T-Shirts, Leafblowers and Grief
Volunteering at an event for a local wellness center, a fellow volunteer, an older woman, a bit scattered but friendly asks me if I’m married. When I say, “No, I’m a widow.” She says she is too, asks me how long. Without skipping a beat, she responds, “The second year is the hardest, I think.” I want to disagree, try to think of a reason she is wrong, but I can’t find one. “At least the first year, you have all the logistical and banking crap to concentrate on,” she says with a shrug. Her matter-of-factness irritates me. She doesn’t know me, I think. I’m doing okay, I’m out in the world, I’m doing things.
Why is the second year harder for a widow?
We live in a neighborhood rich with trees. When the leaves fall, they blanket the sidewalk, cover the grass, clog the gutters. The background noise of the whirring charge of the leaf blowers, like a motor boat, the push and shove of the air blowing the leaves into the street or off the sidewalk grated at me. He was home, sick and listless while I shuffled around the apartment trying to give any form of comfort. The futility of blowing leaves, the denial of reality and a reach for control against nature when nature has the upper hand.
Two years later, the sound comes to me and pulls me right back to those sad and long days. Two years later I wonder at what point I realized there was no turning back. I use the metaphor of a tsunami a lot because that is truly what it felt like. To know your most beloved person has stage 4 cancer is one thing, to have everything you have tried stop working, to see it from a distance slowly coming to claim your life is another.
My First Widow Support Group
I went to my first widow support group last week. Others had more recent losses, and with mine being two years, I felt like I should have some insight, some sage wisdom to bring. Instead, I admit that I haven’t cleaned out Daryl’s dresser. All five drawers contain his socks neatly rolled, t-shirts carefully put away never to emerge, jeans, pajamas. I get some comfort from having it filled and tidy, I say. But I wonder what it is that keeps me from just making a clean sweep. I reason with myself, I don’t need to give anything away, I can distribute to friends and family, keep what reminds me most of him.
The truth is a bit more twisted. Every time I look at that dresser, I can pretend he’ll come back to me. The irony is he hated that dresser. I found it for a steal at an antique store and bought it without consulting him first. Two years ago, the day before our anniversary, I started a letter to Daryl and contemplated the dresser:
I’ve kept your phone on the last two months, spending unnecessary money because I dunno, maybe you’ll need it? I’ve put all your clothes away in the heavy old midcentury dresser I pushed on you and we struggled up the stairs with to the old third floor Kensington apartment and I thought “There’s no way childbirth is harder than this.” And you were mad at me for buying it because you “didn’t need it,” but you did need it and now it’s here and you aren’t. But I digress. The dresser is now full of all your t-shirts that I didn’t think you needed and so many socks. Even the mismatched ones. And I look at the dresser in the morning and I imagine you’re still singing in the shower and you’ll come in and stand in your towel and try to pick out something to wear. So, there it is, like a f-ing Smithsonian piece of grief, this stupid heavy dresser that nearly killed at least one of us. That’s what you get for leaving me behind, you get a memorial dresser. I hope you feel honored.
Time Does Funny Things During Grief
The first year is a fog, one day tied to another day and another. You fill it as quickly as you can and try to move through it, exhausted and elated when night falls as if someone is counting the days you have survived since the loss. As if the days can stack up and offer you solace, protection, security. Anyone in grief knows that all of this can be blasted to smithereens in an instant. A few weeks ago, it was accidentally downloading his WhatsApp and the stream of messages popping up from friends all over the world wishing him well, saying good-bye the week he died. I was a sobbing, snotty mess.
This weekend, I was cleaning out my closet, making room for winter sweaters and decided this was it, the time was nigh. I could no longer justify shoving my clothes into plastic bins under the bed when there was a perfectly good dresser right there that contained the clothes of a person who was no longer on this mortal plane.
As soon as I grabbed a row of t-shirts, I felt that familiar heaviness, a finality. He loved t-shirts that supported local businesses, or Richmond teams and organizations, or just had a message. Reading each one—RVA All Day, Plan 9 Records, Obama Elementary School, and one of his all-time favorites from his local soccer league, “In Y’all We Trust…” Crying, I put them into a plastic bin as if I was burying my childhood pet. Like his bike which he loved and rode all over town, becoming a familiar figure on the streets, his t-shirts were him, spoke to his personality, his love for the life he lived and his support for friends and organizations.
He had a lot of t-shirts. Too many for one man, really. Even as I demanded he give some away, complained he had too many, now I can’t part with them. Gone one day, one month, two years, twenty years—there is a beauty in knowing your person can be as alive to you in an object, a moment as if they never left.
The Undertow of Grief is Always There, Always When You Least Expect It
Yesterday, after a fun weekend with a good friend visiting, I could not get myself out of a heavy funk. Truly, like a cloud was following me, one I could not shake. Days like this feel endless, that somehow nothing will ever be fixed, the same or even manageable. The best way I can describe it is if you were on a plane and window was blown out, the power and suction of the reality of the situation threatening to take you with it. But, I managed. I took a nap. I made cookies. I took it slowly. I let myself talk myself out of Halloween plans with friends and back into them again. I gave myself permission to feel like crap and, eventually, the feeling lifted.
Two years and 10 days since Daryl departed this earth he took a good part of me with him, I take comfort in not destroying leaf blowers, Halloween displays and being able to successfully clean out two of his drawers to make room for my sweaters. I don’t know if this is victory or defeat, but I do know that there’s no timeline to grief, when it’s easy or hard. It just is.