His chair

   His vast, blue, ratty recliner is the last place I saw Michael alive. It was the place where I gave his stone cold body desperate and terrible CPR because the 911 lady said I had to.
   Last night in the dark, I hauled it out of the house to the curb and used the 311 app to schedule trash pickup.
   I have tried to repair it for eight months. It LOOKS like it could still be a good chair. But from the Compassion Center fiasco over my dad's sofa, I know that no one wants used furniture with even mild cat scratches on the arms.
   So I had a dream last night. Quite an upsetting dream.
Michael and I were walking into a light and airy, Craftsman bungalow. Big window, white curtains, wood floors: my home.
   He said, “I got you something.” It was a pressed-wood, lighted shelving unit (we used to argue about such things: Where are we living that we must waste electricity to spotlight our knickknacks?).
   It held multiple copies of two or three large ceramic pots, tall ovals, lidded, asymmetrical, with bold and quite attractive figured patterns on black, lemon-green or orange fields.
   "I knew you would like these,” he said, "They came from my mom."
   I wanted to stomp my feet and tell him flatly, "NO, no. I have just spent all this money and so many tears and so much physical effort clearing useless clutter out of my house, I don't want that. Out."
   But this was Michael. And they had not come from his mother's house. They were not her taste. He had picked them out just for me, and I did not want them.

   There will be no end to missing him. I could purge my home of every item that makes me weep, and still I will see him in my dreams.

Juxtaposition

   This time and last time.
   This year and last year.
   
   Michael. Matt DeCample. Lisa Fischer. A room echoing with noise.
   Empty table next to our overfull one. Kind co-workers, real friend. Tired boss face. People who obviously want to go home. Friend angry that there were no options for nondrinkers besides water. 

   Conferring with teammates. Realizing one is reliable.
   Conferring with teammates. Realizing one is reliable.

   Thinking I am sure I can spell a word another team is missing and then discovering I am wrong.
   Telling the good teammate what I think the spelling is and then hearing the other team spell it differently and be correct.

   Spelling correctly a tricky word.
   Spelling correctly several tricky words.

   Bungling a word I know how to spell.
   Bungling a word I know how to spell.

   Being second. Not minding.
   Being second. Minding a bit because of the tired boss face.
   
   Going home truly relieved to have survived, with Michael — not having to keep track of my wallet, not having to scurry to my car, Michael being patient with my fizzy energy. Michael disbelieving that I do not mind not winning.
   The sad boss face. Relieved but regretful, noticing the too-bright wine faces, scampering across the dark lots and popping into my car to lock that door, alone on the wet streets in the car with no one to impress, realizing how insignificant I feel, starting to cry, shutting that nonsense down because I am driving.

   Going straight to bed.
   Staying up a little late while the cats that ran to meet me at my lonely door behave like kittens under my feet.

Gone

   The sale of Mom’s house has closed; the check is in the bank; all I still need to do about her house is to get through to three utilities’ customer service departments to close her accounts and to her insurer to end her home policy.  
   It might not be a snap. I have a doc appointment first thing Monday and then will have to rush-hour it to work where we are slammed trying to cover a former co-worker’s load, and each of those calls might entail an hour on the phone. When I tried to switch my own Entergy account from Michael’s to my name, I gave up after being on hold for an hour and ten minutes. But surely I can do one call a day over the week?

   She also has some land near Vilonia to sell, but a real estate agent can handle that.

   The land is dirty and crammed with trees, insects and animals, but that’s not a problem for land. Land can have all the silverfish it wants to have and nobody will be disgusted. I don’t need to de-hoardify it, de-clutter it, repair it, repaint it, test it for asbestos, protect it from break-ins by humans and termites, mow it, talk to contractors about it, crawl around underneath it, drive nearly an hour each way to tend it while fretting all the way about its structural defects or weeping.
   The best thing about the land — all 7.1 acres of it: There are no memories attached to it that I must violate to make it sell. 

   Dad bought it because he wanted to be an organic farmer. I have one memory of hiking through tickish-looking dry grasses to a house trailer where I had to drink sweet tea a sunburned woman had to offer me while Dad chatted with her husband about turnip greens and irrigation.
   She wore a handkerchief.
   This is not a memory that will die in slow motion if the realtor tells me the land isn’t worth anything like the amount its assessment might suggest.

   I remember 30 years ago, sometime after my father-in-law died, how Norma divested herself of a huge house full of family debris and treasures, moved into a condo and furnished it with new things that none of her kids were attached to. Michael judged her for the new decor. She kept only a few of her old things, and they were deeply important or just really nice.
   That woman loved to shop. She and her best friend were garage sale fiends. I thought they were materialistic. I failed to note that the stuff she brought home was always a gift for somebody else.
   Today — after five years of being in charge of the stinking heap of bug-infested beloved crap Dad, children and grandkids left in Mom’s house — I’m in awe of Norma.
   Way to go, Norma.

   To declutter your life so that your children don’t have to after you’re gone is generosity. Humility.

   Emptying a two-story house, sorting and discarding a lifetime of family members’ possessions, brutalizes one’s sense of self-importance and taste. How naive I was. But then came the day an estate sale presenter told me the exotic, ingenious, precious stuff I was reluctantly agreeing to ask her to sell on the cheap would not sell because it was broken, chipped, shabby, too big and not worth rehabbing. 
   And I said, OK, donate it. 
   And she said, They won’t take it. 
   And I said OK to the landfill.

   Again and again over the past year, I said OK to the landfill. 

   I personally crushed all kinds of familiar items from my childhood and my siblings’ childhoods into the big trash can and the two little recycling cans and dragged them out to the curb. Week after week. 
   I personally said, “OK, landfill” to the clean-out crew I finally hired because after a year of my effort and a weekend of group effort with the nieces and nephew and two amazing weeks of progress made by my friend the archivist, the house was still so crammed with stuff that potential buyers could not see it.

   Gone to the landfill. I imagine a geometry roughly the shape of the house but made of black bags. I see it inside the great Mount Trashmore of North Little Rock that did not exist when I was in high school.

  So many tormented nights: Why not have a series of yard sales? Why not stack the things in the yard and sit out in that tatty yard, with the mosquitos, weekend after weekend after weekend after the week of hustling from my first job to my second job, unless it rained, unless it was cold, and wait for bargain hunters to come pick through the stuff and haggle me for it, bit by bit? Why not buy a WiFi hotspot device and take credit cards? Could I not have done that? Was I so lazy or selfish I wasn’t willing to put another year into ensuring no more of my family treasure would add to the waste inside Mount Trashmore?

   Sometimes I flash on a framed print that used to hang in my bedroom or the line of Crayola cups and jam jars in the kitchen cabinet. They are in the midden of Mount Trashmore. Do I really have to think about that? 
   What happened to all those books, the rooms full of silverfish-infested religion and outdated textbooks that the estate sale woman found so appalling? I took boxes and boxes of books to the library, but what happened to all the rest of them? What did the clean-out crew do with Mom’s gardening books?

   Things are not people. Sending a broken dish to the landfill is not like pushing long trays stacked with murdered Jews through the door of a furnace. It’s not. 
   It’s not. And yet it feels so brutal.
   It forces me to reassess myself — the size of my life, my collection of thangs.

   And it makes me need to get the clutter out of my own house before I die, so Ben won’t have to feel like this.
 

My mother's daughter

   Mom was 64 when Dad died. 
   I am 63 and Michael has died.
   She married Dad when she was 30, after knowing him less than a year. They were together 34 years.
   I married Michael when I was 25, and I knew him for three years before we married. 
   Dad was a handsome, ambitious, dynamic war hero and 20 years older than Mom.
   Michael was the funnest person in our office, tall and sweet and kind, but sad, and he had beautiful hands and a big vocabulary. He was seven years older.
   Mom had been married once before and had two children. Dad had been married twice before and had three children, but they lived with his first wife. Mom could not drive or had only driven a car once in a while.
   I was never married before Michael. He had been married once. I had no children, no pets. He had no children but four pets. I had a car, a VW Super Beetle with a moon roof.
   Mom and Dad moved often as he lost faith in employers or grants ran out. After they were married she changed homes 10 times.        
   Michael and I lived together in his house forever. We used to sing Nanci Griffith's “Gulf Coast Highway” about that — “this old house here by the road.”

And when we die, we say, 

we’ll catch some blackbird’s wing

And we will fly away together

To some sweet bluebonnet spring.

   Mom sang “Blueberry Hill” and “If You Were the Only Boy in the World.” I don’t remember Dad singing with her. He liked music, though.
   Michael and I sang together a lot, especially before Ben was a teenager. Sometime when Ben was in college, Michael told me he did not like my voice, that it was pompous and squeaky, and I stopped singing altogether. Singing made me cry. Mom had taught me that I had a pretty voice, and I dreaded being that person who can’t sing but thinks they can and people humor her. 
   He didn’t mean it, he said later. He was trying to pay me back for calling him stupid and an idiot. I didn’t mean that either. He was not stupid. I only called him an idiot because the wife called Raymond an idiot on Everybody Loves Raymond, and it was funny. But Michael did not receive it as funny. It was mean, and it hurt his feelings. It's miraculous that he stayed with me.
   Mom tried to warn me that I should work on listening. “I read somewhere that listening is a pure expression of love,” she said.
   Dad never stopped talking. Mom taught herself to listen, to really listen. But she had a head start: She was a naturally quiet individual, unburdened by the need to be right. 
   Unlike her daughter. 
   Mom seemed to thrive after Dad died. She said she missed him, but I never saw her break down weeping. Sometimes she was misty, but she was a private person. She spared her children.
   I never, for instance, saw her crawling on the floor howling. John E says she was a trouper.
   Not much like her daughter at all.

My dead, undifferentiated

Dewdrop and Rosebud, white mice, were buried under the canna lilies in the gritty drip-line bed behind the house at 1824 Byrnes Drive, in McLean, Va.

Ginger, Mary’s dog, was struck by a car or a truck outside a hotel on the Blue Ridge Parkway while our family was moving from Virginia to Texas.

Bootsie, the black and white dog, died in our front yard at 305 E. ValVerde in Crystal City, TX. Joe and I thought she had been poisoned because there was froth at her muzzle, but she was an old lady dog.

One of Fuzzy Phantom's kittens died under my bicycle when it tipped over while nobody was around to see, and that was my fault for failing to engage my kickstand properly, and everyone hated me that day, and told me so.

Granny Lynch died at New Year’s in Rhode Island. I had measles and no one told me. Mom just disappeared from my world, which was a bed in the larger of the two rooms in the secondary house behind our main house. It used to be servants quarters, I imagine. And behind it was a one-room house that may have been for migrant field hands. Our place wasn't old enough to have housed slaves. She was in Rhode Island at the funeral, but they didn’t tell me, because Dad’s baby brother, Melvin, died of measles as a toddler, and he feared measles. He slathered Vick’s Vaporub on my ankles and made me wear two pairs of socks. There was a mustard plaster at one point, too. And vinegar on brown paper. Mostly I remember being ordered not to pick my nose. And then I was fine, but Granny was dead and I had not been told. I misunderstood not being told. I thought it was because I was too wicked to be included. I think about my poor mom, rushing to be with her and arriving too late. She didn’t get to know her mother as an old woman. She ventured into her own old age as a pioneer.

Friskie, formerly George, died while I was in college.

Fuzzy Phantom died in the driveway.

John the Dog died. His wife, Szadu, died.

Nana, Michael’s grandmother, died when Ben was little, with congestive heart failure.

Jim Storey died in 1985 of melanoma. I went to see him a few days before and he gripped my hand and urgently tried to say something. His eyes were big and wet. He said, “You got you, you got you.” I don’t know what he meant but I do know what he meant. It meant he liked me. That I should never leave Michael.

Ouida Belle Fleming Loyall, Dad's mother, died in 1987. She was 99. He couldn’t stand her because she made stuff up. He went there out of duty, and to show off his charming children and his pretty wife. Ouida Belle lied about the past, he said. Mom said she was ornery and that would help her live a long time. I saw that they had a fight every time he visited her.

Dad died suddenly in 1988 of a hemorrhagic stroke. I saw him all over the place for months — in the street, in grocery stores, driving cars.

My half-sister Beverly Jones died in 1989 at age 59. Just fell over dead.

Bamma Cora Storey died in 1990 at Paragould. She was 90.

Frankie the Camp Cat was hit by a car. Michael found him.

Phoebe the Bitch Cat was hit by a car and had convulsions and died.

Otus the Head Cat drowned in 1992, and it was my fault. He had been having seizures, and we gave him half a baby aspirin a day so his hind legs would work. He had spent his whole life as an indoor-outdoor cat, and I thought it was mean not to let him go outside. So when he begged, I let him out. I was busy doing other things and lost track of him. Ben came home and immediately wondered where he was. We searched outdoors, calling. It was terrible. It was my fault. 

Norma Storey died in my arms in 1995. She had cancers.

Her father, Granddad RR Ivy, died a month later. He was 93.

Frodo and Gizmo died in the same year. They were brothers. Gizmo had cancer. Frodo died a straightforward mammalian death.

Jim’s brother Uncle Bob (Robert Henry Storey) died in 2003. He was 74. He donated his body to science. The day he turned 33, he called Jim’s house drunk and Michael picked up the phone. Bob told Michael he was now “as old as Jesus.” He had been a wildman in his youth and adulthood, but then got sober. At his funeral, one shabbily dressed person after another stood up to talk about how kind he had been to them in small ways. One man said Bob had saved his life and saved his marriage. They were all crying. They all loved him.

Uncle Layton died in Florida.

Uncle Horace died at Hoxie.

Pharaoh died in convulsions while Mom was trying to get him to the vet. He had feline leukemia, but she had taken good care of him for two years. I can’t thank her enough for that. I feel bad that she went through the trauma of his death alone. How he thrashed in the box on the way to the vet.

Someone set glue traps for mice at the arts center and a little mouse was caught. It was squealing in the AC closet and everybody said, “Try to ignore it.” I did not yet know that it is possible to free mice from these terrible traps using oil. I thought I could ease it off, but it was screaming when I picked it up. This dainty, mouse-gray, little creature, screaming. I tugged but the hind feet wouldn't come off, and then its foot tore off. I put it in a garbage bag, put the bag in a trash can and hit it with a brick until the screaming ended. I apologized over and over.

Mercury died. That was devastating. He died a peaceful mammalian death, but we were crushed. The floors were empty. I made a ceramic cat to sit on the floor, so I had something to look at. I made it with its tongue sticking out, as though gakking.

Alyson Hoge let me practice fishing at her house. I caught two catfish. At home the second one croaked and protested — in air — for what felt longer than 30 minutes while I tortured the first one trying to kill it the way everyone had instructed me, using a nail through the head to a board. It was horrific. It was murder. I could not eat them. 
God.

We were sitting in our chairs watching TV when I noticed Mackey was panting. Michael thought he was just tired, but he was panting. I looked that up online and they said it was a terrible thing. I raced him through the night to the emergency clinic in North Little Rock. They said he was in total kidney failure and was dying. I stood with him while they put him to sleep. I begged him to find me again. I don’t know why I said that, but I hope that he can and does.

Mom died in February 2018, surrounded by family members and having been given last rites. She does not linger anywhere. She slipped away into freedom, and I am glad for her. She was released from the prison of her rigid body and what seemed to be a mechanical dementia, like there were obstacles in the way of her mind which was still clear in many ways. She remembered recent events. I don't think she had Alzheimer’s. I wonder if it was her parathyroid? 

Wood rats invaded the basement and we set traps. Twice in one day they maimed and trapped a rat without killing it, and I had to take those writhing, ruined animals outside, in garbage bags, and pound them with bricks. Michael wasn’t around for the first one, but he was for the second one, and he offered to do it, but I had already done the godawful that day and figured I would be less disturbed repeating the deed with my sullied mind than he would be having to do it on a fresh mind.

Michael, Oct. 7, 2018. 

So huge, so hopeless to conceive. 
All of that other dying, and the world went on as it does. But with Michael, the world changed. 

Patience

   I wrestle with thoughts of calling out someone who keeps telling me I am not grieving properly. She says I am avoiding and denying my grief, as though she could see me 24 hours a day, instead of the once a month she does see me, as though she knew who I am better than I know me, as though grief was a decision I could make and not this global condition that keeps knocking me off my feet. 
   But I don’t want to snap at her, because that’s my self-importance wanting it. I want to forgive her, because she truly doesn't understand. It’s one thing to minister to people whose best friends just died. It is another to lose your best friend, forever, and with him your future.
   Also, she has burdens, and it is extraordinary how dutifully she carries on day after day, putting a bigger situation first in spite of what she needs. Maybe she’s lashing out.

   The first time my new truth came out of my mouth, I said, “The world is different.” 
   And she said, “No, it is not.”
   I say that it helps me to process my sorrow by thinking, and she says, no, it doesn’t. I say I would rather sit at home, next to Michael’s chair, and watch Netflix than go to a public weepy-time service where you listen to sad music and light a candle and then go home alone, to your chair and your memories. She says I am doing it wrong.
   I wonder if I said something carelessly misleading to her or someone told her a story about me that misrepresents what Michael meant to me — my only love, my dearest friend — and she has some false understanding of my history with him that presents me as cold or calculating or unworthy of him? And so she wants to punish me? 
   Or maybe she is angry with me for not finding a way to spend more time with the other people in his life who lost him, too, and who suffer and miss his face.

   When I talk to myself about this, in my mind, I rehearse direct conversations, direct, with her, which is the thing to do when we have a serious misunderstanding going with someone who matters to us. I recite the names of all the big people in my life who are dead now. I cry about my mom and dad, and my dead cats. But that would be self-justification. I don’t need to justify how I feel.
   Then I lose my patience, in my mind, and insult her. Call her smug, mostly. 
   But I don’t believe she is smug. That wouldn't be honest or helpful or represent how I feel about her. I like her and don’t want her ever to feel what I feel. No one should feel like this. I think maybe she is overwhelmed, but too strong to give up carrying on all the work she has to do.
   And what if she is simply at a loss and trying to navigate our conversations using some touchstone advice some trainer gave her — that people are pigheaded sheep who do not know their own hearts and do not know what is good for them and must be broken down so they admit their helplessness and the light can enter their hearts?
   Well, I admit that. My heart is all lighted up. I’m not a joyful sad person, I am a sad joyful person. I live now, and now is often beautiful, when it’s not crushing me. But I live here without my life’s partner, and our future is gone. My world has no future in it.
   Why does it matter to me that this young person wants to correct me and contradict me? Am I focusing on that because it’s a simple problem, a relationship problem, and I know I can resolve it?
   Because it certainly is less awful to think about a problem I have with a living person than to think about Michael and how he looked as a corpse in his chair and that he is not living anymore.

   That must be what is going on. I am distracting myself with this whole thing.

   For now I am will channel my mother, and think calm thoughts, giving time some time to work. Let her live past the rough patch she's going through. And then take her to tea or something else good, and have it out.

Landscape is soul scape

   How perfect is it that there is a giant hole in my house?