I RIDE THE WILD MOUSE

Monday, February 27, 2012

First of all, let me begin with the most important lesson I’ve learned in the last week, courtesy of my first session in grief recovery at Riverside Counseling Services.

My brain isn’t broken. My heart is broken. This means I cannot fix my heart with my head. This means my grief cannot be fixed with time alone, or by keeping busy, or by being strong, or by replacing it with chocolate.

With a lot of help, I am going to learn to face and feel and claim my losses. 

Oh brother.

I’m out to fix my emotional self and quite frankly stepping into those waters scares the shape wear right off of me.

It’s like walking down a familiar country road in the pitch black of night with my arms outstretched into the nothing with a tiny flashlight.

I know with help I will find my way, yet something tells me this heart healing is going to be as raw and painful at times as the sides of my mouth are after I eat an entire bag of salt and vinegar chips.

And what’s the name of this ride I’ve been on? I would like to get off, please.

Who knew there was such a thing—an emotional roller coaster with waves of dreadful rides 24-7 right here in my neck of the woods in the middle of winter.

I looked to “Wikipedia” for a definition of a roller coaster and specifically to find the right words to describe the degree of rise and fall that one of these machines takes, so that I could better explain the whirligig of feelings I am experiencing these days.

The definition of the “Wild Mouse” rollercoaster landed right in my lap and it fit so well I put in on overtop of my black cape.

“A Wild Mouse roller coaster is a type characterized by small cars that seat four people or fewer (and in my case just one).

It rides on top of the track, taking tight; flat turns at modest speeds yet producing high lateral G-forces. (Uh huh)

The track work is characterized by many turns and bunny hops, the latter producing abrupt negative vertical G forces. (Uh huh, there goes my appetite again.)

When approaching a turn from a straight section the intended impression is that one will simply continue straight, and thus plunge off of the device. (I can relate)

Almost all “Wild Mice” feature switchback sections, consisting of several of these unbanked turns, separated by straight sections. Usually the turns on the switchback section are 180 degrees, but some coasters feature 90 degree turns as well as more rarely steep runs with loops.”

I wanted to paste this description to my forehead and point at it when someone kindly asks, “How are you doing?”

And the Academy Award for “how well you am processing this” goes to . . . . Me? Not a chance, my friend.

I think “processing” is what happens in an abattoir.

While I have my moments of peace and quiet, which usually occur at 2 a.m. while I am asleep, I do not feel strong or courageous at the best of times nor that I am “processing” anything well.

I feel lost and abandoned and shafted and helpless and desperately sad to name five of the many, many uncomfortable emotions I have begun to recognize on my roller coaster ride.

And the best medicine I can think of is at my doorstep. Its name is counseling.

The Cape I Wear Is Not A Fashion Statement

Monday, February 20, 2012



I had homework to do this week that included reading three chapters of a book on grief and how to move beyond loss. I’m not supposed to go further in the book until I’m instructed to do so, nor am I supposed to use it to teach anyone else—and I won’t. But already I can see how extraordinarily beneficial this choice to get counseling on grief recovery is going to be for me. 


A well-meaning friend called me a “hurdler” the other day. I wasn’t sure what she meant by that. Was I the type who met life’s challenges with fortitude or was I the poor sap who despite my best efforts is constantly faced with obstacles that challenge my soul. Hmmm. Maybe I’m both. 
Today I am the latter.


I’m wearing a long, flowing black cape these days. It’s at least two city blocks long and it’s there all the time, double-knotted around my neck and complete with arm sleeves that prevent it from being mislaid. 


My cape is there with me in the shower, it covers my pajamas at night, and lies around my feet at the kitchen table each morning during breakfast. 
Even when I’m driving in my car or walking down the creek bed my cape follows behind me billowing in the wind and as soon as I slow down it snaps to a stop and falls in around me. 


I know this black cape to be one of the many faces of grief and as much as I’d like to rip it off, soak it in gasoline and burn it; I know I have much to learn from this unexpected bounty hunter. I will wear it, touch it, feel it, and stay with it until it falls off on its own. 

Self care is something I thought I knew about. I don’t use white sugar or salt, nor for the most part do I eat processed or fast foods. I don’t drink alcohol and I exercise (or at least I did up until 30 days ago) four to six times a week. 
I read a lot, get enough sleep and wear sunscreen. 


But there is so much more to self care that I have yet to learn—like slowing down in life and giving myself more attention than the me who is the caregiver of others thinks I should. 


Self-care also is asking for help, seeing a counselor, calling a friend or my mom and dad when I’m lonely or sad. 


Self-care is about stopping everything I’m doing for everyone else and sitting down and taking off my mask and having a good cry. 


Self-care is clearly about giving up control and allowing life to teach me what I need to learn. This unfolding Universe is showing me that over and over again. 


In hindsight, I think the Universe gave me a kick in the pants in that direction about 10 days before Jon died and although I didn’t know it at the time, I’m convinced the event, which I wrote in my diary about a few days ago, was meant to be a lesson for all of my todays.

“I keep thinking about that day in early January when I was outside giving the dogs their food. I was coming back in the house with my slippers on and I fell. I fell like someone had pushed me down all at once, on all fours, all at the same time smashing my knees and the palms of my hands into the cement pad at the top of the stairs outside.  I remember looking back to see what the hell did I trip on because I just don’t fumble. I never fumble. The pain took my breath away.
It’s February 19th and I still, after six weeks, have a mark on my left knee from the fall. It was mindboggling to me, the smashing of my body against that cement pad.
I never really made any more of until after Jon died and I started trying to reason all these things out. 
I wonder if that was some kind of Universal force that took me down as a reminder to me that I don’t have control all the time about what happens in my life. Maybe I was meant to realize it now; along with everything else I need to learn. I just don’t know.”


I wonder why it is that those of us dealing with loss put ourselves on the back burner when we need help and recovery from grief? Our immediate need to begin to recover from loss shouldn’t be any different or delayed than getting a car windshield repaired after a rock splits it.


You need that car to get you where you need to go the same as you need your mind and your body and your spirit to get you where you need to go.

If I am a hurdler, so be it. 
But I’m going to learn the right way to let go of this black cape so that I can leap into life again with happiness. 

Books Take Me Places I Need To Go

Monday, February 13, 2012



The time slot for this column seems to appear out of nowhere like the next guy’s electric bumper car in a race around the track at the fair. All of my time is spent trying to figure out what just happened, and then I look at the calendar and it says “Writing Day.” 


Crumb. 


These days my shoulder pads are heavy. On my left shoulder sits the fat little gremlin I call “What If”—and he’s an ugly old chap who pokes at and opens up my half-stitched scar of grief all the time. 


My right shoulder, too, is heavy. But it’s bodyguard-heavy with the indelible writing advice of Stephen King, “Come to the craft any way but lightly.” I take him very seriously, even now. Lucky for me he also has the best pitching ear, because I am deaf in my left one. 


I took on two big hurdles this past week by walking through the doors of the local library and the newspaper office to face friends and colleagues in their workplaces I have not yet seen since Jon’s suicide. 
(And I thought leaving the Christmas chocolate in the cupboard was difficult.) 


Those first steps to face people and revisit the thinking of those first hours felt like I was pulling my feet out of glue to reach land. 
But it is done and it was two steps forward. 


I went to the library for another reason and that was to find Joan Didion’s book, “The Year of Magical Thinking.” Of course it was there waiting for me. Why wouldn’t it be? 


I stared at the words on the book cover and realized Didion’s husband John’s name was highlighted in blue. And if I took out the “H”  . . . 


I was standing in the aisle where all the new books were posted on shelves and it felt good to be among the words of all those authors. I decided right then and there that I wouldn’t leave the library until I had my arms full of books of great variety including funny. 


Nora Ephron’s yellow-colored book “I Feel Bad About My Neck And Other Thoughts On Being A Woman” jumped off the shelf into my waiting grasp. 
“The Chicken Chronicles” by Alice Walker was next, then a picture book on decorating, and a book called “Kaleidoscope,” on ideas and projects to spark my creativity. Yes, sparks of creativity is what I needed.


Just then, under what I can only describe as an intervention by sources unseen (if such things exist in libraries) I turned around and came face to face with a black book written by Kay Redfield Jamison called “Night Falls Fast – understanding suicide.” 
Now that I think about it, I’m sure I swore out loud when I saw it—I hope in a whispered voice. 


I was compelled to pile it with the others I was carrying, but I didn’t really want it and yet I did. Understanding might decay “What If,” or at least shut him up for more than five minutes. 


I was so proud of myself for my reading intentions—all of it—and I brought them home and set them in a little pile on the coffee table, in front of the big leather couch. I piled the books by size and walked away. 


For two or three days I stalked the table, pacing the cage and staring at the little mountain of knowledge and fluff with unease and apprehension but never touched it.

I didn’t know where to begin. Should I pick up a book that would make me laugh at my neck jiggle and then feel guilty again if I found joy in such times as these? What about decorating? Would I suddenly decide to rearrange the furniture and paint the walls? 
And “The Chicken Chronicles?”  It was about fowl friends named “Gertrude Stein” and “Agnes of God.” Anyone who knows Alice Walker knows it’s bound to be a profound story and I knew I couldn’t “bawk” at that.

The black book stuck out. Of course it did. I didn’t want to read it, but I did want to read it. 
I was drawn to it like my thirsty dog to her water bowl on a hot summer day. 


It was the first book in the pile that I picked up off the table. I opened it at random to page 297. Iris Bolton’s words from her book “My Son…My Son” said it all. 

“I don’t know why, I’ll never know why. I don’t have to know why. I don’t like it. What I have to do is make a choice about my living.”


And so I begin. 

Joy Is Medicine For The Brokenhearted

Monday, February 6, 2012

It would seem that “The Year of Magical Thinking” by Joan Didion now sits at the top of my read list, up 60 rows from where it sat below “The Complete Bartender” by Robyn M. Feller.

Up until January 19^th I was entrenched in “The Sisters Brothers” by Patrick DeWitt, a novel that won its author the 2011 Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction. It’s an engaging story of two henchmen in the Old West pursuing their next target. Today if you offered me $50/hr to finish off the last 109 pages of DeWitt’s book, I’d never see a dime of it. I’m too busy disliking everything about everything.

I may read the book of magical thinking tomorrow but at this moment I am surely wallowing in the dark Leonard Cohen hits and shoveling in as many bags of potato chips as I can muster.

And in fact I became quite sick of myself today, wandering about this quiet house some 18 days post tragedy with nothing better to do than stare out the window wishing for things I could no longer have.

I re-read Andy Rooney’s “My Lucky Life” speech from October 2 of last year and rolled my eyes at how I’d spouted at the mouth in my column back then about my own life fortunes.

I also made the big mistake of watching the romantic movie “Love Actually,” which until January 19^th was one of my favorites. I might as well have stabbed myself in the eye with a kitchen knife than watch it by myself. What was I thinking? Magical, that’s what.

Yes, quite sick of myself today.

So mid-afternoon at the pinnacle of the Day 18 pity party I got in my car, sped out of the driveway and headed to town in a crying jag passing an ambulance sitting stationary in the airport parking lot across the way. No doubt there would be a patient inside in much direr straights than I. The sobering thought made me take pause from my wallowing.

I will admit that for the last 18 days I’ve not wanted to see any of my grandchildren. I couldn’t bear their optimistic and spirited attitudes to living a life when I was immersed in an unbelieving grievousness I never knew existed.

But today I’d tipped my cup.  I had to shake myself off and find at least a little bit of balance.

Kahlil Gibran was right on the mark with his poem “On Joy and Sorrow.” They are inseparable. While one sits on the edge of the bed, the other one is in bed with you.

I drove straight to the house where some little peppers lived, because I suddenly needed their joy like a breath of fresh air in May. It was all I could do to get there in one piece.

I was sitting on the couch when my three-year-old beauty came running out of the kitchen with a red piece of construction paper on which she had drawn a picture for me.

She explained away the big sunshiny sun and a round blob with stick arms and legs and big eyes (me, she said) and a stop sign, all drawn in black marker. Another nebulous figure, nearly invisible in red marker had been drawn hovering over me.  It was “Papa Jon.”

Gibran wrote, “The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.”

The delight in that moment filled me up. Children should be seen and they should be heard when we grownups are sad. This I know for sure.