky old Yankee and diminished by her dwindling and
dying. Now I have more people to
love. Now I have more people to lose.
As I knelt on that floor in my sudden weeping, a graduate
student I know only by sight came to me: young, and clear eyed and completely present. It was the first offering of presence and
compassion that came to me in my grief, but the kindness keeps coming. The love that surrounds us was tangible in
the eight families I could think of to help with Small if we needed overnight
care, in the offers of food, in the concrete favors, in the phone ringing off
the hook, in the gentleness of my colleagues and the Kitchen Man.
When I’m angry, I run.
I hate everyone. I run until the
poison seeps out in my sweat, until my heart pounds like a drum, until I am too
tired to be angry anymore. In the early
morning I run in the dark because I don’t know where the switches are; I run
while the ballet students wander in for the morning barre class. I crank up the punk rockers on my IPod, their
snarls matching the venom in my soul. Bikini
Kill comes on and I think, “Except Jender.
I don’t hate Jender.”
This little spot of—not even love, of not-hate—sets a wedge
in my icy heart. I open a tiny
crack. I remember that even at my most
hateful, even at my darkest and most broken, when the rage flows hard, there
are those to whom I would reach out a hand.
These days there seems to be less and less distance between
that grudging realization and the knowledge that I love, and am loved, all the
time. There seems to be less distinction
between the handpicked few who I can tolerate in my orbit and a sense of
general goodwill towards people. I see
in the clear eyes of the graduate student, hear in the soft voice of my
colleague, that we are all caught in the bonds of love, each of us vulnerable
to loss and brokenness. I know that my
sweetheart’s family is my own. I know
that love is what we get and it is enough.
On my way home, tears on my cheeks, I stopped to let the
Little Family cross the street. The
Solstice baby with the piano fingers was tight on Papa’s chest, the parents
held each other’s hands. “More love is
more love,” is Sarah Buttenweiser’s mantra for open adoption, but more and more
I find it the aching truth of all our lives.
More love is more love. Fall down on your knees. You are
not alone.
Author’s note:
Another re-write might have found room for a quote from the
Reverend Kate Braestrup, Unitarian Universalist, about how highly she thinks of
falling down as a grief response.
You
should also check out the songs, of course.
Slaid Cleaves, Temporary
