Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
I Didn’t Want to but I Had to Answer this One
I don’t really want to answer this question but if I do, maybe it will quit haunting me.
The last time I saw my daughter alive, I was standing in the doorway of her hospital room, itching to leave because my husband and I were late for a meeting. We’d been ‘visiting’ if you want to call it that for a couple of hours, her four-year-old daughter Paulina, our granddaughter, sitting on the wide windowsill watching videos on her mom’s phone and my husband, daughter, and I watching a seemingly endless game show that involved guessing numbers and either winning big or jumping off a cliff in desperation.
Every so often, my daughter would see an imaginary speck of dirt on her bed, pick it up with two fingers and flick it on to the floor. We knew she was having a procedure done later in the afternoon, a last-ditch effort to unstick a heart valve that was causing so much trouble. It was an intravenous thing, not a surgical thing so we felt okay leaving, even though she expressed surprised that we weren’t coming back to, what? to sit in her room waiting for her, I guess. We were exhausted with everything – the room, the condition, the time, the future, things that happened decades ago floating around the room like vaper from an unplugged oxygen machine.
Thirty days of visits to the hospital had made me crazy. Crazy with wanting fresh air, crazy with wanting to be driving somewhere, crazy to be free of the game show and the flicking of imaginary specks of dirt. So, I beckoned to my granddaughter who was by then sitting on her mother’s bed. “It’s time to go. If we go now, we can go to the playground.” It was the bribe that always worked. She loved the playground more than anything.
It was then my daughter started stroking Paulina’s hair. We’ll never get out of here, I thought. I heaved a big sigh. “Time to go, honey.” We’d be back the next day, probably to spend the entire night before my daughter’s open-heart surgery. “We really have to go.” I might have been tapping my foot, I felt like I was tapping, drumming my fingers, jumping out of my skin, that’s how bad I wanted to leave the room, close the door behind me, walk down the endless hospital corridor to the outside world, hold Paulina’s hand and go to the playground where there was air and sunshine and families eating McDonald’s.
And that was when my daughter looked me square in the eye and said, “You better go, Paulina. Grandma’s getting impatient.”
Those were our last words to each other. Our daughter never woke up after the procedure to unstick the valve and passed away the next day during open heart surgery. So yeah, if I had a day to relive, that one would be a prime candidate.
The Lovely Magic of Spicy Chips
What’s the last movie that made you cry, you ask? I want to answer, the one I’m in. But that would sound self-pitying and if there’s anything I can’t stand it’s wallowing along with chocolate chip cookies that are limp and falling apart like the one I just ate.
The cookie was dessert after eating a little bag of Crunchy Cheetos which, in my opinion, are way better than regular Cheetos. I have little bags of Cheetos, crunchy and not, along with a few assorted bags of chips left over from packing lunches for Street Angels. Paulina thinks I bought them for her but erred in not buying spicy chips (Doritos) exclusively.
A few weeks ago, I surprised her with a bag of Doritos and a bottle of weird looking blue juice when I picked her up from day camp. I whispered to her, loud enough for one of the day camp leaders to hear, “There’s Doritos in the car.”
“Oh,” the leader said, “Grandparents can do that.” She laughed. I shrugged. Yeah, if I was a real parent, I’d be showing up with carrot sticks and tap water or nothing because whoever it was I was picking up (name any one of the other four kids I raised) could just wait until dinner, don’t you know, because eating snacks ruins your appetite, for heaven’s sake and we can’t fucking have that.
I’m into the joyful look of a four-year old with her own bag of Doritos and bottle of weird looking blue juice. “You bought this for me?” she asks. Yes, I did, little lady, and there’s more where that came from. Not often, just often enough and unexpected enough to be delightful. People evolve over time, right? That’s my little evolution. I no longer give much of a shit about snacking before dinner. A couple of hard-boiled eggs will nullify practically any hideous snack. I think the same thing about outrageously surgary cereals. I don’t care anymore. I’m not dying on those little hills like I used to.
Today when we pick up Paulina, I am packing a peanut butter sandwich, chips, maybe an applesauce, and a bag of juice (the ones where you poke a hole in the bag with a pointed straw). This more elaborate meal is because we are going straight from day camp to her new school for K5 family orientation. Yes, Granny is going to get oriented.
There’ll probably be a whole session on healthy snacks.
____________________
Note: My husband and I are legal guardians for our four-year old granddaughter, Paulina. Her mother (our daughter) passed away in June. We are facing this new challenge in our lives with good humor, occasional hysteria, and plenty of spicy chips.
Happy Showed Up and Wants to be Friends
We bought our Neighbor Pete tamales, rice and beans, chips and pico de gallo, churros, two kinds of Mexican beer, Pacifico and Dos Equis, four ears of today-picked corn, freshly roasted Hatch chile peppers and an avocado. Also, flowers, including a couple of sun flowers which have become my favorite flower for a while. This took a bit of driving around town which was fun, during which I realized that it is okay to be happy.
We did this because contractors fixing our basement occupied his driveway for most of the week and because he made a surprising and very generous donation to our granddaughter’s college fund as a gesture of support after our daughter died. But we mostly did it because in the very early morning while we are sitting on the back porch and my husband calls out “Good morning, Neighbor Pete!” and Pete answers from his backyard, “Good morning, Neighbor Howard!” we all laugh and feel good about the day even though we don’t know what’s coming and whether it will be bad or good.
Yesterday I picked Paulina up early from day camp to go to a new beach on the far south side of Milwaukee County. Good wind, healthy waves, clean packed sand, a bag full of snacks, a plastic bucket and a shovel, two towels, and just a few other families. I let the waves knock me around a bit, then sat down on a towel to build a cairn which Paulina quickly wrecked, then watched as she wandered off with her pail to fetch wet sand. A few yards from her there were what seemed to be plovers, tiny birds I’d only known to be in the U.P. I laid down on my towel and looked at the sky, the clouds moving so fast it almost made me dizzy, and I realized that it is okay to be happy.
For a long while after our daughter died, I’d catch myself feeling pretty good and then think, hey, what’s happened was a terrible tragedy, and so everything, every little bit, every bite of breakfast, every load of laundry, each story read, all the good nights and good mornings, everything has had the sheen of tragedy even when we were laughing. But now, I think the sheen is wearing off, gone in some spots, dull in others, all because I realized that it is okay to be happy.
I love this. I feel like the waves are taking me to a good place.
Snippets in a Bowl of Marbles
I put together sixty-seven of my 100-word stories into a chapbook called Snippets.
A graphic artist whom I’ve known for close to fifty years created the cover and then carefully laid out the stories. This is harder than one might think because of how a chapbook is constructed. It takes skill. I know this because I tried laying it out and it made me crazy.
The idea of the chapbook was to print it and give it away. So, I ordered 100 copies and I’ve been giving them to people I like – friends, family, people in my writing groups. If recipients weren’t standing directly in front of me, I mailed them copies. I liked this. It felt like sending things for Christmas. Real things – not gift cards or presents in big fabric bags from Amazon.
I gave a copy to each of my children including the daughter who passed away in June. She remarked on one story having to do with Nicaragua, “Adoption,” page 32, asking if it was about when I came to Nicaragua to bring her back to America. It was. She didn’t say anything else about the story, whether she liked it or not, but I noticed that when the nurse asked her to pack up her less essential things prior to a move to ICU, she put Snippets in the grocery bag that also had a small plant I’d given her that had wilted, earrings and a beaded purse that a friend had brought (I could never figure out why) and several self-help books, I guess because visitors thought being quite ill in a hospital is a good time for reflection.
She kept other books. Oh well.
I could make something of that. In the giant bowl of marbles that is the aftermath of a child’s death, everything can have meaning. I think of that when I look at the small stack of chapbooks on my desk. How I gave one to my daughter and she gave it back. Maybe it was for safekeeping, she didn’t say.
There’s no way of knowing. There’s no need to know. I just stir up the marbles on move on.
Night Swim: A Story
[It’s been a night swim these past few months after our daughter’s death, but now I’m finding the raft. It’s good.]
She’d dreamt of swimming across the lake a thousand times. The dreams were always the same. There was a full moon that shone on the water like a spotlight, soft, though, sweet and rolling with the waves. She saw herself swimming, always in a red suit, the skin on her back and arms perfectly white, alabaster as if she was a statue come to life. Her stroke was smooth with a two-beat kick, her body rolling side to side like she’d been taught in high school. Her swimming was languid in her dream and endless. She swam forever and it was beautiful.
After a night of dreaming, she sat in a canvas chair under a tree. The sun was up but just barely. The coffee from the old percolator was too hot to drink so she held the mug in her hands for a good long while, contemplating the distance to the other side of the lake. Was it a mile? Two miles? She could see children playing on the dock across the lake. They stayed the summer in the blue cottage. A raft bobbed some distance from their dock. She could swim there, she thought, but it would have to be at night.
She was afraid. Not of the water. Not of swimming. But of the dark. She had never swum in the dark – not in a pool, or the ocean, or a lake. She decided to set out that night, to make the dream real. To swim in the dark because if she did, if she swam to the raft across the lake, she could do anything.
Dinner was a hot dog and a hard boiled egg. She drank water and a half a bottle of Gatorade and then went inside in tiny cabin to put on her swimsuit, her only suit, a black one. The black would blend into the water. She would be seamless and smooth and lovely, like her dream.
She had fished with her father in this lake. Together, they’d trolled the edge of the bass beds in an old rowboat but got their biggest catches in the open water. Northern pike struck hard on their lines, the struggles sometimes went on for long minutes. Her father watched her reeling and pulling and never offered to help until the pike was next to the boat. Then he would scoop up the fish with his green net, dumping it slowly at her feet. Because of how long it took to land the fish, she would have to use pliers to get the hook out of its mouth. Her father showed her how to put her foot on the fish’s body and then reach in and twist. It took a long time but her father waited for her, his hand on the tiller, never moving except to light his cigar.
She rubbed her face thinking of the northern pike and their angry-looking jaws. Do they swim at night or sleep? What do fish do in the dark?
It was dark, very dark when she waded into the water. She felt minnows fluttering around her ankles. She knew those minnows. She’d held them in her hands when she sat in the water, sunning in the afternoon. They were tiny and silver and so perfect she’d thought of swallowing one just to feel it glide down her throat. Minnows were like silver, a necklace come undone. She still had her father’s minnow bucket in the corner of her kitchen.
Wading in, knee deep and then thigh deep and then letting go of the earth to float in the water seemed final somehow, like these could be her last steps in this life and she was giving herself over to timelessness, all of her memories of the lake floating with her. She began to swim. She kicked and stroked and breathed in a rhythm she’d known forever. Rolling with her breathing, stretching out as far as she could, watching the moon come out from behind the clouds.
The weeds wrapped around her right leg first and then her left. She’d known the weeds were there, a patch of them bordering the edge of the lake right before the drop-off. She knew that from fishing, looking over the edge and seeing the tall waving stalks give way to a deep so deep, she couldn’t see the bottom. She kicked and pulled, reaching down with her hands to pull the weeds off her legs and throw them in the distance. She shuddered, thinking about it, how easy it might be to sink or for a pike to find her wriggling. Turning back would be okay, no one would know one way or the other. She could make coffee and sit in the dark.
By then, the moon was pouring its light on the water. As in her dream, the light folded out in front of her, her strokes slicing the water like knives, clean and even, no splash. This is what she had wanted. This swim in this darkness and this light. The night was still except for her quiet breathing and fine drops of water falling from her silver hands. She swam this perfect way across the lake.
The raft had a metal ladder. She held on to the lowest rung, her legs hanging, resting, her breathing quiet like a thief. Slowly, she climbed on to the raft and then laid down on the rough wooden planks. The raft was very old but sturdy and she felt safe and comfortable lying there, so much that she fell asleep, only waking when the moon had disappeared back behind the clouds and the wind had picked up. She was cold.
She didn’t think about getting back to her cabin. It didn’t matter to her. She sat with her arms wrapped around her legs and waited for the sun to come up.
______________
Photo by Jaunathan Gagnon on Unsplash
Originally published in July 2024
Nola at the Splash Pad
Nola sat down on the next bench. She was smoking a long cigarette, maybe a Benson & Hedges like I used to smoke.
She looked over at me. “How old are you?” I stood up to get closer. She asked her question again, “How old are you?”
“Pretty,” I joked except she didn’t get it, asking her question a third time. I told her my age. She told me hers. I told her she was just a kid. She rolled her eyes and took a long drag. It looked dreamy, that drag, even though she seemed steamed about something. Not my age or me, but something else.
She pointed over at the slide. “That’s my great grandchild.” He was sliding down face first, landing inches away from my granddaughter who was playing dead at the bottom of the slide. Another girl walked over and put her hand on my granddaughter’s chest to ‘feel a heartbeat,’ declared her still living and they all laughed and ran to the top of the slide.
“My granddaughter lived with me a long time and then she had this boy and she just took off. And so now I’m raising this boy. I don’t want to raise any more kids.”
She scanned the couple dozen kids playing in the water and the nearby playground looking for one that might be attached to me. There weren’t any other white people there – not adults, nor kids. All Black except one little Hispanic girl and her Anglo grandmother.
“That’s my granddaughter,” pointing to the girl playing dead again. I thought about it a minute and then I said, “Her mom died a few months ago. So now she lives with us.”
Nola looked startled. “Your daughter died?” And I could see her calculus – was having a daughter die worse than having a granddaughter run off and leaving her son for you to raise?
“I have to go,” Nola said, looking around for her great grandson. She dashed off even though the boy kept playing with his new Hispanic friend. She didn’t say goodbye and I didn’t see where she went.
I just sat back down on the bench and listened to all the kids laughing.
Checking Worries Off My List
My daughter dying in a foreign country.
I’m free from this worry because she died here – in the United States instead of in Nicaragua where she had been living. Could I be any more macabre?
This morning on the back porch, I said to my husband, “I don’t want people to feel sorry for us.” He took a sip of coffee, put the cup down on the porch table and said, “If they read your blog post last night, they’re going to feel sorry for you.”
I suppose. The price for public lamenting is catching all the “Oh poor you!” vibes let loose by your moaning. Oh well. I don’t know what I’m doing with this ‘getting over it’ business. I do recall a friend who lost two of her children and who found a million reasons to avoid my consoling her. I finally, in my ignorant determination, went to her house with deli sandwiches and ice cream. She eschewed the sandwiches but picked a bit at the ice cream. She told me things that made me so weak I could eat neither a sandwich nor the ice cream. The sorrow was like acid rain and she knew it. She could see it dripping on my innocent well-meaning self.
Like my friend, I don’t want anyone bringing me sandwiches and ice cream. I don’t want anyone to ask me how I am doing or how my granddaughter is doing. We’re all fine, I’ll say. I want to maneuver through the world in a bubble of my own construction. There’s only one person I trust with my puzzling and opining and second guessing and that’s the person I’ve been married to for forty-two years. We meet on the back porch and sort things out and then revisit and rediscuss and then when something has been chewed to death, we put it aside and watch the squirrels hop on the fence like they think we can’t see them.
I am glad to be free of the worry of my daughter dying in a foreign country. It’s one less thing we have to talk about on the back porch.
Today at the Playground and Afterward: Grief Tunes
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.
Writing Bleak
(I wrote this on August 5, 2017. Nine years later, I’m in a different spot about death and grieving. I’ll write about that later today. Two posts on the same day. Wild.)
The problem with writing when you’re anxious or a little depressed is that everything ends up being about death – your own death, your spouse’s, your kids’, your dogs’, the death of the great American city, Death Be Not Proud, you get the idea. It’s depressing.
I considered submitting something for an essay contest. The topic was ‘the happiest day of your life.’ Oddly, I remember the happiest day of my life but it lacks drama and angst so I don’t think I could write convincingly about it.
My Happiest Day
It was a hot summer day on Lake Superior. All of our children were staying with us in our old house on the beach. I’d reluctantly come in from swimming to start dinner and, as I was chopping onions, my younger son ran into the house yelling, “Mom, why did you leave? Come back swimming.” And I put down my knife and walked back out to the beach into the water and swam along the shore with him and the other kids and our dog until the sun almost set and my husband was waving to us from the porch, “It’s time to come in for dinner.” And when I came in, Kathy Mattea was singing “Love Travels” on the stereo.
I found myself wishing the prompt was saddest day or most regrettable day. I want to start a post talking about how cocktail hour seems to be starting earlier every afternoon and how investing in Two-Buck Chuck has been my frugal move of the month. But even with all my little snarls of turmoil, I am a Strawberry Shortcake in the world of agony writing. I am nobody’s victim except, occasionally, my own. I can’t hold a candle to true despair. Mine is hobby suffering. It’s temporal and temporary.
I have friends who are experts at suffering. They allude to the physicality of it, the aches and pains, the lack of appetite. “Why are you not hungry?” I ask. “Because I am grieving,” comes the incredulous response. Me? I am not grieving. I have avoided grieving. But I am afraid of grieving and that itself is putting me in this strange, onion-like place. There are layers to all of this and I don’t want to peel any of them away.
__________________
Photo by Tobias Macha on Unsplash
The Undocumented Bumble Bee Kite
I am trying to live an undocumented life but it is very difficult when one’s practice is to document everything.
This afternoon, flying a bumblebee kite, I thought about how I ought to take a picture of the kite, more specifically the string running from my hand to the bumblebee’s chest. That line, that string against a completely blue sky was the perfect shot so I looked around for my husband to ask him to get my phone because part of my undocumented effort is to quit carrying my phone in my pocket all the time.
But he’d gone inside after watching the beginning of the kiting, if that’s what they call it, and I knew he was probably napping. It was a July afternoon on vacation, after all, what else would he be doing? It wasn’t even worth yelling, the wind would drown out all but the shrillest, most terrifying scream and I wasn’t ready to go to such lengths just to take a picture.
Besides, I thought, one can remember things. I remember that when we were kids, my brother, who was nine years older than me, could make a kite out of newspaper and balsa wood. Having newspaper laying about seems common but why we had a ready supply of balsa wood I couldn’t tell you. My folks were handy, though, so they had stuff like vast assortments of nails and screws, tools of all sorts, tiny screwdrivers, vices that would hold thing still, my dad could fix a toaster and tie a fly, my mother turned dresses into curtains and vice versa, all of which goes by saying, of course, we would have balsa wood and probably enough lumber to make a rowboat if the need arose.
So my brother would make a kite, I can see him doing this in my mind’s eye, the newspaper spread out on the kitchen floor and then when the kite was done he’d tear up old cloth to make the tail. “It needs more tail,” he would say, and then outside when we tried to fly it, he’d say it again, “It needs more tail.” Then flying a kite seemed like something I would never be qualified to do, at least not without my brother.
I don’t have a picture of my brother making a kite or flying one. I have almost no pictures of my brother, even though for many years he was my great defender and caretaker. He wasn’t making the kite for himself, he made it for me. That’s what I remember.
So I flew the bumblebee kite today with my 15-year old granddaughter and 6-year old twin grandsons. Then my granddaughter put together a second kite, a Little Mermaid kite, and we took turns flying both kites but for long stretches of time I flew the bumblebee kite by myself, the wind blowing hard off Lake Superior and the kite flying as high as its string would take it. I am so lucky, I thought. I am so lucky to fly this kite. I don’t need a picture to remember my great luck.
But as it happens, there was a picture taken and so I share it here with you.
____________________
Originally published in 2019
Snow Door | wisconsinacademy.org
Listen to Jan read her essay “Billy” presented on WUWM’s Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “At the Breakfast Bar” on WUWM Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “The Parish Hall,” on WUWM Lake Effect
“Fury Cannot Touch Me,” Modern Love, NYT, 9/29/11
Recent Comments