Doing what I can when I’m certain I can’t

Every day Nate finds me somewhere in the house, on the hammock, on our bed, at my desk, on the couch, and I am crying or have just been crying or will shortly be crying. He sits beside me or across from me or sometimes lays the whole length of his body on the whole length of me, the pressure of his weight pressing my body back into itself.

I have grieved a thousand things—people, places, things—but I have never grieved this hard before. There is a cavern in me that won’t be filled and every tear just scoops more out of me. I keep thinking I have gotten to the bottom, surely there can’t be more left in me? But there is.

I’m barely holding anything together these days. Can’t bring myself to work or write, really, find it difficult to bring myself to be around a lot of people or let myself be asked the question, “How are you doing?” when the answer is I’m afraid I will never feel whole again. I constantly judge my grief, put it in a line-up against friends who are grieving the losses of marriages and brothers and daughters and parents.

Nate asks yesterday, “Do you think it’s because we don’t have kids?” The implication being this is the reason I’m taking her loss so hard, that she was a replacement for the absence of them. But how can I compare this to that? I’d never say this is worse, but it feels worse than anything I’ve ever lost before.

I ugly cry to him about how I can barely do daily tasks like clean out the refrigerator, badly in need of being cleaned.

Afterward, I blew my nose on my t-shirt (already snot-soaked), dried my face, and cleaned out the refrigerator, removed every drawer and shelf, scrubbed every surface, which is I suppose how we get through whatever we’re going through. Confess that we can’t and then find—somehow—that we can.

I made a grocery order and instead of ordering ingredients, I ordered ready-made chili and Greek orzo salad and sweet potatoes already roasted, marinated chicken and a couple jars of masala and marinara. I’m trying to make it easier on the sopping mess of me who faces the refrigerator at 5pm and stands there looking at it until the beep sounds and then turns off the beep and keeps standing there letting out all the cool air. No more ingredients, I promise myself, not until the cavern starts filling back in.

The temperature is cooling marginally and being outside is the only place I don’t feel so suffocated by our new reality. The sun, which usually doesn’t hit our windows or our backyard, is lowering on the horizon a bit and so I sit on my hammock swing in the morning and face it, take deep breaths and tell Rilke again and again and again that we’re going to be okay and that Harper is never coming home again and also that we’re going to be okay. I don’t believe it but I need him to believe it.

After starting and DNFing a pile of Booker longlists, I turn instead to a pile of thrillers and mysteries. Cheap reads, quick reads, page-turners. I’m barely handling my own grief, I can’t carry a high literary character’s too.

In the novel I started writing last year, I opened it with the line, “The row houses on Lemon Street had been leaning up against one another for so long it was difficult to tell whether they were holding each other up or tearing each other down.” I think about Ted Kooser’s poem about the death of a dog where he says, “Our house has been lifted away from its foundation.” I have never lived in a more solid house than this hundred year old brick row-home and it feels like it’s crumbling around us and we’re crumbling too.

Don’t worry. My friends know. My therapist knows. My doctor knows. Now you know.

I’m taking my fiber and probiotic and D3 and Zinc and magnesium and progesterone and inositol and painting my fingernails red and drinking two or three big Mason jars of water and doing the dots and listening to music with lyrics I know by heart and eating a lot of zucchini and glad for the triple batch of chocolate chip cookies we froze months ago and watching West Wing reruns and telling myself I will make something good again, make art again, write good words again, feel right again, that our house will settle into a new foundation line, that we will level into a new normal.

I’m doing what I need to do but I’m not lying if someone truly asks.

If someone asks, I’m telling the truth. I am not okay. I’m afraid I’ll never feel whole again.

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