Red's Wrap

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.

What you write about and what you want to write about are two different things a lot of the time.

I want to write about how some condolences feel like diagnostic quests. How are you doing? No, how are you really doing? Is that when I tell them I scrolled through all the texts from my daughter while she was hospitalized in the month before she died to see if our back and forth was strained or relaxed? Was I remembering things the way they were? Were the hours we sat in her hospital room easy or hard? Had her old resentments been stowed away or were they lying on the thin sheet at the foot of her bed but I just didn’t see them. Do I tell them that I think all the time about when I washed her hair in the tiny hospital room sink, how reconciling and fleeting that was?

I don’t say any of these things.

Yesterday, I walked into a shop of a nonprofit group that helps trafficked women begin new lives. They sell soap and candles and notecards and hats, and the shop smells like the lightest cleanest place on earth. The program’s director met me at the door. She smiled, glad to see me, and I could tell from her eyes that she knew what had happened to our family. But she didn’t ask. And I was grateful for that. For having her silent acknowledgement of our daughter’s death and our family’s challenges but being spared the piercing look, the How are you doing? No, how are you really doing?

It’s ill-mannered to criticize well wishers of any ilk. They mean well, my mother would say. So I don’t criticize, I just buckle up when I’m around them, drive faster to get out of traffic, roll the windows down so I hear nothing but the wind and sirens in the distance.

That’s what I write about today. It’s neither here nor there.

I’m giving my mother’s afghan to Goodwill. It is pretty but very scratchy. Just writing that makes me feel like the afghan being scratchy is an insufficient reason to put it in the used blanket bin at Goodwill. So, I am feeling guilty about wanting to ditch the afghan, you know, after all the work my mom put into it, all the squares crocheted just so, all the Ed Sullivan that was watched, Gunsmoke, Palladin.

Things have to go.

I am oppressed by all these things. My baby shoes, a meat grinder, Thing 1 and Thing 2, a ceramic skunk, adult coloring books, jigsaw puzzles, embroidery kits, empty picture frames, Leonard Cohen’s Book of Longing, Robert’s Rules of Order, a mink hat, and Durant’s ashes. I am skimming the surface.

A week or so after my daughter died, her friend brought over bin after bin of stuff he’d agreed to store until she came back from Nicaragua. The bins sat stacked on our front porch. We’d sit for a while, collect ourselves, and then tackle a bin. Jewelry, pictures, cosmetics, books, journals, purses, satchels, so much that we told him to hold on to whatever was left which sounds crazy but made sense then and still does. The stuff, all the things, well, they were suffocating. Us. Suffocating us.

So, the afghan and all its scratchiness and effort and obligation must go. I want to picture it heaped on a massive pile of my things, the four-part DVD of Lawrence of Arabia, my sewing kit, the blue parrot the boys bought me in Key West, the mug with all the presidents’ signatures (well, not all, thank goodness), and the thank you notes, written and unwritten. In my mind’s eye, the pile becomes a funeral pyre stacked a mile high in the bed of a rusted Ford truck and someone sets it afire on the side of the road next to an abandoned dairy farm.

A fitting end – to the afghan and everything else. Don’t you think?

I’m not a wreck. I am super functional. I have to be because there is so much to do.

That said, I just spent an hour giving myself a pedicure because to not do so would have an adverse effect on my mental health. Much more so than the laundry sitting in the washer that needs to go in the dryer or the massive and very thorny weeds that have taken up residence in my side garden, but I will say this, to my credit, the hydrangeas I planted last year not only came up this year but revived themselves after I finally watered them after walking past their droopy selves for three days resenting their neediness.

Our daughter died three weeks ago yesterday. The whole day felt weird, like the two of us, her dad and I, were counting down the hours when we were sitting in the surgical waiting room eating the last of our meager snacks. We thought surgery would wrap up by dinnertime, but we were wrong. We thought a lot of things. We thought the humble but obviously insanely smart surgeon would pull off a miracle. We thought our daughter would survive the surgery and come home to rehab in our upstairs bedroom like she’d done before. We thought she’d regain a semblance of a normal life despite her busted heart and be able to work and walk her little girl to school.

So, yesterday, we were sort of reliving all those dashed hopes and I, in particular, was feeling hurt, like I had a bad sunburn and didn’t want anything, even the thinnest lightest shirt, touching my skin. So we opted out of a big event that I normally would have loved attending and went to the dog park instead and then to Meijer’s to buy my favorite coffee and red wine vinegar which we always think we have but never do.

I think that’s part of the aftermath of death, listening to when you’re telling yourself you’re too fragile to do something and then not doing it. And then not making any excuses, just saying it was too much. I can’t do this yet. It’s too much. And that being okay.

I can do the things I can do. The pedicure, the laundry, watering the plants, vacuuming and wrestling with the madness that is my office. Little one is expected back in a bit after a day spent with her aunt and uncle. I’ll be ready. I’m not a wreck. I am super functional.