It was just one night, and one night, measured against the course of a lifetime, doesn’t seem all that significant. But it was a dark night, and I have never been able to shed the weight of the memory of it. I have never been able to put it, as they say, in perspective. I never will.

Jasper was not quite six months old. I had not slept in weeks. I lay awake as he stirred and fussed, bracing myself for the moment when I would have to rouse myself fully to nurse him or change him or soothe him. The darkness that night seemed particularly black, the kind of black that has a density, a weight. To say that it felt like it was closing in would be to use a trope that gets overused when writers are trying to describe dark nights and oppressive fear, but in this case it was true. The darkness was closing in on me like a heavy fog, like an army of ghosts, like a slick of oil, like night made solid and sinister. I couldn’t breathe. Jasper continued to fuss. I fought the dark.

I fought the dark. I think that I won. Even at the time, I wasn’t sure. I’m still not sure. (continue reading…)

I was scared to come back to the Internet this week. I was scared, because I thought that I couldn’t come back unless I explained why I’d had to take a break, and explaining why I’d had to take a break was something that I did not want to do, because it was just too complicated and messy and because it seemed that explaining the complicatedness and messiness would have to involve talking about all the things that I didn’t want to talk about, and the desire to not talk about those things was why I had to take a break in the first place, so. (continue reading…)

(No, really. It’s an actual holiday. You should probably take the day off.)

(I’m taking the day off. I’m actually going to take a couple of days off. I need a little break from the Internet. My heart is heavy and my head is full and I just don’t know how to put it into words. I don’t know if I can put it into words. If I should. So. I need a few days. That’s all.)

I am struggling to remind myself that it is spring. I can smell it in the warm rain and hear it in the call of the robins plucking earthworms from my garden and see it in the green shoots pushing their way up out of the earth, but I am having trouble feeling it.

My husband tells me that he worries about me, and I tell him that there is a difference between the oppressive dark that settles upon one in a depression, and unhappiness, generally. I can be depressed, I tell him, and not be, strictly speaking, sad, or unhappy. I tell him that there is a difference between the dark clouds of depression, which settle upon the horizon of my psyche and linger there, casting shadows, and the rain that comes with sadness, that comes in short or long bursts, that falls lightly or heavily, that pelts my heart and dampens my spirit. And unhappiness, I say, is another thing entirely. I might be depressed, I said. I also might be sad, because the sadness – the sadness related to grief, the sadness related to dread and worry – it comes and it goes and it doesn’t announce itself. But I am not unhappy, in any meaningful sense. I don’t think. I can still smile. I still laugh. It’s just that, sometimes, I am overcome by the dark. (continue reading…)

This image pretty much sums up how I’m feeling these days:

Smashed Kitteh, Found Curbside On George Street One Early Spring Morning (mixed media, 2010, artist unknown)

I don’t whether it’s the shattered glass, the intimations of alcohol dependency, the desecrative wad of gum stuck to the frame, or the fact that someone had a framed picture of a kitten in a highball glass that somehow got smashed and then dispatched to the curbside to be collected as trash that makes this image so, I don’t know, sad, but the details are, I think, beside the point. I am neither a kitten nor alcohol dependent, nor do I have a wad of gum stuck to any part of me, but I can still identify with the feelings of misplacedness, of lostness, of existential confusion, and these are the feelings with which I imagine that kitten – stuffed in a highball glass and left alone at the curb – is struggling, if that kitten had feelings, which it doesn’t, because that poster is almost certainly circa 80’s, which means that that kitten is dead.

Tuesday is shaping up to be a really cheerful day.

******

(I’m okay, just feeling kind of dark. Existential confusion can do that to you.)

(Am maybe going to crawl back under the covers. With a cupcake. And a Siamese cat. A live one.)

Alexander McQueen died this week. He committed suicide, and he did so, in part, it seems, because of his bereavement over the death of his mother earlier this month.

This is going to sound awful, terrible, extreme, insane… but… I think that I know – maybe, a little bit – how he felt. (continue reading…)

My husband had a vasectomy last year. There was a lot of discussion around it – another baby would not have been unwelcome, and so I wasn’t eager to close off the possibility – but we both knew that it would be madness for me to risk repeating the more or less pretty awfully terrible anxieties and stresses and mental and physical health concerns that I endured in my pregnancy and delivery and post-partum experience with Jasper. “You can’t go through that again,” my husband said, repeatedly, last spring. “We can’t go through that again.

He was right, of course. The pregnancy with Jasper wreaked havoc on my mind and body, as did his birth, as did the post-partum aftermath of that pregnancy and birth. In many ways, I’m still recovering. But still, I have moments in which the loss of the possibility of another pregnancy, another birth, another baby weighs so heavily upon me that it’s difficult to breath, in which the closing off of that future feels a little bit like heartbreak. (continue reading…)

I think that I’m stuck in the denial stage of grief. It’s not that I deny the fact that my father is dead – his ashes sit in a box on my mantle, surrounded, at the moment, by a few Christmas ornaments and my kids’ picture with Santa and Emilia’s bardo-drawing – it’s that I can’t wrap my head around the fact – is it a fact? – that his death is the end, that his life is over, that I’ll never see or speak with him again. The absoluteness of it all, the finality: I’m having trouble accepting this. I can’t accept this. My heart aches from its stubborn refusal to accept this.

(continue reading…)

I wanted this year to start with laughter and smiles and cookies and fizzy soda. I didn’t want confetti and champagne and fireworks and streamers – I just wanted smiling. I just wanted this year to start happy.

I’m still trying to find the happy. Yes, my heart lifts when I hug my children and my lips curve when they giggle but the last week of last year and the first week of this year have been covered in a thick blanket of fever and snot and heartache and it’s been hard to find the laughter. And although Nyquil takes the edge off the fever and snot, there aren’t sufficient meds for heartache, Ativan and Xanax notwithstanding. Last week was much, much harder than I thought it would be – doing the final clean-up of my dad’s place in the week between Christmas and New Year’s was, in hindsight, less than ideal timing. Coping with the heart-punches of the holidays was difficult enough without throwing myself into the line of fire of the gut-kicks and soul-wedgies that came with seeing the last of his things carted away, his home wiped clean of his presence.

(continue reading…)

Christmas has come and gone and we are still picking figurative tinsel out of our hair, even as we move forward into a difficult week, clinging to the hangover of joy so that whatever pain the next few days bring is blunted by its residue.

We’ve come west to try to finish the work of clearing out my father’s home, of getting closer to closure with the business surrounding his death. My husband is doing the heavy lifting – the packing, the moving, the cleaning – and leaving to me the sorting – the physical and emotional sorting – that will, hopefully, bring the aforementioned closure, closure that I am not certain that I want, but still.

I cannot go to his home this week. I cannot do it. I am ashamed of this, a little, but it is necessary, so I am trying to forgive myself. Instead of me going to Dad’s stuff, his stuff – the few remaining things that might matter, the stuff that my husband will sift and sort and set aside – will come to me in the lair that I have fashioned for myself in my mother’s home some miles away, and in the meantime I will fret and fuss and worry that some precious object – some note, some stone, some photograph, some feather, some fine bit of detritus – will be misplaced or overlooked or tucked in the wrong box and sent to the thrift store or the recycling box and be lost forever. I will, worry, I will worry constantly. But that is also why I cannot go, because were I to go I would linger over every last spoon and teacup and paper clip and oil change receipt and spend an age agonizing over whether I could bear to let these – these remaining artifacts of my father’s life – go.

So, no. I am struggling to keep a distance, some little distance, between myself and the things that are, right now, too difficult, and working to distract myself with diaper changes and music shows and marathon cookie baking sessions and visits to see the horses at the ranch and eating my mother’s lasagna. And I am tending my grief carefully and quietly, keeping it well watered with the last drops of holiday joy. And hoping that I will be okay.

The view from the road between my mother’s home and my father’s. Desolate, and breathtaking.

I don’t know how much I will write this week. I may need to write. I may need to not write. We’ll see.