Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
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.
3 Comments on “Checking Worries Off My List”
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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
Grief seems like a paradox. It can feel good to know that we are not alone, that people who love us are standing by to hold us up when the going is so very tough. It is also true that we have to walk through the valley of death achingly alone. Reading your excellent reflection of your walk, triggered the ache that I feel for all the losses I’ve experienced in my 82 years of existence. The vision in my soul is of a mass of people walking in the wilderness, each one totally alone. Maybe as you, your hubby, and granddaughter walk through this wilderness you can hold hands. If you need help along the way, my hand is extended. Just grab it and hold on tight.
So kindly said, Jan. It is not the job of a grieving woman to help others assuage their sorrow.
(plus what Deb wrote!)
While emotional I thought the post yesterday was a kind way to tell all of us not knowing how to be just how to be for you and I appreciate that Jan. Actually I’ve always appreciated that about you, even in our virtual relationship.