As the folks who read my other blog know, I’m writing a book about the process of turning your back on the American definition of success, and doing something else entirely. I wrote a bunch of stuff for the book that I’m now editing back out, for one reason or another (like, I was freaking out, writing was therapy, and that stuff has no business being in the book, for starters). So I’m publishing the not-excruciatingly-horrid bits of it here.
This piece, I wrote right after my stepfather, The Bear, passed away, last November.
First, every lightbulb in the house burned out. Simultaneously. Except the long fluorescent tubes in the kitchen, and the high-intensity bulb in the spotlight. Other than that, every time we flipped a switch, there was a small “pop”, and a sigh, as one of us, in darkness instead of illumination, went in search of the right replacement bulb.
Then, the timer on the stove went out. Normally, if you bake something humid, it’ll freak out and beep uncontrollably for a few minutes. This was more like morse code. Only none of us knew how to read the message. I hope we didn’t miss some profundity from the grave.
I suppose the insane wind storm that ripped half the roof off that came next should have been no surprise at all. But it was anyway. The windstorms that spin up out here in the desert are horrors of sand and dust and vicious tumbleweeds. I know that in Westerns, tumbleweeds are a metaphor for freedom. In fact, what actually happens is that this vicious, spiky, dried ball of death catapults along just barely slower than windspeed, ripping apart everything in its path, and depositing little tumbleweed seeds in its wake. Those little seeds sprout up rapidly in the rains, because nothing eats them, and they create more nasty little tumbleweeds to go rocketing along ripping apart fences, paintjobs, undercarriages, and small animals.
There’s a certain hideous tawdriness to grief. In the pull between the desire to enshrine the memory of your loved one, and the inevitable emotional speedbumps when you smack hard into all the crap they did not put to right before their departure, you end up being disingenuous to yourself, and to others. Grief is to veracity as velveeta is to cheese. It’s kind of the same color, and if you ripped off the wrapper, it’d pass for a similar thing, but you know deep down that it tastes of bitterness and plastic.
I am tired of grief. The Bear hasn’t even been dead for an entire week, and already the rituals of grief are making me crazy. The endless stream of people with a) well-wishes, who expect to be fed and entertained, b) their own horror stories of loss, c) an idea for how they can spin the situation to their own profit. Occasionally, we get a visitor who brings food and departs without excess conversation. Those people are blessed.
The ghoulish watching of Mom, to see when she’s going to snap, is really getting old. I know they mean well, I know they do, but I am quite tired of the question “How is your Mom doing, really?” Like, she’s lying to them. Or like I see something they don’t. Or like even if I did, I would tell them. What, precisely, do they think they would do about her pain, even if I did tell them about it? Are they in some particular position to do something to mitigate the fact that days before her 66th birthday and three months shy of their 32nd anniversary, my mother’s husband passed on?
I’m not even going to whine (too much) about the fact that, since I am a grown child living my own life, apparently not one of my parents’ friends have figured out that I’ve lost a parent myself. Mom’s grief is paramount, no doubt, but it is not singular.
I think that homemade grief is too much for people to deal with. Just like homemade cheese. People can’t even contemplate raising a dairy animal, harvesting the food intended for its babies, and hanging it in a cool place to rot into the ultimate yumminess of cheese. The whole process, when you really think about it, is completely disgusting, yet somehow has become an artisanal endeavor. Realistically, velveeta should be a far better product, sterilized, standardized, and industrial as it is. But everyone knows that a block of a small, local, organic, hand-raised and created, one of a kind cheese is always, always superior to the block of melty plasticness that velveeta represents.
It’s like that with grief. We don’t have a place for death in our culture any more; we don’t practice it like the Tibetans do, we don’t engage in community rituals about it, like the First Nations do, we don’t hold wakes, like the Irish do, we don’t even know to bring casseroles and comfort like our grandparents did. When death got taken out of its context and moved into hospitals, all the rituals of comfort somehow got left behind and forgotten.
So we’re left with gluten and chicken. All of us are gluten-sensitive, yet in this time of mourning, while we’re all still pretty much in shock, we’ve reverted to bread products. It’s part of the velveeta process. Rather than focusing on solid, nutritious food, we’re eating crap in order to shut our stomachs up. Well, crap and chicken, of course. Of the people who’ve brought food to the house, in the time-honored tradition of mourning (which apparently all but two people have no clue about), one hundred percent of them have brought chicken soup.
I like the symbolism there. Mourning feels sort of like the onset of flu. You’re tired, you don’t sleep well at all, everything aches (especially the heart), and your immune system is running uphill trying to fight something that your body perceives as threat but is actually just grief. So naturally, what you need at a time like that is chicken soup.
Both were homemade. One arrived in a crock-pot, ready to be plugged in and kept warm for as long as we needed it, the other arrived in Tupperware. One was thickly chicken, nearly shredded with long cooking, with barley as the primary starch. The other had neat, discreet, cubes of chicken, and a spectacular broth highlighted by parsley, rosemary, and garlic from the giver’s own garden. Both were excellent in their way, just as both of the people who brought them were excellent in their support.
Other than that, people arrived and stayed through lunch or dinner, forcing Mom, who has old-school manners, to invite them to stay. Me, I would have served us food and let them starve, but Mom’s too kind. So we ended up cooking for, feeding, and washing up after, a stream of well-wishers. Here’s a late-breaking news flash; if you are coming to console, please consider that allowing them a long hot bath in privacy and solitude might do the mourners more good than forcing them to throw a luncheon.
The behavior of the folks calling the business line has done more to convince me of the value of gun control than any other argument. These people have the emotional I.Q. of a pack of playing cards. I started answering the business phone to spare Mom the strain, and it never failed to prang me as well. I finally started answering enquiries with a very pointed, “My father, the gunsmith, passed away last week and we’ll be closing the shop down. I’m sorry we can’t work on your gun, but best of luck finding another gunsmith.” Most of the time, they babbled and hung up, but a few gems replied with things like “well why can’t you recommend another shop?” or “Well are you still selling guns? Because I’m looking for this model…” so I’d go ahead and repeat “Did you hear the part about where that was my father that just died? I’m not really focused on the gun business just now, I’m sorry.” A few of them tried to push past that, even. Them, I hung up on. I guess to some, the Second Amendment trumps death. They’re probably government cheese eaters.
People want to know what Mom’s plans are now. As if, in the scant week of her mourning, she should have plotted out her destiny. They don’t seem to understand that she’s barely able to open the mail right now, because of all the reminders of him. It’s like people want her to move on, so that they can get back to their regular modus operandi, and quit having to be consoling.
The ancient tradition of a year of mourning, where a widow wore black for a year, served so many good purposes. She didn’t have to worry about what she was wearing, or whether people would think she was too “cheerful” too soon. She was wearing a sign that said “look, I’m still grieving, don’t be a schmuck.” (Which, as time goes on, I’m discovering is almost necessary. And have I mentioned how much I hate the question “how are you doing?”?) And she didn’t have to put energy into her appearance. Open the closet, put on the black. Done.
People judge. You’re grieving too much, or not enough. You’re talking too animatedly, or you’re too quiet. The art of holding space for the grieving has, with so many other critical interpersonal skills, been completely lost by our culture. I don’t know how we go about getting it back, and I don’t know how to convince people of the value of learning it, until it’s their turn, when surely, they’ll get it too late to be of use to anyone but themselves.
But for pity’s sake, please, if you’re going to serve me cheese with my whine, don’t serve velveeta.
Tags: Family, Food, Gratitude, Musings
