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? 

Wear it well

   Most of the hours, I am happy. I don’t remember that Michael no longer exists. Especially at work, I don’t have to trip over the non-facts of him.
   I like being happy. I like busy-ness, problem solving, quick steps and decisive gestures. I like mock-dancing with co-workers as our paths cross on the carpet. I like blurts of humor from social media, I like people’s jokes. I like the problems.
   I don’t like being reminded. 
   I don’t like the generous, tentative, thoughtful co-worker who stops to look at me and ask how I am doing. “How are you holding up?” I don’t like it when they ask that. Stop asking that. Just assume I’m too fragile to answer and ask me instead about your grammar or that TV show we like. 
   I don’t like it when kind people express their sadness, and I have to remember mine and find a few sad-seeming words to say so I won’t be like a monster to them, trashing their good opinion of me by refusing to be broken and ruined and a mess. 
   I don’t want to be a mess. I refuse to be broken and I don't need to be ruined. He left me stronger and happier than I was before he found me. He gave me decades of strength to fall back on. As soon as I am on my way toward my workday, I can lift my nose to the sky and like the high wild blue and how my heart is ready to laugh and have a great day.
   I don’t like it when they confide how much they miss him and are struggling with it. 
   Their sorrow makes my sorrow happen when it doesn’t need to happen. It makes the loss of him slop around.
   They should shut up and have a good day.

   I must avoid thinking about his last months while I am driving. I need to stop going on and on about how often he would call me at work, after he was home in the afternoons. About the joke it was between me and Jennifer, his calling while I was so busy and unable to talk. I would text him some minor information and right away he would call to ask me to recite the text, confirm the text. “You will stop at the store on the way home?” 
   It was sweet but so annoying.
   Now while I am driving I start to worry that it was awful for him. That he was frightened. That he sensed his death coming and felt alone and was frightened. That he wanted to hear a reassuring human voice, and my voice had to do.
   
   Or did I mean everything to him? Was I reassurance? 
   I hope not. I hope he had other, better sources of reassurance. I was trying to be kinder, but I was always distracted — calm, but also not often fully present. 
   Again and again over our 41 years together, my harsh treatment of his feelings would shame me, and I would promise myself to be less rough with him next time. Gradually, over the years, I did learn better self-control, I remembered to remind us both that I loved him very much even when I was biting off his ears because he was fraying my last nerve. 
   But still, there was always that need for a next time, to do better next time.
   Thank God we didn’t have run-ins or rough patches in the week before he died. I don’t think I could recover if there was a “next time” I was still counting upon, a next time that will never come. 
   No, we were on good terms when he left and took my future with him. 
   I can see myself tweaking his big toe as I walk past his recliner on my way to the washing machine. I can see myself smiling at him fondly. I know he sees me showing him how fond I am.

   But it would be better if next time would come along anyway. Just for old times sake, give me back the future I had planned.

Women in airports

   Since 2013, several big publications have published stories that purport or at least try to explain why so many people weep in airports. 
   Time interviewed a psychologist who talked about the accumulated stressors of getting onto a plane and the nagging fear that one will never see one's loved ones again.
   Dubbing the phenomenon “the Mile Cry Club,” The Telegraph cited a study by Virgin Atlantic suggesting tear ducts are more sensitive in the air than on the ground.
   In a better written essay, for The Atlantic in 2013, Elijah Wolfson cites several studies to support a theory that after we endure a stressful situation and sit down finally, alone and with no distractions, the parasympathetic nervous system kicks in at the moment of transition, allowing us to shed stress hormones by weeping. Being alone is crucial to this scenario, and also could explain why grieving people are inclined to weep while driving. 
   Being inside an airplane feels like being alone, Wolfson writes:

Alone in a closed metal tube, 40,000 feet above land and miles from anyone you know. Surrounded by people who share your fate, but who do not acknowledge you. They, like you, sit facing forward in rows, focusing on their own discrete box of space. The cabin is dim and it hums; you look down at your folded hands in your lap, lit by a pool of light from above. There’s nothing to do: no email to check, no messages to send out, and minimal distraction. If you felt a gaping hollow open up inside, if you thought you were not going to make it, you would have no way to reach out to your loved ones.
Is it such a stretch to imagine a commercial plane as one of the loneliest places in the modern world?
   Somewhere among John Updike’s umpteen dozen essays there’s a poem or a paragraph that notices red-eyed women in airports. He concludes — sensibly, I believe — that women weep in airports because they are on their way to funerals or deathbeds. He doesn’t mention men weeping in airports. 
   I never have wept on an airplane. But twice since Michael died, as I’ve walked out of the concourse at Bill and Hillary Clinton and toward the staircases, and toward the spot where he used to stand, waiting for me, always, every flight for most of my adult life, I've been mugged by his absence. 
   The first time it caught me unaware. My nose flamed up and I was weeping before I realized what had happened. It was a struggle to compose my face on the stairs.
   The second time — Friday as I returned from Thanksgiving with Ben, Caroline and the babies — I was wary of that bad place, the place without him. I would walk past it too quickly to think about my loss. I speed-walked that concourse with so much determination that I turned the wrong direction out of the gate and found myself increasingly uncertain and then dismayed as the wrong end of the concourse swept toward me.
   But I turned around and rushed the opposite way, and soon enough I was past the empty place, down those stairs and out in the chilly fog and rain, headed across surprisingly deep puddles to long-term surface parking and my good old car. 
   But the place without him jumped me anyway, an hour later, as I stood on the porch of Marie’s house and foolishly mentioned having missed him there.
   I could make myself weep again, now, by envisioning that stretch of airport carpet. 

Ollie in the AM

   The cats and I are gradually creating our new routine. But the house is full of Michael’s scents. I know they are waiting to find him.
   They were with him when he died. Nobody else was. When I hurried home from Marie’s to make sure he’d eaten supper, and I found his corpse, they were huddled apart from one another on the carpet near his chair. 
   Thinking back to that moment of my protest, my disbelief and pleading, I see their tense bodies. I feel their uncertain eyes on me. They didn’t know what to do anymore than I did.
   
   These mornings I wake about 4:30, as I have for years, stirred by Michael’s super careful attempts to get ready for work in the dark, holding a tiny flashlight in his teeth, going onto the washing machine landing to dry his hair with the blow dryer, all his clothing set out the night before in the living room, so he wouldn’t bother my sleep. And yet always I woke up. Always I sensed his going.
   I go on waking up. We must have cemented a habit, he trying to keep me from waking, me sensing his tiptoe movements and waking.
   These days I stagger to the bedroom door and crack it open, knowing that Ollie will soon join me. He’ll thud upon the foot of the bed and then pad quickly across the landscape of my body up to my face.  
   There he will either settle into the angle my head makes with the pillow and commence sandpapering my nose and purring like a 23-year-old Honda Passport OR he’ll purr like a Passport while settling his suffocatingly furry weight on top of my head.
   We drift off to sleep again together. It is bliss.

Airport lonely

   There is lonely and then there is airport lonely.
   Saturday I returned Ben and Caroline’s car to them via one straight nine-hour drive to Indiana. (The car had an accident in Little Rock the night of Michael’s memorial; it spent more than a week in a body shop here.)
   Indiana 69 was about 90 miles of blazing hardwood forest, humps of color on rolling hills. And the visit was fun. The older granddaughter made me hop 2 miles up and down the hallway, according to Fitbit.
   Sunday I flew home. It was an uneventful flight, except for an exchange with my silent seatmate as the plane crossed over Granite Mountain near Little Rock. I had imagined it was the size of a mall, but it went on and on until I wasn’t sure what I was seeing. So I asked this silent, coughing man what it was, and he said, Granite Mountain. I said Wow. And he said Yeah. I asked, that’s nepheline syenite? He said, I don’t know what that is. A feldspar, I said. Oh, he said.
   Then came the mourning moment. As I hurried along the airport past the gates, headed for the exit, I realized Michael was not waiting out there.

   And it was the first time in my adult life I had walked that airport without finding him at the end, waiting for me with a hug.

Mowing the lawn

   While I was mowing the lawn at my Mom's former home today, it struck me how easy it was to do. And yet, over the past two months, Michael dreaded being asked to do it. Dreaded it.
   Also, I remembered how he would call me at work to report all his lawn-mowing. In the past two months, he called several times in a row every afternoon. Usually he would report that he had mowed some section of our lawn. Usually, I was slamming my head against a deadline and had to apologize that I couldn't talk.
   I did feel bad about continually rebuffing his calls, but also I felt annoyed. 
   I forgive myself for that. 
   If he had said to me, “Something is wrong with my heart and I am scared,” not only would I have stopped what I was doing, I would have rushed home to be with him.

   Maybe he didn’t know he was worried.
   Maybe he wasn’t worried.

   Throughout the last year, his final year, if I sent him a text, he would immediately call to repeat to me the information I had just texted him. Every time.
   He must have been worried. 

   I was a little worried. He was puffing through his lips for no good reason, as he did 20 years ago before the bypass surgery. 
   I was trying not to worry about that.

The Widow Hood

    Several things are happening:

   • Sunday while Song and I were dismantling Michael’s cubicle at work, creatures of the type not covered by my homeowner’s policy held WWF auditions atop some fragile drywall between the attic and the landing where the washing machine sits. I came home to find washer, landing and stairwell full of blown-in insulation and rat poo. 

   I have a call in to a well recommended contractor, but in the meantime am not turning on the heating because there also is a creature hole on the corner of the roof outside. It’s unusually cold for October — we’re having one of those Arkansas Octobers, which might as well be Arkansas Decembers or Arkansas Mays or Arkansas Februaries ... any month might happen at any time here. It’s cold enough that creatures will be looking for warm cubbies to move into, and I don’t want to make the attic any more enticing than it already obviously is. Let it remain a cold place until a contractor closes up the hole and repairs the ceiling.

   The cats have been huddled, miserable, in their plush beds. That is, they are using for the first time ever the plush bends Michael bought them.

   This evening I brought my studio space heater upstairs to take the edge off the 58-degree den, and everything eased just enough that love and peace reigned for an hour. Ollie and I curled up to eat soba noodles and watch Grey’s Anatomy in standard definition.

   But then the space heater tripped a breaker. 

   Back we are in the icebox.

   • Standard definition is the new rule on the TV here. Now that Michael isn’t watching our TV, my dear daughter-in-law has figured out how to make AT&T sell me fewer and less fabulous TV channels so I can pay less not to watch TV. 

   Michael and I talked about doing that while he was alive (oh! what a painful turn of phrase, “while he was alive”!), because we were wasting money paying for top-level options we neither wanted nor used. But change is a hassle. He preferred to let things ride, even though it made sense to be more conservative with our disposable income since he was made part-time last year.
   But I should talk. I have been paying $5.38 a day for coffee I could be making at work. That has to change.

   The basic option Caro and I selected includes some HD channels, but only shopping outlets. How mean is that, AT&T? The local channels (which I might watch) are all in standard definition. But standard def looks pretty good when you don’t compare it to HD. I will probably miss the heck out of AMC and HBO, but now I have an incentive to use Michael’s Netflix subscription and stream Amazon Prime.

   • The coroner signed the death certificate in time for the memorial, so the cremains were ready for us. But the sexton at Mount Holly and his assistants were all unavailable last week while the family was gathered. So I have Michael’s cremains tucked into a niche here at home. 

   I thought it would make me insane with grief having them in the house, but compared with the mess on the landing, they are easy to live with. 
   And this delay gives me time to make a ceramic box for them. I am going to make a noble porcelain box, carved all over with cats and fired in soda. 

   Then we will put it into the ground and never look at it again.

   But I will know it is down there, being pretty in the dark.

Let it go

   One by one, the kindly experts tell me to let it go. 
   Don’t try to repair Mom’s house. Don’t try to fix the damage done by the family that lived in it for more than 40 years. Do not spend any money. No money. Do not spend any more time. No more time. Find somebody willing to take it, and if necessary, pay him to take it — all, do not differentiate — so you can move on. 
   Then move on.

   I do not want to move on.
   I want to fix it.
   I want to go back in time, to the time when I didn’t want to live there. I want to want to live there. For Mom’s sake. For the sake of us. To make it better. Cleaner. Less stinky. No longer broken. No longer built in a hurry — I want to rebuild it the way we deserve it to have been built.
    I want to go home again, and I want my mom and dad to be there. Only this time, I want to be there, too.

In praise of togetherness

   For the past 4 or 5 months, every weekend I’ve spent at least one day, 4 to 8 hours, at Mom's house, throwing out the past. Some weekends, I do skip. But I do something else toward the estate settling, so I tell myself that’s OK. I’m not failing.
   Now the floors downstairs are clear and the house smells better. But still there is more debris.
   And as you can imagine — and might know from experience — it’s heartwrenching work.
   Saturday, Michael happened to call while I was in the middle of Mom’s yearbook from her sophomore year: I bawled all over him. Which I try not to do, because it gets old.
   Also, he had already been there, first thing in the morning, shearing the front yard with his hedge trimmer. He had already done his bit for the weekend — and the week, because as has lately on Thursdays, he moved the garbage cans back from the street so I don’t have to drive over again. (I put them out on Tuesday night.)
   His reaction was just like Michael: “What can I do to help?” while yawning. After we hung up, it hit me that it WAS time to ask for help. Working alone is too upsetting and the mess — finite, it is finite — was overwhelming.
   I texted my buddy who a few years back cleared a hoard out of her mother's house and enjoyed it so much she has helped other friends with their mothers’ houses. She likes turning mess into order; she likes shopping at estate sales, and she loves categorizing things — she’s an archivist.
   It is time to get help. She'll start working with me Thursday.
   This is just friendship. Friendship.
   ALSO, I asked, and this morning Fiona skipped church so she, Michael and I could work together.
   WORKING TOGETHER IS GREAT. It was a relief to have her making the decisions about what to keep and what to toss from the heap of Talen’s and Song’s childhood things ... peed upon by cats for years.
   We emptied both of the attics — except for Dad’s big desk in the garage attic, which I want to ask Joe and Talen to bring down next time Joe’s in town with Nikki. Hopefully, he remembers how to assemble that desk, so we can sell it.
   Fiona and I made real headway in the blue bedroom, which seems to have been one big litter box for the cats.
   We made progress. Doesn’t look like it, but we did. Half of a Bagster is full.
   Meanwhile, Michael went through every page of the ancient tax returns from the attic, and sorted out pages that he will burn later.
   We found Talen or Song’s boom box, and it works. We listened to Ted Talks.
   We found a pretty tile Nikki made for Mom years ago.
   We found Dad’s uniforms, and they smell OK. We found a big framed photo of one of his ships — the Pocono? the Little Rock?
   We still haven't found his fancy-dress sword, but we have a plan to work together again next weekend.

Landscape is soulscape

   


   
Today I began cleaning another room in what used to be my mom's house. 

AFTER

   So far, I've cleared and cleaned the front hallway, the downstairs and upstairs bathrooms (with repairs), the kitchen (with repairs), the eating area, the back porch, parts of the front porch, the crawlspace and some of the yard. 
   The floors are not spotless, because the vinyl is stained, but they are no longer filmed with black hairs, grime and silt. The silt is gone, and with it much of the cat funk.
   This new room is a step back to square one. Back into the landfill. It's awful. 
   Again and again, I pick up what seem to have been perfectly serviceable things, relatively new, that have been ruined by cat pee, insects, disregard. Once-good clothes. Heaps of them. Worthless. 
   Cat smell doesn't come out of clothing unless it's treated and washed. Most of the items are used underwear or stained shirts and wouldn't have been donation-worthy even were they clean. But also there are jackets and pants that would probably come through a drycleaning looking nearly new. But it would take drycleaning — they aren't clothing you could soak in oxidizing something or other and scrub at the stains one at a time and then run through a washing machine five times to get out the animal smell. That would be a noble effort — spending time and money to make them nice and then tossing them into a donation box. But it would devour even more of my life than this project already has, and it would be a misapplication of the trust's money. Some of the siblings need to inherit as much as they can inherit.

   There is too much of this ruined clothing. 
   And I regret the bulk I'm sending to the landfill. But it would be worse to try to donate things that have been walked on and peed upon for years. 
   Making the decision to toss the stuff out used to give me a grim sense of superiority — “Look what these fools have made me do” — but I'm over that. There are layers in this debris field, evidence of a cycle that is sorrowful. 
  • There was a need born of hope, and energy, and it led to purchases. 
  • But then the hope failed, the energy died. 
  • Depression and a sense of purposeless futility descended. 
  • The things drifted to the floor. The cats marauded over them. 
   Dirt settled — until another bout of hope attacked, bringing more purchases.

   What I'm looking at is depression. Its effects and aftereffects.

   On the other hand, I'm invigorated by the awfulness of the mess.
   This I did not expect. 
   The room's disgusting ... I should be sick. And upset. It smells bad! 
   But instead I know the mess is finite. And it can be relocated. 

   And I feel so fortunate. My life has only had ups and downs; it has not ever included a spiral into Dis. My life has been so easy. I mean, look at this sweet man! Look what he is doing. He does it a lot. Our house is overcrowded, messier than ever and jammed with stuff, and yet he doesn't stop trying.


   Also, I am no longer able to imagine that I am not complicit in the burgeoning Mount Trash I never stop being astonished to see looming in the distance as I drive along 107. I'm adding to that sorry mountain. That is my mountain of decisions.
   
   This afternoon, driving home from the house, as usual I passed the chainstore node. For three years, on my way home from visits to the nursing home, I would swing in there for what even I realized was retail therapy. Many sweaters and youthful blouses hanging in my closet were purchased after I raced weeping away from my sweet mother and the problem of the fact that she was still overjoyed by life in that unfair unjust undeserved predicament that was inexorably rotting her body.
   I realized today as I motored past without stopping that I haven't stopped, not even once, in these months of cleaning at Mom's. 
   I don't want therapy. I have it.

Less than less

   I am holding Mom’s black purse, feeling through a tear in the crumb-dusted lining seams for what might be a coin but isn’t. Her wallet and checkbook aren’t in here and haven’t been for three years. Long before she died, most of the necessary tools she hauled around for a decade or more in this stylish but serviceable bag were replaced by tissues, old lipstick, hearing aid batteries.

   I remember talking about purses with her, while we were shopping. They needed compartments, she said. They should have zippers.

   What is to be done with this black bag?

   When I steeled myself to tackle the filth and clutter in Mom’s house, I moved into the work while sternly ordering myself to stop wasting energy blaming my sister, her husband and daughter for living in it for decades, heaping it into a kind of baroque installation, a living artwork about sloth. They had gone out of their way to bring in more and more cats, from four to eight cats at a time and sometimes unhealthy, which worsened the mess. 

   Cats I love, but they are machines that generate urine and feces. To own a cat is to own responsibility for its detritus. And they do amuse themselves by dashing anything that can move off any high place they can reach, poking that thing to the floor. And then they must bat it under shelving units, they must. You must know this and accept the chores that come with it. You cannot throw up your hands and say, “They did that,” without bending down to get the thing back up off the floor.

   Every place my sister lives winds up looking the way Mom’s house looks — hallways blocked by broken devices and abandoned projects, forgotten enthusiasms, a forest of furniture, trashed books, multiplicities of plastic bottles and toilet paper tubes that no one may remove because they are “recycling,” shredders, broken shredders, advertisements for shredders ... 

   Clotted around the stuff like so much peanut butter in hair will be cat litter — in this case it was wood chip mulch — layered with envelopes, bills, tax returns, silverfish, unspooling thread, clothes, clothes, clothes ... Always, there are books about clearing away clutter.

   An open doorway — she took doors off hinges — is like a window into a thicket of metal and wooden chair legs. 

   The floors in every room are coated in a thick layer of silt and hair stuck to islands of dried syrup.

   In the upstairs bathroom between the toilet and the wall I used a garden hoe to un-fuse a rotten facecloth from a kind of molasses of filth hardened around it. It peeled away dangerously but came off all in a piece, a black lace, a widow’s net for her funeral hat.

   So it had been there a while. And so had the diapers in the garbage bag hanging off the doorknob by yellow drawstrings.

   The silt bothered me because it testified that no one swept up anything, ever. Two vacuum cleaners, three brooms, and no one swept anything, ever.

   And yet all of that was OK and I could let go my self-righteous repugnance and stop wasting time on blame. Let it go: That sort of thought is rooted in fear anyway, fear that the task is too much, that we will fail. Anything made by people will be finite, I told myself. Nothing lasts forever, not even mess.

   But then came experiences I wasn’t prepared for:

   Item by item, I would find an old friend, a thing remembered from my childhood. These things had a magical quality once: new, cunning, special.

  But the thing in my hand is not that. It is tatty, gross, broken — worthless. 

Dad brought this back from
Greece. Although it can be stacked
so it looks whole, it is trash
now. I could repair it, but
there are chips missing inside,
 and anyway,

   I hold this worthless thing and I am a little girl, playing alone for hours with the contents of a mid-century modern secretary/shelving unit, loving the quiet snick of magnets as the doors open or close. I like the glowing grain of the wood; I like the aroma of furniture wax. I spend hours reorganizing the contents of cubbies: a ship in a bottle; a fat straw lion, from Africa, maybe; stacks of wooden picnic plates. 


   Especially I like some little boxes that live inside the cabinet and never come out to be used. These are papery cardboard boxes, not bigger than 4 or 5 inches each and each containing its own “hurricane lantern” — a two-part assembly with a metal base of unusual color and a glass bell shaped like a tulip. The colors differ from box to box; and I do not know what a hurricane is.

   The hurricane lanterns turned out to be like the tunafish that came in a can. I remember in both cases the days I learned that tuna was a fish! and a hurricane was a storm! But fish have nothing to do with cans, how could that be? And the little hurricane lanterns made even less sense, because they were so light a cat might dash them off a table. What use would they be in a storm?

   They remind me of my home, clean and yet constantly being cleaned by children marshaled into work details by parents who must have been paragons of energy.

   But now I am the adult making executive decisions, one after another, and these once magical things are dented, chipped, frayed, threadbare, sticky, broken: worth less than less. 

   Junk. 

   One of my college English teachers, Eileen Gregory, told me that we should thank god for disillusion. People destroy themselves over illusions.

   But what will happen to the wonder that was the world after I throw its ruins away? 

   I hold my mama’s black purse.

   I am Hamlet holding Yorick’s skull.

   I shove it in the garbage bag with the rotten death lace. I pull the yellow drawstrings together. I move on.

Visitations

   A TED Talk I listened to in the car a while back advised people who use social media that social media is not a good place to “process pain.” That made sense to me at the time. As I motored along feeling OK about my driving and the face I present to the rest of the traffic, I thought about how often the remarks I leave under my friends’ posts about their ordeals and broken hearts are less heartfelt than they appear, a dutiful exercise whose perfunctory execution is, I hope, well disguised. 
   Sometimes it even annoys me a little to have to respond to the posts and look at the photos — so many, many posts, all crying from the core of people I should suffer with but don’t want to. 

   At St. Mary’s decades ago, a religion teacher had us write little essays about what kind of women we wanted to be. I wrote that I wanted people to see me as kind and so I was trying to be kind to them. The sister wrote in the margin of my paper that, someday, I would learn to be kind to the people because they needed help.
   Sister, I’m not quite there yet. 
   But at least I don’t expect to be the center of all attention. Since my mom died, social media has become such a source of unexpected comfort that I am overwhelmed by how grateful I feel to the people who post. Even the formulaic phrases, the “thoughts and prayers,” are like being tapped on the shoulder and handed a daisy. 

   They feel good. I feel a part of a community, and I am fine with the thought that it is a dutiful community. I think that belonging with people who are willing to do the duties of friendship is real friendship. Social media compassion is real in its own way. Different, but helpful.

   Also, the social media contacts are less exhausting than the face-to-face condolences because they are less intimate. Exerting their kindness in person, my friends pull from their own well of sorrow and there’s always danger that the weight of that sympathy gets the better of them, and they are pulled down. Then we have to cling to one another, weeping under grocery store lights, surrounded by cabbages and jars of nuts. I value that intimacy because it is real — don’t misunderstand, we know one another better as we walk apart. But all this intense emotion leads to dehydration. Dehydration creates kidney stones.
   And we will pass one another again, in another part of the store. That’s anticlimactic.

   I think my kidneys benefit from my attempts to process my pain through social media. So, TED Talk, thank you for your input, but you are not correct.

Today

   The nursing home finally lifted the flu quarantine that turned me around at the front door before and after Christmas and before and after New Year's, and I was able to go in. Not that it was something I looked forward to; the long break, added to the interim between Arts Center sessions, had been an emotional vacation. No struggle to prep something to teach; no struggle to force myself over to the home; no struggle to recover from visiting. An ease of time in which to focus on working at the paper: pleasure.

   She was already in the dining hall, parked halfheartedly within the realm of tables and left there to block traffic eventually and thus be moved to her place by someone other than the aide who left her. 
   Her eyes were narrow slits and dark. It’s possible nobody was home.
   
   But I had come all the way. So I found a chair and noticed that, as I took off my coat, Someone was there.
   She would say nothing, so I sat down and sang. At first I sang at her, but in a while I was singing for her and then — not too long later — with her.  Our roster of greatest hits:
   "How Much Is the Doggy in the Window."
   "Blue Skies."
   "If You Were the Only Boy in the World."
   "Tennessee Stud."
   "Blueberry Hill."
   "Mister Sandman."
   
   An aide apologized that we needed to move out of the way; they were bringing the people in for dinner. So I pushed Mom to the feeding table where she always eats and settled down beside her on my knees.
   "Over there," she said. "The beautiful light still there."
   And she rolled her eyes toward a sconce.
   Mom hadn’t seen the dining hall in however many days the long quarantine lasted. She was reassured that the sconce was still there. She thought it was beautiful.
   
   Other than singing a stitch of "Doggy In the Window" with me, all she said for the next 45 minutes was that the beautiful light was still there. But her eyes widened, and crinkled. She wriggled her nose like a bunny. We guffawed. Michael called on the phone, and she read his name off the cellphone screen while he babbled amusingly. One of the less demented residents tucked a napkin over her chest and sang in with me on "Hey, Ho, Nobody Home."

   When I slipped away to check out the socks situation in her room, Mom was grinning and looking around at the other people at her table. Eyes bright.

   I am afraid to be glad that she is alive and apparently going to live on a while longer. I am afraid to be glad. 
   But I AM glad.
   Happy New Year, Mom. I hope you see it through.

Dammit

   Mom has now been dying in the nursing home for more than 1,070 days.

   The foot-tall Santa I put on top of her cabinet has made her say this: “Do you see it way in the back? An old-time Christmas.”
   He cost $19.99 at Kroger, so probably he was made by poor Chinese workers; but he has a fine white earthenware face and hands, and his plush red and white suit is impressive, as is the black belt with its shiny buckle, the French horn in his sack and the fat gold rope dangling from his hand.
   She seemed to see him, and she seemed to be enchanted.
   “Do you see it way in the back? An old-time Christmas.” 

   There was something that felt knowing about the way she said it, and also there had been something knowing in the first thing she said to me when I arrived, which was, “Have you written a book yet?” I had to tell her no, not yet, but that I wanted to write a book for children. Maybe one about a seagull that steals a cheese sandwich and learns that he doesn’t like cheese.

   But Christmas was the theme today. 

   It felt great to have a genuine gift for her: the word “Joe.” 

   When I told her Joe would visit Sunday, she grinned a beautiful big grin, an emotionally present, happy grin. She might not have remembered 60 seconds later, but in the moment that she heard Joe was coming, her Joe, she was blissful.

   And then she asked if I could see the old-time Christmas, way at the back.

   She said it so often that it got me to think back on our family Christmases and how they might have felt to her. That was something I could talk about for her, and so I described the walk-in closet full of presents wrapped and waiting to be wrapped. The tree big enough for two Christmases. As I was talking, I realized she must have had fond hopes for her beautiful children’s happiness. She was working more than full-time, teaching and going to night school, and still she made Christmas for her 6 children. She really did that. 

   My older sisters created the decorations, and they enforced the traditions, but Mom’s dream of love was why they did. I hope they see that now.

   I tapped those memories and talked to her about midnight Mass, and I sang snippets of the hymns we sang, in Latin and English. As I sang the ones I love I knew she loved them, too. I did my best to describe the candles, garlands and the unearthly calm, marble face of Mary in the alcove of the church. 

   I recited the bits and pieces of “A Visit From St. Nicholas” that I recall. Aunt Mary McCoy used to live in the house across the street from the house where that poem was composed. Mom liked that poem. When I got to the part where he lays a finger aside of his nose, winks and up the chimney he goes, Mom lifted her hand, which was swaddled by her blanket, and although it was hidden in the blanket, she laid a finger aside of her nose, and she winked.

   Suddenly I was choked up. So I gathered my bags, made the clever cheerful exit that does not admit one is leaving, and I slipped out. But I was really weepy.
   Just then a new aide came down the hall. She looked about 20 years old, if that. I saw her see me, and I saw her decide that she was going to heal me. That healing me was her calling, and that she was up to her calling. That she was put on this earth to foist some compassion upon me.
   Hell.
   She dragged me back into my Mom’s room and showed me my Mom and shouted, “Hello, Julia!! She does understand everything! And I know! We have a connection! I look her right in the eyes and she looks back at me and I know she understands! She won’t eat but then I make a big mouth at her and she eats the food before she knows! She is in good hands!!”
   I was getting even more weepy, and when that happens I leave the room because Mom is an emotional mirror: She feels whatever you project. If you grin, she is happy. If you become sad she feels more sad, and if you are upset, it upsets her dreadfully, and so I LEAVE. It is CRUEL to stay.
   But I couldn’t explain that to this girl fast enough to save myself from her. Instead I stood there and allowed her to torture me with her compassion for my guilty feelings, which she wanted to make sure I understood were not justified, because I am “only one woman with ten fingers and ten toes.”
   (And actually, I liked her for that image. That was a sweet thing to say.)
   She wouldn’t stop hugging me and talking about her connection to Mom. My glasses snagged on her hair and WE connected.
   

   As we disentangled, from a distance, from the internal distance that feels like one is standing high above oneself, I saw this as an absurd situation. My mom — my mom — would have relished my predicament, recognized it and quietly laughed her ass off. Because that was her smug daughter Cecelia being obliged to be nice. She so loves her smug daughter Cecelia, but also, it is so funny to see her discomfited.

   Oh, my Mom. How I miss your seraphic irony!

   The deal was, I had to be nice and let the idiot instruct me or I would be a Bad Lady — and shame my mother.

   After a while I recognized the aide’s name on her name tag.
   And I remembered the name because Sunny talks about her. 

   Sunny positively hates her.