Most of yesterday was rough. It was almost worst than the first day after I lost Buddy. Actually it was worse.
I think after all of the googling and reading and writing and diving in to it and basically just giving myself permission to be stuck solid, I don’t know, something started to shift late afternoon.
I had sent Steve over to my brother’s as I just couldn’t breathe with another person breathing in the same room. I don’t know how better else to explain it.
He in his non defensive way just said “whatever you need” and headed over there. Of course I found out later he dove in to various chores around my brother’s house. John’s house is going to be so spic and span and organized when he gets home I’m sure he won’t be able to find anything since the chaos has been ordered. 😉
not an actual photo but close 😉
Mid afternoon, I decided I needed the rest of the weekend to myself to recover. That I couldn’t handle any interaction at all. This is a way I’ve coped my entire life; retreating, alone.
(I almost never use a semi colon, I hope that was the proper placement 😉 )
Around 3pm I phoned Steve up and said I wanted to get the other two cats moved over here and then if he could head home for the rest of the weekend I didn’t think I would be good company to hang out with. He said he understood and that he’d be over shortly with Coco in the carrier. Then we’d go back together and get the Nutball Lazlo who I’d not forgotten him breaking his own paw in the transfer over there freaking out in the carrier resulting in an ER visit and $300 Vet bill. We figured that one was a two person job.
Steve came back with Coco, grabbed his stuff then we went together to get Laz. On the way there I asked him to stop at Dutch Brothers and got us both a coffee (well Steve a Chai) and I don’t know, I think that’s where the thawing began out there in that 100 something degree muggy heat.
Steve started making me laugh.
that’s Buddy’s tail wrapped around his neck just last weekend 😦
By the time we retrieved Lazlo and got him in the car (and I saw all the work Steve had done at John’s place) I’d changed my mind and asked him to stay. He laughed and just said “Ok, I can if that’s what you want….women!”. We both laughed. But he wasn’t judging me. He understood. He lost his beloved Duke just earlier this year. I don’t have to explain any of this to him.
For the first time in a long time, in a moment like this, I felt like it would be better for me to be with someone than be alone. This was kind of a breakthrough.
I reflected on my promise to Buddy, about how I would do my best to live on his legacy. How he moved from a beginning life of terror to one of bonding.
Maybe this was a first step for me.
Steve ran back to the Redbox and got two suspense movies, Argo (so good) and The Call (so creepy!) and we got back to our laughing, eating hot fudge Sundaes and freaking out on the couch to edge of your seat suspense. He says I make him laugh in a way most people don’t. I think it’s because I bounce off his humor.
Or maybe because I’m 1000% myself around him. He’s seen me at my absolute worse, unshowered, no makeup, clothes damp with Lazlo’s cat pee from his car freakout in my lap (even though the towel), grief stricken and he still likes me.
We watched the three cats get acquainted again. I also saw Sabine come out of her freeze on that one dining room chair she slung her head over for hours. For two days.
Even if she was hissing at Lazlo , she was moving.
I woke up this morning after a dream where I was really happy. Sabine was next to me on the bed.
So here I sit, Lazlo purring and kneading the back of the chair behind me-Buddy’s favorite spot, Coco near the window as usual and Sabine walking around negotiating her new normal in her own home. She and Coco ate breakfast side by side this morning.
Steve’s upstairs still sleeping. It was a late night double feature.
And today I’m the one who has plans for us.
And they involve walking, exploring, laughing and eating. And getting out of the house/cave.
We’re all coming alive again.
It’s a paradox, this freezing/thawing business. The more deeply you go in to the freeze space, the more committed you are to it, the more swift the thawing.
I don’t know about you, but I’ll take my pain now rather than later these days.
There’s too much to live for. Just as all who have passed before me would want for me.
Yesterday I was so flattened I felt like I was hit by a fleet of Mack Trucks.
I felt basically immobilized most of the day not wanting to talk to anyone, interact, think, decide, eat, move.
Steve is visiting and I asked him to go tend to John’s cats at his condo as I just couldn’t tolerate any movement in the air around me at all. I wrote my blog, which was like climbing a mountain but opening portals for tears at the same time. It gave me something to do with this constellation of freezing and agony but it was about all I could do. Sabine came down and sat across from me. She wasn’t eating or moving either. I remember a long moment or series of moments where we just sat there, frozen in our own igloos, staring at each other across the room. Blank stares.
Like, what now?
I ate an avocado all day until I realized mid afternoon I needed to get to the bank. I got thirsty but was too frozen to get up and get myself a drink. I thought of putting away my clean clothes but when I realized just walking upstairs was too exhausting forcing me to sit on the stairs half way that I’d postpone that task.
I called Sabine’s name to see if she would come to me but she just stared. I remembered she usually came when I called Buddy’s name so I called his name. Then felt destroyed hearing his name in that falsetto coming from my throat. I want to call his name. I want to keep calling it. I don’t want that sound to disappear from my home. But disappear it will. I can’t call Sabine Buddy’s name to keep him alive. It’s torturous. It’s not fair to her.
Yesterday, feeling so immobilized, uncoordinated, frozen, numb got me thinking about an NPR interview I’d heard years ago about the physiological implications of grieving. People tend to think it’s a head and heart situation, that just our thoughts and feelings are disturbed. But I heard this author, Joan Didion, speaking about the physiology involved in grief and how deeply it affects our entire body. I thought I’d revisit that theme today seeing I’m smack dab in the middle of it. This morning I woke up in to it again. This is a hole that sucks you in to it until you’ve been patched up enough to surface again and you really have no say in the matter.
I think any deep loss resurrects the vestiges of any prior loss that’s been lurking, on pause, waiting for an opportunity for a portal to slip through so it can find some light of day. This is also good and just damn hard.
About six years after Cindy’s death, I received news of my dear friend Charlie Carter’s sudden, entirely unexpected demise while I was on vacation. I was flattened for three days up there at the beach over Charlie. He was a client/friend of mine and I had no idea how deeply he’d become embedded in my heart until he was gone. It was terrible, sudden, shocking. It was also hard to explain to my family who I was there to party and relax with that I was having a hard time even getting out of bed. When I came home I remembered the grief support group I’d been in five years prior and enrolled myself again. I knew Charlie’s death was digging up roots of Cindy’s…at least. It was an extreme reaction.
How ironic that I was enrolled in that weekly support group when Benny got sick and I had to put him down. So there was a plan after all because I had my group of people surrounding me to break down with about that. Fathers who’d lost children, older folks having lost parents, the whole range. I do remember an extremely Bible based woman in there who was very involved in the church. This group was associated with a church that I didn’t go to but a woman I’d met, Carol Fornoff who’d lost her daughter to homicide, invited me with open arms.
The Bible lady had lost a parent I think. She was holding on to her Bible for dear life to get through it. But she told me I shouldn’t grieve my cat, that cats didn’t have a soul, that they blah blah blah her interpretation of the Bible on pets. She genuinely thought she was helping me. I sat there on the inside saying “shut the fuck up Lady, you have no idea what you are talking about” but realized I was someone else’s house, that this was their religion so I wasn’t there to make waves. I was so grateful when others in the group spoke up and derailed that and stuck up for me in my grief of Benny saying their interpretation of the Bible was different but we weren’t there for that reason. We were there to support each other. It all just subsided quietly.
Last thing you want to do is get in a fight in your grieving support group over a cat. We were all screwed up so there’s an opening and tolerance and acceptance around that. I didn’t hold it against her. The fierce tsunami of grief has it’s own way of making it’s presence known no matter what anyone says anyway.
Poking around online searching words like “physiology of grief” I came back on Joan Didion’s NPR interview which I’ll share here. Her book “The Year of Magical Thinking” quickly became her biggest best seller. She writes about the sudden loss of her beloved husband of 40 years, John Edward Dunne, another writer. Her daughter was acutely ill in the hospital at the same time and died shortly thereafter. She’s another one who knows of what she speaks.
Both segments of the Fresh Aire interviews are found here:
(I also found the text there worth reading although haven’t made it through all of it yet)
I’ve not read her book but have been reading excerpts online all morning. It’s just what I’m experiencing and writing about.
She talks about “processing everything by writing it down” which I so relate to right now. I’ve journalled before but there’s something about this blogging that is taking me wider and deeper in to what I need to find….what I need to discover.
She talks about how she used advice from Emily Post of all people about the physiological effects of grieving—how the body gets cold, how the digestion shuts down, how others can best support people in this kind of frozen moment which I think is so important.
You can hear her speak about these things here (skip to 20:35 in the first segment to hear that interesting part):
I love how she uses the word “practical” in her description of Post. I’ve used that term recently myself. Practical support.
This is another interview I found with Joan Didion that I think is worth watching. It’s shorter:
In my exploring, I also ran across this article which describes the physiological elements that happen with deep grief. Here is one excerpt:
Because we sense that we are in danger, the body mobilizes to protect itself from the intruder or, if that’s not possible, to escape to safety. But loss is no hostile tribe that we can guard the camp against; nor is it an enemy that we can run from. Therefore we are caught in a state of tension. Our brain has stimulated us to take action; but, since we cannot undo the loss there is at this moment no action we can take. We are, therefore, held taut. This means that our bodies are under enormous stress…Dr. Beverley Raphael warns us that “bereavement may also be fatal.” (Excerpt from Seven Choices by Elizabeth Harper Neeld)
Grieving is hard work and takes a huge toll on our bodies. When we are responding to a loss, the part of our brain where responses are integrated increases the production of CRH, a hormone that produces anxiety-like symptoms. Emergency-mobilizing chemicals are released. As our stress increases, the chemical levels increase; and our central nervous system becomes highly stimulated. Our breathing may become defective. Biological rhythms of sleeping and eating are disturbed. Our digestion, metabolism, circulation and respiration change. Our ability to concentrate and pay attention decreases.
Grieving can actually change the environment in the belly, intestines and bowels. “I feel as if I’ve been hit in the stomach,” we might say. “My stomach is in knots,” someone else may offer as a description of the physical stress triggered by a loss. These reactions can actually rearrange the muscles and sometimes even our body’s skeleton, in particular patterns for particular lengths of time. We may make sounds, like a moan or a growl. Our brain produces pictures that upset us even more.
Often the physical stress of grieving will cause us to lose coordination. We fall more easily. We don’t run our daily lives as smoothly as we did. Even simple things seem hard to do. Our brain and our eyes don’t coordinate the way they did before the loss. We are prone to have more accidents. We get more colds. Our immune system is compromised. We tire easily.
I really relate to all of this yesterday and today.
In Teri Gross’s second segment of the interview with Didion, she speaks about the theme of her book “magical thinking” and how she couldn’t get rid of his shoes because some part of her developed an “insanity” thinking he was coming back. I don’t think I’ve ever gone that far in any tangible way but I do relate to that in dreams. Where Cindy has come to me in dreams in awkward ways like walking in the courtroom once and down the middle aisle of the courtroom during one of the trials in this strange dreamy way saying “I’m back now…it’s all ok now…this can end now…”.
Then waking up in to the real nightmare. I remember wishing I wouldn’t dream about her because the pain of reality was so not worth any glimpse of her presence. I think I feel differently now. I’ve worked very hard to feel differently about that.
It’s a double edged sword when you think about attempting some kind of connection, some kind of sign they are still around and reaching in to it blindly while at the same time acknowledging they are gone. Many folks are much better at that than I am. I’ve done so desperately at times, such as right before we moved John out here, and I will write about that in another story.
Today I feel like I couldn’t move the corners of my mouth in to a smile even with a forklift. And I’m kind of known for my smile. I feel like I have hooks tethered to boulders holding my mouth in to a deep frown just as my static expression.
I brought Sabine down earlier just to encourage her to eat. She looks at the food, eats a few bites, laps a few sips of water, looks at me, wanders over to the bottom of the stairs and keeps looking up. She just keeps gazing up those stairs looking for someone. With this look of longing in her eyes. I think she possesses that magical thinking Joan Didion talks about. But Buddy didn’t take his last breath in her arms though so she has some catching up to do.
I’m aware of the terrible necessity of cave dwelling, at least for me, going through something like this. I feel raw in every pore of my body. I can handle very very little stimuli right now. It’s all just so jarring.
I guess I will sign off with this poem by my favorite David Whyte. I think I’ve said all I need to for today. And just leave you with this. If you ever judge yourself or have felt judged by another to “just get over it” or “it’s just a cat” or “they’re in a better place” or “isn’t it time for some closure?” maybe you will think of me today writing, grieving for so many things after having slipped through that rabbit hole with Buddy. We never know what that ball of yarn will pick up along the way clinging with it’s own need for air and a reach for a new glimmer of daylight. The well can be deep but so can the healing. Sometimes it’s a wise decision to just sink.
The Well of Grief
Those who will not slip beneath
the still surface on the well of grief
turning downward through its black water
to the place we cannot breathe
will never know the source from which we drink,
the secret water, cold and clear,
nor find in the darkness glimmering
the small round coins
thrown by those who wished for something else.
two innocents 