Category: grief

The Most Important Thing

Not the best picture, but also the best picture.

Twenty-two years ago today I met my husband, and eight years ago on Tuesday, February 16, he died in a single-car accident about 1/4 mile from our home.

We had a rom-com-worthy meet cute.

I was teaching at New Options Middle School in Seattle (now Salmon Bay, and the best school ever) and had just received a call from the garage looking at my car. It was an unseasonably warm and sunny Friday afternoon, a Friday when I was scheduled to chaperone the school’s Ski Club trip to Snoqualmie Pass.

Instead, I found myself sweating in long underwear after school, listening to the mechanic as he said things like, “The wheels could have fallen off,” and “You cannot drive this car anymore.”

Claire. I had only had her for a week. A powder blue car whose make and model I forget but who was a replacement for a car that was totaled when I was hit-and-run from behind by a drunk driver on the way home from another Ski Club outing, late the previous Friday night. Insurance gave me $1600 for that car, and I spent it on Claire, the only car I could find for small cash, a car that had been apparently submerged at one point and was now in possession of rusted-out wheel bearings and an axle or two of uncertain stability.

I canceled Ski Club chaperoning. I called a tow truck. I called a rental car place. I got a ride to the mechanic.

I emptied Claire out and sat like a hobo with all of my possessions on the concrete wall in front of the mechanic to wait for the rental car people to pick me up.

Eventually, the tow truck showed up and pulled into the lot. I turned around to look into the shop and saw a tall, lanky man with bleachy, spiky hair leaning on the counter. He had a cast on his left arm from his wrist to his elbow and had the practiced lean of a person who was not really in an hurry. I turned back around and sat for a few minutes, sweating and fretting about the money I was about to lose, then turned back around to see him still there.

I stood up, hopped over the concrete divider I was sitting on, opened the door, and stuck my head in.

“You looking for me?” I asked.

“I guess I am,” he said.

I canceled the rental car and let Dane drive me to the car lot, where I had him turn on his tow truck lights and park smack in the middle of their business. I stormed into the office and demanded my money back. I was aware of Dane watching me as I harangued the guy behind the counter, aware of him watching me as I climbed back into the tow truck.

Our first date wouldn’t happen until February 16, 1999, a date where he picked me up in a wide Lincoln Continental, white with crimson velvet interior, an auction car. We listened to Portishead on the way to the bar, and when he walked through the front door he reached his hand back for mine without looking, a surprisingly intimate gesture for a first date.

We played darts, drank beer.

We built a life together, and then that life disappeared on the side of the road in the middle of the night, 14 years later.

As time stretches away from the night he died, I am beginning to forget some things. Specific dates, times, things we fought about, what we did every day in our life together.

But I knew when he reached for my hand on that first date, the way you know things in your bones, that we would make a life together. We lived an entire life together in just 14 years – lost parents, had a baby, lost a house, lost jobs, lost a baby, moved across the country – so much loss, but joy, too. Love.

As I write this I feel a literal ache in the place where my heart is. In many ways, this beautiful life of mine now is what it is because of Dane. He loved me, and he loved our child, with every part of himself – all of the broken bits and the joyful, exuberant parts, too. I think of him most this time of year, but he is not often far from my thoughts.

I feel lucky to have been able to understand what is really important in life, early, to get an idea that we think we have time, but it’s no use dwelling on how much or how little.

And that our days and lives are made up of small, quiet moments, not huge gestures. Reaching out for a hand. A greeting kiss. Your beloved’s hand on the small of your back. The idea that you have a person in the world who is home for you, no matter what.

On this bittersweet day, I remember Dane. His smile. His sweet blue eyes. His laugh. The way he loved me.

I remember that my people are the most important thing. And for that, and for Dane – the whole messy, tragic, and joyful experience of our life together – I am also grateful.

What Happens When Trauma Leaves The Body

Can we talk about how last night I taught yoga online in the granniest of granny panties, and IDGAF?

Like, so granny, the kind hospitals give you after you have a baby and leave the hospital, that go all the way from the place where your ass meets the top of the back of your upper thigh to fully grazing the beginning of your thoracic vertebrae?

Yes, THAT GRANNY.

And when I was changing into yoga clothes to teach how it was a decision I made to not change, not into a thong, not even into something less likely to peek out from the back of my activewear, because I am finally realizing what the feeling the world is experiencing is, and I need comfort wherever I can get it?

It’s grief. We are in mourning.

Whether or not you agree with the way the U.S. culture works, and I can assure you that I do not agree with most of it, it is the water we have been swimming in for a very long time, and the tank has sprung a leak.

Following this revelation (I started this particular post around 8 pm Sunday night), I had a massive anxiety attack, the worst in awhile, way back to the days when I used to black out in the middle of them.

This anxiety attack had an additional feature: uncontrollable shaking. I have been known to shiver as an anxiety attack recedes, but this shaking was like having a seizure, only I was fully aware and able to stop long enough to go throw up.

It was so bad, I had to hold my jaw open to prevent me from smashing my front teeth in as they gnashed together (they have short roots, I am informed, and it will only take the slightest nudge to knock them out).

Triggered, is the term, I think. I am triggered.

This shaking may have been trauma, held in my body for so long, trying to make its way out. The linked article (which I highly, highly suggest you read) explores the idea that our brain responds in a very orderly way to disorderly occurrences (like, oh, say, the death of your husband or the stressful unknowns of a pandemic). The reptilian brain kicks into gear when confronted with a stressor of any kind. This keeps us alive when we need to respond, as in when tigers are chasing us.

But what if the tigers are constant – real or imagined – and the rest of the brain is not able to spring into action to process the emotional response or to allow the brain to understand what occurred (the cognitive processing of an event)?

We are literally unable to “shake off” the trauma and our bodies remain primed for action. Conventionally, this is referred to post-traumatic stress disorder.

I have been collecting trauma in and of my body for an entire lifetime.

Being a learning robot and making an effort over a decade to recover and manage, I have been doing all of the right things – going to nature, eating well, attempting to meditate, (finally) managing my access to news and social media – so it is especially disheartening to have this occur.

I have no answers. I don’t know why.

This is not a blog for that.

We are living through trauma. We are surfing an ocean of grief that may or may not have anything to do with losing the life we have now but may instead be a compendium of a lifetime of damage in the body, damage that comes from just getting by, stuffing things down, insisting we are ok.

I am not ok. I am better than some, but even saying that invalidates the sentence before.

I am not ok.

But I am learning. I am here. I am working towards letting go. I am reaffirming what is important. I am developing tools within myself.

I feel at my weakest. I feel I am the strongest I have ever been.

We are all of us swimming in contradiction, far away from land.

For ourselves and for each other: let us be kind and patient. Let us be compassionate. Let us move slowly and lovingly and remember always to breathe.

I am trying.

Happy 2020?

I cannot decide if this is a good sign or a bad omen.

As I write this, it’s nearly 2020, the last Saturday night of the decade, to be precise. I am alone, lying snugged under a blanket and biting my fingernails to the quick as I alternate between watching season three Better Things and scrolling through Instagram.

It’s not an unusual way for me to spend a Saturday night in general; the only thing that sets this one mildly apart is an unusually strong craving for a brownie sundae and the fact that this is right around the time when I think of the upcoming year.

I do wish, just once, that the end of the year found me looking back with warm contentment at the preceding 12 months, not white-knuckling it into the next year. This past Thursday night, a friend of mine was attacked by 15+ kids and beaten, sent to shock trauma the day after Christmas on what should have been a fairly routine Thursday night reading of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans at Khristian’s studio in the CopyCat building.

We were waiting for our friend who had just texted that he would be at the door in a minute. When he didn’t arrive after texting, a quick glance up the street at the police cars and ambulance told the story – just a block away and a minute or two after his text, he was knocked off his bike and set upon by a roving group of kids with nothing better to do and a whole lot of despair to expel.

He is better than he might have been had it not been stopped so quickly. Quick intervention by a mail carrier, concerned neighbors, and an uneasy feeling from Khristian meant that from beginning to end the whole incident lasted about ten minutes. Enough time to shove him around and shatter an ankle, but thankfully not much more (other than the trauma of the attack, which I am certain felt like a lifetime).

Seems odd, maybe, but this incident got me thinking again about home.

I have been back in Charm City for almost six years now. I grew up in western Maryland and went to college at UMBC, spending several years in Fells Point when Harbor East was a wasteland of abandoned warehouses and Druid Hill Park was still a place you didn’t go after 5 pm. I was once pinned down in a rowhouse by gunfire in my capacity as a counselor for women in transitional housing, and I saw my first dead body on the sidewalk in front of The Buttery (the restaurant featured in the movie Seven and has now been replaced by what is referred to as the “Ouija 7-Eleven“).

The city has always been dangerous.

But this feels different.

When Sicily and I came to visit after Dane died in 2013, we felt like we were coming home, but since I have been here it hasn’t fit quite right.

I love my house. I love my street. I have built a community here, in my neighborhood and among the people I have met. I have been lucky in my work and in the friends I have cultivated.

But it doesn’t feel like home.

I thought Baltimore would be the place where I would feel settled, and although there is a familiarity about it, and it is more home than anywhere else I have been, it’s not quite the comfort I have been seeking. I don’t feel held in the bosom of this place as much as I thought I would.

In this city that could be so great, with so many brilliant people from all walks of life and such a perfect location and size, there is so much daily desperation and pain that I find it hard to leave the house some days.

Is this the midlife crisis, the actual one instead of the one brought on by Dane’s death, where I make bad choices and rash decisions?

Super possible.

Fast forward four days – it’s New Year’s day, and I have been awake since 4, out well before midnight. I have already walked the Loch Raven Reservoir (found the new friend in the picture above), painted, edited some poetry, and felt regret for a decision I made last night. Khristian always says you feel lighter if the decision is a good one, but I don’t feel light. I am not sure if it matters.

The tone of the post is rambly and ranging – from New Year’s resolutions (eat more Daim cookies) to brutal attacks to what makes home and now finally bad decisions.

I don’t know what to say, but I feel compelled to write, and as this is my party, I will cry (write) if I want to, platform be damned.

I do wish everyone the happiest of new years. Hopefully, it’s a damn sight better than the last one.

31 Day Social Media Fast: Day 4

In which I skip out on Instagram and Facebook for the month of March but still allow myself the internet.

There is no caption to adequately describe this. Please just watch.

Today’s post is not a happy one, brought to you as it is by the horrific history of American slavery and the manner in which we continue to perpetuate racism in this country.

In addition to reading The Book of Delights, I have been reading White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard To Talk To White People About Race.

Spoiler alert: If you are a white friend of mine, you may be getting one or both of these in the mail in the near future. I know reading actual books is unfashionable, and if you get the latter book you might feel defensive or insulted. It will be ok. Please read it anyway.

In one of this morning’s essays, Ross Gay talks about the genesis of the phrase “hole in the head,” and then tells the story of Vertus Hardiman, a man who, at age five, was experimented on with radiation.

Because here in the U.S., we experiment on black children. We enslave whole generations of people, break up their families, and blame them for the racist structure of the country.

We experiment on black children. I cannot put into words the grief I feel over this.

And then there is this:

Sorrow Is Not My Name
By Ross Gay
—after Gwendolyn Brooks

No matter the pull toward brink. No
matter the florid, deep sleep awaits.
There is a time for everything. Look,
just this morning a vulture
nodded his red, grizzled head at me,
and I looked at him, admiring
the sickle of his beak.
Then the wind kicked up, and,
after arranging that good suit of feathers
he up and took off.
Just like that. And to boot,
there are, on this planet alone, something like two
million naturally occurring sweet things,
some with names so generous as to kick
the steel from my knees: agave, persimmon,
stick ball, the purple okra I bought for two bucks
at the market. Think of that. The long night,
the skeleton in the mirror, the man behind me
on the bus taking notes, yeah, yeah.
But look; my niece is running through a field
calling my name. My neighbor sings like an angel
and at the end of my block is a basketball court.
I remember. My color’s green. I’m spring.

If you share nothing else that I write, if you comment on nothing or barely pass by the words that I put down, if you cannot even be bothered to click the little “thumbs up” on your Facebook page, please share this post. I don’t care on what channels you share it, I don’t care what caption you place on it or if you are horrified and disgusted that I would post this and want to write about how awful I am.

Good. Share it anyway.

Death Of Light: Green Tomatoes, Two Ways

Chow-chow, nearly done.

Things fall apart in the fall. It is the season of death and decay and the gradual fading of the light (fall back on Saturday, November 3rd. Take the country back Tuesday, November 6th).

It is also a time of powerful transformation and intention setting and a season of acceptance that comes after grief in the face of extraordinary change.

This is clearly reflected in nature. Leaves litter the sidewalks and the grass wears a morning tiara of sparkling frost that melts away with the rising sun.

In the garden, overgrown green turns spindly and the last vestiges of fruit struggle to hang on the vine. This is the last call for the summer garden – last call to bring in any kind of harvest before the sun barely crests the horizon and night falls before dinnertime.

Green tomatoes are a unique by-product of the scraggly fall garden. Tart and bright, they are everything you need when the light dims.

Here, two recipes: Green Tomato Chow-Chow and Roasted Green Tomato Soup. The former a staple in the south, the latter a bright ray of sunshine in a darkening fall kitchen. If these don’t do it for you, give last year’s ode to fall a whirl. You can’t go wrong with any of these.

Green Tomato Chow-Chow

Use this uniquely southern condiment on greens, black-eyed peas, pork chops, chicken, BBQ sandwiches, and in salad dressing (or stir it into the soup that follows). Add finely chopped white cabbage if you like. This recipe scales up easily and can be canned for winter time. This particular recipe makes one pint.

Ingredients

1 1/2 cups chopped green tomatoes

1 or 2 Thai chilis, diced

1/4 cup diced onion (about 1/4 a large-ish onion)

1/4 cup diced celery (1 stalk, give or take)

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon mustard seed

1/8 teaspoon turmeric

1/8 teaspoon nutmeg

5 or 6 black peppercorns

1/2 cup sugar

1/4 cup apple cider vinegar

1/2 cup drained tomato juice

Optional: 1/4 teaspoon fennel and/or coriander seed

Method

Dice the green tomatoes, Thai chili, onion, and celery. Place in a glass bowl and add salt. Stir, then cover with plastic wrap and let sit, at least four hours but preferably overnight.

Place a mesh sieve over a bowl and strain the vegetables, reserving the liquid. Pack vegetables in a pint jar. Measure spices and place on top of the vegetables.

Heat sugar, vinegar, and a 1/4 cup of the reserved tomato liquid in a heavy saucepan until sugar dissolves. Let cool slightly, then pour over vegetables. Let cool to room temperature on the counter, then refrigerate. Only gets better as it sits, but unless you preserve it, eat in a month or less.

Roasted Green Tomato Soup

This soup is quite accidental and made from the bits and bobs of my CSA, herbs grown on my porch, and stock made from vegetable peelings from the summer. This particular batch of stock featured corn cobs and fresh fennel, both delicate, subtle flavors that actually manage to lift the soup to a whole other level. Roasting the tomatoes and caramelizing the onions coax the last bit of summer’s sweetness from both. As with its red brethren, this soup goes well with a buttery, gooey grilled cheese.

Ingredients

2 pounds green tomatoes, cut into quarters for roasting

Olive oil

3 cloves garlic

1 medium onion, diced

1 tablespoon fresh thyme

3 cups vegetable stock

Salt and pepper to taste

2 cups arugula (ish)

Optional garnish: thinly sliced scallions

Method

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Toss green tomatoes and whole garlic cloves in olive oil and season with salt and pepper. Roast for 40 minutes.

In a large stockpot, heat another two tablespoons of olive oil. Add onion and cook on medium-low until caramelized (around 30 minutes, so start these when you put the tomatoes in the oven).

Add roasted tomatoes and garlic and stir to combine. Add fresh thyme, salt, and pepper and cook for two minutes. Add stock and arugula. Bring to a simmer and cook for 10 to 15 minutes.

Use an immersion blender (or regular blender) to puree the soup until smooth.