WITH WHAT REMAINS

"That the dead stay dead is a constant surprise." (Author Unknown). The author is unknown because EVERYBODY says it. Everybody who has lost someone is amazed and aghast, whether thankful or unthankful, that the dead stay dead so long.

"Sure, I knew he was dead - but I had no idea he'd STAY that way."

The way I focus on Fossil Guy's ashes you'd think I was literally waiting for that grey stuff to reassemble itself into a second and complete F.G. Yesterday I introduced an old friend to the ashes and my friend said, "Gee, I've never felt ashes that were so GRITTY." Gritty. Well, you can take that many ways. They aren't lumpy, but they are...stickly, and....I'd call them "snaggly". And then I worried that it was the mesothelioma stuff poking through. And then I felt proud as a young mother. MY deceased husband's know how to be gritty. What do YOUR deceased husband's ashes know how to be?"

Joan Didion couldn't give up her husband's shoes because he would need them when he returned. This past Saturday, when my stepson David and my granddaughter Rachel were filling Dave's truck up with all the garage stuff for a Goodwill and dump run, it was F.G.'s slippers that got to me. I sat down on the porch step and wailed. I could see his jackets going to the Goodwill, his shirts, his duck boots......but his slippers? Excuse me? Someone who didn't know him, a complete stranger, someone who might or might not be able to sing old cowboy tunes or recite the Gettysburg Address, someone who might have disdain for Obama and vote for McCain or not be sardonic or not know how to put lots of jalapenos in the scrambled eggs.....walking around in Fossil Guy's SLIPPERS?

Give me a break.

So I grabbed them and held them, cuddled them, slipped my bare feet into them, walked around inside the house with them, thought about how maybe I could make a doll with them or at least something that could be cute and useful.....and then I handed them back to David and said "Here. You can them them now."

You can take them now.

You can take them now because they don't matter at all if he's really not coming back to claim them. If he's not coming back to peer through the family room window window until he sees somebody knocking about and then pound on the window until we let him in (unless he's learnedhow to float in, he's a quick learner) and say, "Hey, what did you guys do with my slippers? They were right here a couple of months ago......" then to hell with them.

Grief Bursts. That's what some people call these unexpected times of wailing, crying, dumping.... these moments of "Oh, no!" emptiness that feel as if you have just fallen down the family well and the rest of the family jumped into their truck and drove away. Yesterday, at the Pain Clinic, when I walked this way and that around the dictor's office, tears streaming down my face and I'm saying, "Well, Jim said just the other day....." and the doctor lowered his head and looked downwards and I threw my face into my hands and began bawling.

"Has the pain worsened since your husband's death?" asked the doctor.
"What pain?" I asked.
"The deep nerve pain," he said. "Has it worsened?"
"No," I said, "it's just the same." But I had that weird dissassociated feeling like: what in the hell are you talking about? You mean I'm here for deep sacral nerve pain? I'm not here to cry about Jim?"

Yesterday my friend said to me, "Well, I have to say. I admire you. You're not throwing in the towel on life, you're determined to go on and find a future for yourself, and look...you're eating mayonnaise!"

This friend has known me for many years. I didn't eat mayonnaise until I was fifty and thre I was, with mayonnaise bumping its way out onto the outskirts of my club sandwich. What a turning point of adult development. The Dry-Sandwich-Kid eats mayonnaise!

But I began to eat mayonnaise way before Fossil Guy died and he never liked those slippers. He wanted them so I bought them for him and then he didn't like them. It's that old "If I know what I want, I don't want it," thing. They weren't the right color grey. They weren't any more comfortable than simply wearing socks. Socks were more comfortable than wearing those slippers. Barefoot would be better. He'd had slippers before that made his feet melt into sublime comfort, but not these slippers, oh no, not these. These were hard slippers. They were slippers that refused to forgive his feet. And yet, often he would call to me, "Bring me my slippers!"

Here are your damn slippers. You just wait till you're gone. I'll make them into voodoo dolls and stick pins into them.

So today I ride the ferry across the water in order to meet with Dr. B. in his Bellevue office. One might think that I simply want an extra appointment with him now in my time of need. But that's not it. What IS it is that I want to make sure he's there. I want to make sure (I THINK this is "it") that he is really and truly somewhere on the four days a week that he is not on the Island. What if he, too, disappears just as exasperatingly as Fossil Guy has disappeared? Only Dr. B. has a divinity degree as well as an M.D. degree, so perhaps he better knows how to manifest himself upon demand.

I sit in the living room with my eyes softly/loosely positioned so that, if Fossil Guy's shadow should move swiftly through the dining room, I would be able to catch it. Once, in the middle of the night, I could have sworn I heard his voice. At the time, I thought he was warning me not to squeeze him (those ashes again) so hard. But in the morning Rachel told me she had been doing some deep coughing throughout the night, and had it bothered me?

Is thre a saner, more realistic explanation for everything? I don't know. Yeah. Probably. We'll see.

Here's a poem by Rabbi Schulweis. It's about how life and love go on. I like it. It's about survival.

PLAYING WITH THREE STRINGS

We have seen Yitzhak Perlman
Who walks the stage with braces on both legs,
On two crutches.
He takes his seat, unhinges the clasps of his legs,
Tucking one leg back, extending the other,
Laying down his crutches, placing the violin under his chin.
On one occasion one of his violin strings broke.
The audience grew silent but the violinist did not leave the stage.
He signaled the maestro, and the orchestra begin its part.
The violinist played with power and intensity on only three strings.
With three strings, he modulated, changed and
Recomposed the piece in his head
He retuned the strings to get different sounds,
Turned them upward and downward
The audience screamed delight,
Applauded their appreciation.
Asked later how he had accomplished this fear,
The violinist answered
It is my task to make music with what remains.