Red's Wrap

After a great sand-filled, barefoot, pants wet from the rain on the slide visit to the playground, my granddaughter hurt her finger somehow getting into the car. She told me her finger was broken and she started to cry. We drove out of the playground parking lot. She cried louder.

We got on the main drag to go home. By then, she was wanting her mommy, calling for her mommy in the most plaintive, lamenting way. And then more tears. Genuine tears, heartache tears, like it had come upon her all at once that she had lost her mom. Her mom had died. She says that matter-of-factly to people, “My mom died.” It is a thing that has happened.

But the calling out for her mommy, the lamenting, is something else altogether. It happens in private with just me and her grandpa. It is a four-year-old’s grief.

We come home and go in the kitchen. She pulls out the silverware drawer and sits underneath. She says the lights are too bright, so I turn them off and turn on the softer light over the sink. She watches while I peel sweet potatoes. The tears are still coming but she isn’t sobbing. She is just saying “I want my mommy.”

I hug her and tell her I am sorry that her mommy is gone. That we miss her, too. And I know that to be true because I went through the second drawer of my desk today and I found the one of the pictures of her mom that I had been looking for to display at her memorial service, the one with her in her high school graduation gown, her head buried in her dad’s shoulder and her dad looking so goofy and proud. It broke my heart.

Whose grief is whose?

I know this much. My granddaughter’s grief has taken my mind off my own. The need to surround her and protect her has superseded any grief or loss I let myself feel. But all of this is getting harder to stow away.

In the drawer I found a tiny Little Mermaid figurine. My granddaughter saw the figurine on my desk and asked to take her in a bath. She asked if her mom played with that Little Mermaid and I said maybe because I couldn’t remember but probably yes. I don’t remember all the things. There is an avalanche heading toward me and I have nothing on but shorts and an old t-shirt.

That is what I know about grief right now. Nothing.

I know a few people who’ve lost their adult children.

But I only know one who became a guardian of a very young child as a result. And I saw her yesterday in a coffee shop where I was meeting with a colleague about older adult issues. Ours was the longest hug.

No one understands this crazy experience except someone who has been there. Oh, people are sympathetic – either about losing our daughter or about taking on responsibility for a four-year-old – but they can’t fathom how crazy all this is. Or how history is repeating itself in her little face (she looks so much like her mother) and her love of Barbies. When her mother came to us when she was seven, someone dropped off a dozen Barbies with bins full of clothes on our front porch. The Barbies were everywhere.

When I thought about writing tonight’s post, the phrase “Your body language screams self-pity” kept coming up. I’ve noticed how I walk with my head down and shoulders slumped as if the cosmos has dealt me a terrible blow – me, unique me, singled out me, me alone, me the poor mother, me the disheartened grandmother, me who plans to teach her four-year-old granddaughter how to properly wash a car.

Before one of her many heart surgeries, my grown-up daughter came to my room in the early morning to tell me she was afraid. I moved over and made room for her in our bed and, in a rare relaxing and letting go of everything, she made room for my comforting her. This morning, just before the sun came up, her daughter tapped me on the arm and I opened the quilt for her to slide in next to me, her little arm over mine.

I’m jumbled. But it’s not my job to be coherent and collected, to write the best essay, to flow, as they say, hang together. No. It’s just my job to stay afloat, do what’s next. Whatever that is.

What are the ten thousand things you’ve done wrong?
Is there a list? Did you keep a list? It’s not too late to compile.
You could leave room for more, the list can be open-ended, just set another place at the table.

Runners wear weighted vests.
They do it to make a hard thing harder, punish themselves like monks whipping their own bare backs with branches
in order to call back their sins, free themselves from regret, show they are sorry. Runners love the heaviness, how the weight makes them sweat, how passers-by nod in admiration.

It is a bad idea to write when one is in a black mood.
People will think they need to call you and inquire. They won’t understand inquiry is unwelcome, obtrusive, that it is burdensome to explain that dark times will pass, they always do, that you are too busy to talk because you are working on your list. It is very long and people are calling your name from the other room.

My petunias are getting leggy. This is always the time of the year when they get leggy and I turn again them, resent their not keeping themselves thick and lush. I would have to sit out there on the front porch for three hours to deadhead those damn petunias and, really, is it worth it?

I think about it but then I realize everything is leggy and disappointing. I think about this while carrying in a new pack of doggy training pads which I’ve been using to prevent Tempest from peeing in the same spot on the landing’s carpet. Except the pads don’t prevent her from peeing in the same spot (as countless dogs before her have despite the carpet cleaning guys with their loud machines and giant tubes snaking their way out our front door to their truck), the pads have reinforced her peeing in that spot.

Yes, I am training a dog (who is otherwise housebroken and really well-trained and obedient) to pee on pads I put down on the carpet because I don’t want her to pee on the actual carpet. It’s crazy. And there’s no clear path forward.

On the front porch (where the leggy petunias are sitting), there is a table that is set up with art supplies and paper and coloring books and bubbles, and the porch serves as sort of an outdoor playroom for our granddaughter who lives with us. Also, on the porch, waiting its turn to be put away, is a storage bin of her mother’s costume jewelry and several Christmas ornaments. I want to put this box somewhere because it is beginning to feel like the leggy petunias, but I am loathe to move it because every so often my granddaughter opens the box and takes something from it and that thing or things show up in a place that is precious to her, like these tiny shoes sitting on a table that she has fashioned into her ‘desk.’

So, I think I will just let that be. Not worry about the box of jewelry or the training pads but maybe deadhead the petunias, just to have some forward movement here.

Remember toys that came in cereal boxes? Decoder rings and such?

Well, our ever-hungry backyard squirrel, the one who has been raiding the bird seed bin for days came up on the porch and chewed the heck out of the beloved super-duper green plastic Toy Story cereal spoon that was left out here after one of our morning sits.

We are crying. Well, one of us is crying.

Hearing us (or her), Neighbor Tina (that’s what we call our neighbors – Neighbor Pete, Neighbor Nora, Neighbor Mark, and Neighbor Tina) came over with a handful of wrapped sticks of clay. Now we are making snakes and tiny snowmen.

The Toy Story spoon owner just went inside to put on her shoes so she could chase the squirrels who have moved on from chewing on the Toy Story spoon to hang on our bird feeders. She is now using a rubber band as a pretend slingshot and laughing loud enough to be heard downtown. The squirrels run but come back. It’s how everything is.

We work the clay with our hands to soften it up. It’s not like Play-Doh I explain. It takes more work. More commitment. We are distracted by the need to constantly chase the squirrels. Action being more fun that art at the moment.

My daughter died a month ago and her daughter is in my backyard chasing squirrels. “You want to fight?” she yells when she charges across the yard with a sand pail on her head and a shovel in her hand. I think of her mom in this moment.

She would be laughing. So are we in her honor.