Grief as loss, as love

The body really does keep score.

It’s been 12 years since I started teaching, so 13 since the last time I didn’t. Summer’s last yawns dovetail with the dawning of a new school year, a rhythm I no longer keep. I don’t have three classes in a row like last year. No office hours. No calendars filled with plans for this semester. My body’s yet to adapt to the loss of routine; some noble gland keeps pumping out pedagogy and lesson plans when I’ve nowhere to use them. It’s like restless leg syndrome in the brain: a whole lotta involuntary work using up bandwidth to no real end.

It was the same with music. I went to college to be a film composer. Even after dropping that, my brain never quit; it hasn’t for nearly 30 years. It’s always dropping ideas, while driving, while talking to someone, while trying to nap. Try “Paranoid Android” in the style of Chopin’s Revolutionary etude. Descending minor 2nds can be made to sound like flies buzzing. Despite using the exact same notes, C-sharp major suggests a color like dioptase, whereas D-flat major evokes citrine. Always nudging, incessant, like the old Eric Idle bit. I suppose that must be love. For what is love, if not persevering?

The last time I saw my aunt, I brought a couple rocks to show her. I never got to. One was larimar, a gemstone found only in the Barahona province in the Dominican Republic. One reason I collect rocks and fossils is they’re as close as I get to traveling — conventionally and through time. I have pieces from every populated continent, from as far away as Mars and as far removed as four billion years ago, before the moon existed. Larimar makes me think of my aunt. One of a kind from Puerto Rico and Spanish Harlem. Look at that blue.

Photo credit: mindat.org

I also brought a piece of trinitite, because it shared her birth month. In recent years I grew to really cherish connections made with her. A diner I would have passed a million times without seeing is now forever seared in my memory after she talked about how nice the women who work there always were to her. The last time we ate together, I learned of her love for monarch butterflies — instant sear. The growing realization I’d soon run out of things to learn from her made each one increasingly precious.

Does your brain ever struggle with something most people you know don’t? Like, I say “Bless you” not only after someone sneezes, but after they cough. Squirrels and chipmunks: for some reason, I always need an extra beat to confirm it’s a chipmunk. Same with moths and butterflies.

The other day I was looking for a picture to show my niece when I passed one of her helping me plant a Japanese red maple tree back when she was 2-3 years old. That same day we got a visit from what I initially thought was a rather striking butterfly but eventually learned was a rather striking emperor moth. This one, actually.

That same niece just started college, an arrhythmia after the routine of seeing her after school most of the last two years. Those times spent with her and my other niece helped a healing process I badly needed after my engagement ended and my life went upside down. And at first it also provided a sense of minimal continuity: as long as my oldest niece was still in secondary school, that meant my other niece and my kid — both younger — both were, too, and therefore both still categorizable as “young.” Ahh, but blink and how much you miss!

I remember my kid starting kindergarten, their backpack being bigger than they were. Now they’re closer to graduating than they are to that memory. Our contact has been reduced to FB messaging, our past smaller and farther as the future grows murkier. So I soak up every word they gift me. My heart’s winterized. It’s learned to stretch.

After their first day of school, the kiddo sent me two paragraphs about it. They hit like rain in the desert, wild joy as quenching — but careful; best make it last! Who knows when the next will be? Or if? The older my kid gets plus the longer we’re separated equals . . . you know. You know the fear. I don’t have to say it.

I’m grieving different losses, varied in degree. I miss my aunt. She’s the first person I’ve ever really known, loved and lost, a privilege with a high interest rate on the back end: making it this long without losing a loved one likely means a lotta loss coming, and sooner than later. I didn’t remember this line from WandaVision until just now, but it’s something I’m learning from each area of grief, and trying to apply to others.

“I’ve never experienced loss,” Vision says, “ . . . but what is grief, if not love persevering?”

It hits in waves, with no warning. I’m researching basketball stats at two in the morning, then suddenly I’m in tears. I want my cousins to hear their mother laugh again. I want my uncle to feel her in his arms, feel her taking him in hers. I want to wake up in the morning and make pancakes for my kid. They won’t. He won’t. I won’t. Some losses are final.

Grief as phantom limb, then: a persistence of memory so powerful the onset of its absence feels less familiar and thus less likely than the presence persisting, even when the mind knows it does not. Talking to my aunt? Making my niece a grilled cheese? That delicious weight of my kid resting against me? Those losses fill the space their existence once did, and will until the loss becomes familiar enough to no longer notice. At which point that space is re-claimed by memories, which really are stories, and then stories, which really are love.

Once my aunt went from the hospital to hospice care, I started seeing monarch butterflies more and more. This is around when they head south for the winter. Every one I see seems a little miracle. Get enough together and as the video captures, they create a greater miracle. I’m learning it can work the same with people, and comforted by how often it’s true of love.