grief | scillagrace

I think I have a pretty active dream life. I usually remember something of my sleeping hours upon awakening. Perhaps that indicates the level of my anxieties and neuroses; I’m not sure. Steve says he hardly ever dreams, and he thinks it’s because he is so aware of his conscious mind while he’s awake. Well, fine for you, then. I blink my eyes open and forget where I am. I need decompression time every morning. My dreams almost always include my late husband, who has been dead almost 4 years. It gives me a rather fluid sense of reality. Jim is real and Steve is real, they’re just never real at the same time, in the same place. Is that weird? Oh, probably. I’m getting used to it.

The other thing I do in dreamland is sing. I wake up singing a song, or with a song stuck in my head. This morning, it was “The Rose”, a song Bette Midler recorded some years back. I think I learned it from one of my kid’s elementary school music programs. The line I was stuck on went like this: “Some say love, it is a river, that drowns the tender reed. Some say love, it is a razor, that leaves your soul to bleed. Some say love, it is a hunger, an endless aching need. I say love, it is a flower, and you, its only seed.”

Now why in the world would something like that be dominating my waking transition? I thought about that for a while. Then I began to cry. This is how I know when I’ve hit on some repressed emotion, some way that I think about myself that I don’t like to admit. For some reason, I was associating with that tender reed, drowned in a river of love. I was 15 when I met my husband, 21 when we married, 45 when I was widowed. My youth was engulfed in loving him. I don’t feel a great resonance with the bleeding soul bit. Ah, but the hunger, the aching need; yeah, that gets to me, too. I feel that for my kids as well. I call it “yearning”. I yearn for my kids all the time, no matter where they are. It’s a visceral thing. I once learned in a Bible study that there is a Hebrew word for God’s loving-kindness that translates to a verb form of the same word that’s used for a mother’s womb. Womb-love. God “wombs” us. I “womb” my kids. I also “womb” my dead husband.

Now the last line of that first verse, I will take exception to. “You, its only seed” just sounds too exclusive and attached. It doesn’t fit the scope of the rest of the song, either, in my opinion. Second verse: “It’s the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance; and it’s the dream afraid of waking that never takes a chance. It’s the one who won’t be broken, who cannot learn to give; and the soul afraid of dying who never learns to live.” Okay, you could probably guess that verse gets to me all over (see yesterday’s post). Although, in my case, it’s the heart that once danced, the dream that once dared, the one who gave everything already who is afraid to live again and invest all that…again. So, here’s the key change and the big finish: “When the night has been too lonely and the road has been too long, and you think that love is only for the lucky and the strong, just remember in the winter, far beneath the bitter snows, lies the seed that with the sun’s love, in the spring becomes the rose.” At this point, I want to give credit to Amanda McBroom who wrote these lyrics. Good job. I love the idea of seeds beneath the snow. It appeals to the naturalist in me, even though we STILL don’t have any snow this winter in Wisconsin. I love the idea of hope and new life. And this is where I get to re-write that last line in the first verse. The seed of love isn’t a person. It’s LIFE, life itself.

Steve and I were talking about this yesterday as we drove out to hike the Ice Age trail. He was urging me, again, to talk about what I want in life, how I want to live, why I want the things I might want. “Why do you want to have land and grow food?” I want to nurture living things; I loved raising kids. I loved because they lived. I want to live life loving. Whatever I do. It’s a cyclical thing, the flower that comes from a seed and begets more seeds that become more flowers. Life begets love which nourishes life…and so on. Okay, maybe this is sounding like drivel to you. There is something going on here, though, and it’s about a flow of energy passing from living thing to living thing, and some of us call it love. I don’t like the idea of that energy being confined to one “beloved”. That’s where I think I’m getting stuck. I say love, it is a flower and all of life can be its seed.

There. Sorry Amanda, but I have re-worked your song so that it fits my dreaming and waking life a little better. Hope you don’t mind.

So here’s my assignment for the week: write a description of one of the characters who will be in your memoir. Here’s what I have written.

“When I met Jim, he was a warm, charismatic 17-year old. Everything about him was golden and good. He was an A student parented by professional educators, a member of the Mormon Church who spent an hour in seminary every day before school, an athlete competitive in tennis, a baritone soloist with the school choir, a blue-eyed blonde with thick, curly surfer locks and a regular California dream. And the crowning touch? His grandfather was an Italian immigrant. I was introduced to him at our high school’s International Talk-In, where locals were given the opportunity to mingle with exchange students. I was then the Vice President of the Italian Club, a thorough Anglo hopelessly enamored of all things italiano. My best friend at the time, the President of the Club, Lynn Panighetti, introduced us. Jim enclosed my right hand in a bear paw and then wouldn’t let go. His long lashes fluttered in befuddlement as he pretended our hands were magically glued together. He was a flirt, a funny one, and I was instantly flattered and powerfully attracted.

His right hand was broad with short, stubby fingers. He would later lament how often he “fat fingered” the keys of his computer. He had a scar on his fourth finger from a machine accident he had while working in a cannery at age 15. He told me after we’d been dating for a few years that I could have all of him except the thumb and two middle fingers of his right hand – he needed them for bowling. Eventually, he qualified for PBA membership; he always pushed himself to achieve the highest level possible in any of his pursuits. His hands matched the rest of his mesomorphic frame. At 5 feet 8 inches tall, with a massive barrel chest, he resembled a friendly teddy bear, especially to my 15-year old eyes. I nicknamed him Winnie the Pooh.

Thirty years later, that stocky body was swollen with toxins and dialysis solution as a result of his failing kidneys. His barrel chest sported a 6-inch scar where they had split his sternum to perform double bypass surgery on his 31-year old heart. A longer scar down his right calf marked the place where they had harvested a vein for the graft. The kids called his lower legs “cankles” because they looked like calves and ankles combined after neuropathy and edema developed. His polar bear feet with the sideways little toes were in pretty good shape for a diabetic. He had lost only one toenail to ulcerating infection. His hair was still thick, too short to be very curly, and just barely graying at the temples. His beautiful Italian mouth fringed by the ginger mustache looked about to smile, but it wouldn’t. His ears were blue with what our daughter identified as ‘circumaural cyanosis’. (“See, Daddy, I’m really smart,” she sobbed.) He was dead.”

I have become rather moody while taking this course. Finished Joan Didion’s memoir about her husband’s death (The Year of Magical Thinking) last night and did a little research. Her only child died at the age of 39 just a month before it was published. Recent images of her are gaunt and haunted. Interesting that she was an Episcopalian, like me. Her New York life reminds me a little of Madeleine L’Engle’s (another Episcopalian), but she is more neurotic, less serenely spiritual. L’Engle’s memoir of her marriage to actor Hugh Franklin was a favorite of mine about 20 years ago. (Two-Part Invention) I feel rather like I’m swimming in the shallow end of their private pool.