Thoughts just roll around in my head with no way to get untangled from the mess of cobwebs, never rolling out at a convenient time when I have my computer in front of me ready to hold my purging. Today I sit with it conveniently in front of me and feeling mostly intimidation. Feeling that it stares back at me with some kind of expectation for what it’s about to receive and I have nothing to offer. I think I have an excess of flow tangled within itself blocking the outlet, every thought wants to exit at once and feels rude running over the others so it waits, like people at a four-way waving the others to go first and no one ends up going. I am sitting in a coffee house in Vancouver Washington on “vacation” for a long weekend. The time it took me to get here with a delayed flight I should have ended up on Hawaii! Last weekend I went to my cousins wedding down in Albuquerque New Mexico. As it always is when we get together there are feelings that run deep, specifically in a milestone event such as a wedding and tears inevitably flow, not from deep joy but from pain that comes from loss…even years later.
I’ve thought about my aunt dying several times and have missed her almost successively each day that has passed in lessening gut wrenching hurt. She runs through my mind and I catch myself wondering what her perspective would be, what thoughts she might have and how she would see the world. I mostly miss her laugh. Sometimes I think I laugh a lot less in my life without her in it, she made things funny just by choking on her own laughter trying to lessen the sound but with no success. Everyone around would turn to look in our direction when she opened her mouth to gasp for air while covering her mouth with her napkin and turning different shades of red and blue from lack of oxygen, she could never seem to find her breath while laughing, and once she did, she inhaled the whole room with a single sound drawing more attention to herself. You really couldn’t hold it in if you were within her radius, she made you join in even if you didn’t know her. My mom and sister were the worst, the three of them would go in spurts together setting each other off over and over forever! I miss family events without this routine of exhale to inhale, my abs never hurt anymore.
Her youngest son, my cousin, was the groom last weekend. Her baby had a wedding, gained a wife and has plans to grow his family in the future. The wedding was lovely and lots of fun with family from California surrounding him in joy. It was evident that Mary was missing and Donny her oldest son made mention in his speech as best man, she loved Tessa, the bride of the evening and would have been so happy to call her a daughter. The emotion was contagious to those who knew her, our eyes leaking out in our mutual loss once again we connected over the empty space she inhabits. Like a vacuum it sucked her out of our past in a moment she was gone and forever I knew that time could be divided into before Mary and after Mary. But what I couldn’t have really understood in that moment was how she would be missing from the future and yet still so present with each of us. “it’s not fair” resounded through my head and came off of lips. The void that she left wasn’t just personal loss that she no longer came to events she would have fought to host, the relationships around her changed and her place has been lost.
The mention of her name doesn’t come up as much, I think sometimes grief lies in wait and sneak attacks in the dark and unsuspecting places. How much she is missed goes unnoticed until wham it smacks in the face. Having an uncle that was married to my aunt for close to 40 years disappear in her loss. He seems to be unrelated to us now, moving on with his life and ignoring his pain, it seems we lost a whole family with the loss of an aunt. He gave up the Mayfield’s so now we’re all orphans. Spread out across states, with one more to come, no one talks to each other without Mary’s orchestration.
Seeing my cousins after a few years together I noticed our age in this round of greetings. We look like midlife’s…or at least the adults. Our foreheads keep lines from our expressive wrinkles and our eyes show our lines from all the years of laughter…we aren’t even 40 yet and this age is already evident. I started taking notice of my own face expressions, as wrinkles are pronounced all over my face and most people don’t move their faces when talking. Seeing these wrinkles on my family cousins I felt quite at home that we share life on our faces when every inch moves when we use exclamations!
Life is hard, no one says when your small that it will be forever, adulting and responsibility brings independence, but loss and heartbreak…no one prepares you. At the time of her death all I felt was collapsing. Grief, gut wrenching and denial broke hard. Crying was common, mostly pouring out in the car, making driving quite hard to see where I was going, or brushing my teeth the drool increased falling off my face with my tears and into the sink. It was easy to hurt, we all felt the same. We could call or hug while tears ran down knowing we all felt the same way for a time. But now it’s all separate as we’ve moved on through time, we have to mention our feelings to see if it’s shared, putting ourselves out there and possibly “ruin a good time” by bringing it down to what is rumbling inside. But even with that hug still abound, freedom to feel is a lesson were all still learning. Hurt feelings of being ignored or left out, family gatherings were the norm for holidays and weekends, so much time spent together my cousin lamented “she’s like a sister to me” at his wedding. It’s true, once upon a time we were connected that close, but now maybe once a year a text makes it through.
I wish we were pulled so far apart, in this state and that state with personal lives to maintain. It’s hard to catch up on the phone and keep depth. Children get older and I’m not around. The dreams I had once of being close to the next generation of family is lost on the wind. To pick up the pieces is easy to do but sustaining that connection seems to just fall by the wayside when real life resumes. I lose track of time…how is it already half way through April? I remember February as yesterday…did I lose some memory?
I worry about that as words seem hard to find, I lose track in conversation and nothing is in my mind. A name, a label and location all gone…. the nouns disappearing…is something dangerous lurking? Work is forefront in my daily thoughts, the families I see are so close to me. I see them each week, sometimes two or even three. I know some things that go on in their life, with distance of course and it made me realize, I know nothing of day to day with my family. It’s me and my dog and on the weekends a boyfriend, the weekdays too full for planning out time. I don’t want so much separateness of knowing people deeper. Unless I plan every single day on a calendar it goes by in a blink and echoes silence that I don’t even notice. It makes me realize that the only people you see day in and day out are the ones you live with and you still have to notice.
I see know as an adult how much work it took to parent me and my sister and why we were always “home”. My parents needed the weekends to do stuff at home, where I would lament the lack of interaction. Now as an adult I have hobbies and trips, but the trips take more work as they suck out the weekend and Monday starts over less fresh than it should. Everything feels like a giant task…where is the fun?
I don’t mean to imply that life is all boring with nothing fun to look forward too, but I will blame the shut down of covid for stealing my fun. I look forward to events, but mostly the planning or packing I have to do to get the event covered instead of the good time I will be attending. When did that happen? Where is the freedom? Am I so burned out on life that nothing is fun? No, id become a hermit if I felt that way so there must be some light heartedness I am missing. Maybe it’s laughing? I giggle here and there and a joke makes my laugh, but really really laughing deep down from my gut…that is definitely missing.
Maybe what I am feeling is the miss of my family, the one that I knew. Seeing my cousins, I am reminded that I had a childhood. There aren’t many people in my life today that knew me as a child and still know me today. Most of my fiends only know me post-divorce, they can’t even tie the Jackie before to the Jackie of now…. they are most different indeed….and I wish my aunt knew the one of today. I wonder often what it is she would say. She would have noticed the smallest change and made some comment about how I seemed “you look happy and fresh” or she would ask “how are you doing?” with the expectation you would share as much or as little and she wouldn’t judge but she could tell I was lying.
I miss that gift. The gift of seeing, she could handle big feelings and call them out in us without pressing for an action or demanding a change. We are sort of similar in this way, maybe it was our Pisces nature showing, our birthdays four days off we were water. I hope in the loss of her missing from us, I have picked up with part with my cousins, sister, mother and uncles to be able to see a feeling or mood and call it out without judgement to simply say “hey you, I see you” in whatever it is. Mary had a way of seeing. She held us together in her care. I feel the let down of missing this part of her so often and the missing giggles.
How do you define family? I have my childhood memories with faded edges, the good the bad the shared and secret stories. Looking back on it know I think my family extended provided a childhood and light heartedness that feels a bit unraveled. Getting together is less and less often, with money shelled out to spend short weekends together across state lines of travel, it takes planning and intention, we have little in common as far as hobbies.
Its hard to see the future and to know if somewhere down the line we all might be closer, to spend time in our midlife living not quite as neighbors…to move the intention across paper into action is hard but important. There is charge to do more…
The Fish Eye 