Careo

The dog I was stalking at the humane society is gone. I’m glad that she found a home, yet I’m a little sad that it wasn’t in mine. Nayda, however, will remain as thrilled as a little princess kitty in a four-bedroom house can be, owning every sunny spot in the joint. Maybe it’s good she’s a persnickety cat, or I’d go broke buying birdseed and hay and kibble and more. Why I’m not on a farm is beyond me. And, of course, as the last day of a year dictates, I question why I live as I do and not as I dream. Again w/the nostalgia. I bore even myself.

New Year’s Eve. And I chose to be home in pajama pants beneath a Mexican blanket, readying myself for some episodes of The Wire, Rome, and maybe the movie the boys bought me for Christmas: Year One. On the bookshelf next to me, Absalom, Absalom! rests on top of (or hides) Your Defiant Teen: 10 Steps to Resolve Conflict and Rebuild Your Relationship. Admitting that I own this book—even to this miniscule but awesome audience (most of whom already love me)—makes me cringe.

Why am I thinking of it now? And why is it hiding under the book I’d rather read? Well, I suppose it’s because it is NYE, and I decided that I’d love nothing more than to spend the last day of 2011 with my sons—keeping myself out of trouble, making sure they stay out of trouble, and toasting a mimosa (two weaker than one) after a night of cards and movies—but, as it has happened SO many times this year, we woke, we argued, and we won’t be playing cribbage or laughing anytime soon.

All year, I’ve been meaning to read the embarrassing *gulp* self-help book, and all year I’ve been too busy or stubborn (hence no cribbage?) or ashamed that I still haven’t learned how to fix things on my own. I grew up in a house where weakness of any kind was simply frowned upon. Of my father’s many mantras, “it’s all a mind game” sticks with me even though I now find it to be absurd. In fact, most people in my family suffer from severe anxiety. Previous generations attempted to drink this better, but more recently they’ve opted for the somewhat healthier lifestyle of medication. While I feel grateful that I don’t suffer from severe anxiety, I’m also not immune to sadness or suffering, yet I seem to have internalized this notion that I can fix it myself (i.e. without meds or books or guidance of any kind).

The rational part of me knows that if a pill helps, it helps. Likewise: if a book has helpful suggestions, great. If testimonials from strangers who share in the struggles of parenting (who seem normal and not entirely to blame for their chaotic families or troubled teens) will help me to feel a bit less guilty and alone in this lonely house, I can suck it up.

Sometimes, I suppose, all we can ask for is empathy, even if it comes from strangers. And even with those we love, sometimes it’s all we can give. Maybe it’s all we really have to offer. Today, one of my dearest friends is going through something I’ve been through too many times, and the worst part about understanding it isn’t that I’ve ached, too, but is knowing that there’s nothing I can do or say to make anything better for her.

Her grandfather, who is a man in some ways like my father—prideful and strong and against displaying weakness—is ill and ready to stop fighting for life. Frankly, that’s a very brave decision in a lot of ways, for a man like him (and really for any breathing being). Like I told my friend, perhaps this will be his last—if hardest, most humbling & important—lesson in life. None of us have control, even when we think we do. Maybe especially then.

What I do know, as I’ve said in a previous post, is that dying seems to me to be the easy part. Surviving—saying goodbye to those who you love—is the hard part.

I remember when my grandmother, who was my best friend, died at 85 in a nursing home bed. For the week before she went, I spent as much time with her as I could (as a full-time undergrad, a half-time employee, and a full-time single mom). One afternoon, a few days after she’d stopped speaking and eating, I crawled into her skinny bed with her. It was hard to know what she was thinking (she may have thought I was a crazy little bitch, hopping into her bed like that), so when she started making an O with her mouth, she might have been trying to say no, or ouch you’re on my damn leg, but for whatever reason I thought—knowing her to be the Catholic woman she was—that she wanted me to say the Lord’s Prayer. It was a prayer I’d said every night of my young girlhood, per my mother’s routine before kissing me goodnight, but it had been years since I’d recited it aloud.

It’s a simple prayer, I know, but in the strangeness and sadness of the moment I forgot a line. I’m sure it didn’t matter to Grandma, but I sort of knew it then, and I’ll certainly always remember it. It’s damn hilarious. Now. Poor woman—lying there without voice enough to correct her silly granddaughter who couldn’t even get the Lord’s Prayer right. Jesus, I miss her face. The feeling of being so sure that I knew another human well enough to know that was what she wanted—those words, my face next to hers in some of our last quiet moments.

I wasn’t there the night she died. I was late leaving home. I was so.fucking.angry about it, speeding over the tower drive bridge toward a sliver of moon, that bright eye closing, and I screamed and cried and slammed my palms against the steering wheel. The hospice nurse said she resisted a bit in the end, as if she were trying to take another breath but couldn’t.

Maybe the body will always fight for more air. Maybe even those of us most ready to relinquish life from our minds can’t make our bodies agree. Or maybe we do wait sometimes. Maybe Grandma was, knowing that it was important for me to hold her hand or for her that I was holding it. How can I know? How can I say to my dear friend that this won’t hurt more than anything before has hurt? That’s the part that breaks my heart. Because we each have to brave it alone, ultimately.

I can say that her granddad, at 89, has lived a good long life (like my Grandma), and giving in to time is something each of us has to do in our way in our own moment. Still I know that doesn’t make it any easier to say goodbye. And no matter what I say—no matter how many people share their grief, knowing that empathy is comforting—grieving is still the loneliest enterprise I know.

Hell—today, driving down the mountain after dropping off the boys to snowboard, I saw a skier hitchhiking, as people often are, and I thought about picking him up. I could say I didn’t because I was crying, but that’s not entirely true. At first, the loneliest part of me thought, maybe even a ride down with a friendly stranger would be nice. Then I thought, nah—he’s probably so nice he’d leave me breathing.

Sometimes, life does, as my friend said today, suck balls. What can we do but share? And remember, as much for our selves as for others. If life is any kind of mind game, it’s about learning to bully away the ache and shoving to the front those happy blunders (like bungled prayers), and—for me, in this coming year—it will be about how to find happiness again where I’ve decided there’s little more than despair some days. It will be about learning to ask for help, even from strangers, if it will make me feel less alone. It will be to recognize my need is not weakness. I have to remind myself the pendulum’s still swinging, and that what hurts now won’t always be that way. That what once made me ache, oddly, makes my life more full now.

That O my grandmother made; the countless times I walked into Western Village to find her reading some smutty novel (often upside down) and marking her page with a nickel she’d won at bingo when she looked up so happy to see me walk in; the time I hoisted her from her wheelchair (with only one leg to steady herself and one arm with feeling that she could use to hold on) and plopped her in the front seat of my car, so we could ride with the windows down and the wind in our hair: that’s what matters. I knew her, and she knew me. How fortunate.

Maybe the Latin careo is the perfect word for missing: in need of, free from, without—a word that tries to express both sides of itself.

Life is up and down, joy and despair, and, friend, I know you know what is and isn’t fortunate, and that right now it has to hurt like fucking hell. It might not flip in a matter of eight hours or a week, but it won’t always be that way, I promise. You are a lucky granddaughter, and what a lucky man granddad is to have lived long enough to see his great grandbaby and know what a lovely woman you are. And you are. All my love as we move from one time into another. Together.

May each of us lean as we need to.

Thanks for sharing with me and tolerating my excessive sentiment tonight. What else would anyone rather be doing on New Year’s, right?

Happy 2012, everyone. Be safe!