All posts by Corinne

The Letters, Year 1

Letters, Year 1

The Love Room – Year 1

The first year after my aunt’s death was spent in a kind of frenzied fog. After almost a decade of long-distance care management, there was still so much to do. As my aunt’s Personal Representative, I was in charge of settling her affairs: carrying out the provisions of her will, selling her condo in Maryland, packing up family mementos to take home. I was also teaching full-time in Maine, and trying to stay engaged with my two grown daughters and my young grandson.

In some ways, the distraction of so many chores became a kind of insulation from the wrenching wreck of grief. But all I really wanted was lie in the sun in a comfortable place, watch dust motes drift through a sunny room, go back to Maryland and find my aunt. The sense of unreality was all-encompassing, but also compelling. I wanted to see where it would take me.

Small comforts during this first year included time spent in the wilderness, watching old reruns of The Waltons on television, playing with my young grandson. And, of course, writing the letters…..

 

Excerpts from the Letters –

9/15/10
Dear Little Honey,
After carrying you; after the frenzied details of keeping you afloat; after the end, and then sending you off; after tears and hugs from people who leaned into your light, now you’re gone. But here I am, still waiting for you.

For, after all, could a life really just disappear? Could something so rich and tenacious just vanish—poof!—without even leaving a small pile of flower petals on the floor of the world? Impossible. So I keep coming, in the dark and quiet unclaimed times, to sit with you, keep an ear turned your way. Our love room is still the place where I am so much of the time, no matter where else I might be. In the quietest of ways, you are here, too, letting me lay my weary life down at your feet, your sweet, quirky self soothing me even after the end.

 

9/20/10
Dear Aunt Min,
I can’t share you yet. Even though people are asking, I don’t want to talk. Don’t want to wrap up all my slippery feelings, package them into something tidy, give them away.

This coming-apart time is so wispy and thin, yet so much the realest thing: The quiet breath of the mystery of dying and living; the door between worlds, still open. I don’t want to close that by trying to explain how the care and clashes and holiness of two people continues to thrive.

My love room with you is still hanging in the airy light, tangled in the web of my attention, still pushing and pulling with the tide of my heart.

 

10/13/10

Dear Little Honey,
Putting up clothes for the winter switch-over, I grab a handful of scarves to hang, and find one of yours: a bright, silky square of roses on scarlet and gold. Automatically, as if my body has a mind of its own, my hands grab it up, press it against my face. I am searching for your scent—the face cream you used, or your own particular sweetness, or the mustiness of clothes that hung in your closet for years. I am hungry for something of you. This time, it’s your favorite color. Red—the fire, the unquenchable spirit, the warmth, the steely heat of your attention, the cutting edge, the joy. Someone said at your funeral that we should all have worn red in your honor.

I miss you. My body has known this all along, while I was trying to forget, trying to live across the hole you left.

 

10/23/10
Dear Little Honey,
I keep trying to find you. Working on the details of finishing up your life, posting your old photos on a website, planning a Louisiana trip to bury your ashes, going to Maryland to clear out your apartment. I am looking for you in the shuffle of papers, in the busy-work, in making connections with newfound cousins, Nanette, and Lennie and her daughter Kathi.

But, underneath all this, my heart is a yawning awareness that you’re not there. I can’t imagine how it was for you through one hundred years of losing parents, brothers, a sister, friends, the way the world was before so many changes.

I miss you so much.

All I want these days is to slip into the love room—that little space we made together. We could sit and I could hold your small, delicate hand. You could squeeze my fingers and ask me how I am, or sing one of the songs you remember from so many years ago. You could tell me stories about teaching, And I would listen. Again.

There are so many things I want to ask. I want to know why Uncle Johnny killed himself—if you knew how depressed he was. I want to know my dad as you did, when he chattered so much as a little one that you all called him “Peter Parrot”—before he was with my mom and there was no room for another voice.

This is the thing: I am still unfinished. I still need you, but you are done, I guess. But what does that make our love room now, if the walls aren’t painted with need on both sides? If we aren’t stitched together, using the glue of promises and faith and forgiveness to hold it all together? I am still in my love room with you. Sometimes I feel you there, too. My memory of you still knows the best parts of me. Right now, I can’t do without that.

Continue reading The Letters, Year 1 →

On the Dark Times

Reflections

 

As winter approaches, I like the dark times. Before light, before all the colors come back. When wildness skitters into hidden places before the sun, and Bodi follows scent trails into the brush.

This morning we walk down to the lake head where three loons float high in the water, still only shadows in the fog. At the little store, two men chat, drink first coffees from paper cups, cigaret-grizzled voices bantering. Bodi visits, hopes for dropped crumbs. Across the road, 10 crows are raucous, flap up out of newly bare tree branches, settle back again. We watch them for a while.

And then the first light comes. Tree colors blush into the lake.

But I miss the shadowy world. I miss missing you. I liked being broken open and pressed down, down onto that dull blade of loss. I liked the quivering jelly-fleshed realness. The mystery breathing down my neck. I liked my heart wrenched open, and the flood, the sea of feelings washing over me.

I liked the sinking down.

Now, I’m okay, I guess. I’m getting used to the blanketed everydayness of you being gone. This morning I love the beauty of first light, the colors coming back to trees, to the water, the sand. My body emerging out of shadows.

But the longing lingers for those darker times when I was still waiting for you.

On Identity

Reflections

The rupture of the love room after my aunt died lead me to explore my identity: who was I, if not her niece? What had our family lost, in losing her? Who would remember what we had been, if she was gone? And how would we go forward, alone? How would I go forward, alone?

I’m not sure why this search for identity erupted from the chaos of loss. I had a happy life: a circle of friends I had known for years; a small and close community; a sweet place to live; a job I loved; daughters who lived nearby. But my aunt’s death shifted a foundation stone upon which my okayness in the world had been built, and I was adrift.

In her blog on being a young widow, Emily Clark writes: “There is a startling identity vacuum that accompanies loss…..At best I was broken. At worst, I didn’t exist at all.” When my friend Eleanor lost her husband of 50 years, she went to the grocery store after the funeral, and came home with nothing. She didn’t know what to buy, she said. So much of her shopping had revolved around what her husband liked; what they had liked, together. It took her several trips before she could buy something for just herself to eat.

I think that, in some mysterious way, our skin, our whole being, is married to who and what we love. The love room becomes a place where we sink roots, share habits, learn to trust what’s around us. Our identity doesn’t stand alone; it is shored up and anchored by those who share our lives.

I’m curious about how others handle this unraveling of identity in the aftermath of loss –

On Mapping Grief

Reflections

 

In charting each step of these after-years, maybe I’ve laid down a map—small footsteps of a lurching heart after the firestorm of loss. Some have been sweet; some grueling. Some, pressed so close to Mystery, I could barely breathe. Some, lost, even though I’ve tried to keep track.

***

This whole unfolding of what comes after love and loss has been so much more than I can say. Almost more than I can bear, though the bearing is an odd, joyous tenderness I wouldn’t have missed for the world.

***

There is this trail I am laying down, this packet of notes: small, rounded pebbles of patience you could travel across, if only you would.

On Patience

Reflections

One of the hardest things was being patient with the process of loss after my aunt died. No matter how tired I felt sometimes with the gray cloud or the wrenching loss or the social inconvenience of grief, I could not rush things along or stop paying attention. Even when I came to what seemed like an “end,” both to the process and the writing, something kept drawing me on – my heart kept lurching in her direction – the little letters kept wanting to be written. I decided to keep watch, to jot down what was unfolding and see where it led. I began to trust the process, even though it felt long and repetitive. I found that grief had a timing of its own, and I wanted to follow that ragged, luminous trail to whatever the end of the journey turned out to be.