It’s so simple. All I do is activate Songbird and slip into this space and the fog creeps back in. I seem to possess great sadness, maybe I seek it, maybe I always have. I used to call it my cosmic melancholia, a poet’s dressing: it kept the albatross off my neck. But fancy always fades-it’s simply sadness. And I find it as fast as it finds me.
Not too long ago there was a medium blue, modest by current terms, SUV cruising along one of the US highways. Inside was a man, a woman-wife, and a dog. The little team looked quite content:in retrospect, it was. As for the married pair, once you pass the second decade, most discontents dilute. Considering the age in which we struggled, like many of you, to meet deadlines of various nature, we both seemed to simply want the comfort, sometimes just presence, of the other. Add an incredibly animated canine and there was the package, and packages are wonderful because they surely come with insulation, in this instance, insulation against a increasingly disturbing world. So although we each stood post at a point in that triangle, we always, always, faced towards the center. We could have met our final sunset that very way, had we only met it together.
The man died first. He had been playing poker with his body for some time, prone to corporeal appeasements, and a typical midlife screening brought cardio strugglings front stage. My husband, always the wit, dipped disaster in a joke the same way he dipped shrimp in sauce. Every night he swallowed a handful of medications so that every morning he could get on up and smoke another cigarette. He actually carried on like that for a time, until, until that horrible afternoon in a Northwestern November where gray sky trumps nothing but more of itself. Death was instantaneous and God forgive me, mercifully overwhelming: there was no goodbye. He died in the driver’s seat of that modest, blue SUV, with his wife on the passenger side, watching. The pain has remained ulcerous to this day.
A little over a year later, dog and I rearranged the longstanding seating arrangement in that car and headed for a new home. A pressing anxiety became constant with both of us: I didn’t really want to be anywhere without her and she rushed any and all exits in hopes of going wherever with me. I grew more despondent towards the world whose interaction my betters said I sorely needed; she became more insistent on my exclusive attention. Again, facing towards the center, resisting a glance at the third angle, now broken open and leaking, leaking.
Together we worked our way through numerous rubber balls and even more bottles of wine. Sometimes magically sunny days in that emerald backyard fooled me. I told her he’d have been pleased with us, saliva smothered toy, slurred speech and all. Then her cancer came. More pills, damn them all. She couldn’t really digest anything. I got on that tortuous tightrope balancing her pain against mine. But I was raised by compassionate people, and the vet came to the house to lay her down.
Now I am in the car alone. I talk to her: who’s surprised? She gets a regular washing, sometimes lead-plus fuel, and periodic visits to the dealer’s service unit, where the payout seems to consistently align with her increasing decline. Someone or other mentions trade-in and I hiss.
The story of us has been under assault for too long. I hurt and I am beginning to recognize a tired, a what’s-the-use, but curiously, a quiet. I have been nagging at myself for months to pull words from my past and my pain so that the magic of what I had and what I lost would be somewhere in print. (May powers bless my kids for making this electronically possible.)
Ironically, but a little artistically, the irritation was high today. It’s Valentine’s Day, and I am not with them, out there, wherever, disengaged, disembowled, whatever. There is no weight to the memory of one.
Life is precious and there are many popping out of nothing to seize it. But some see a rhythm in an early letting go.
My sadness will cease when it finds the courage.
There is no weight to the memory of one. There is no weight to the memory of two. Sorry about the hole in the leather. I wish it had been his leg instead, then he could have sworn at the dog.