twentytwo

Twentytwo.

When will the numbers stop haunting me?

Twentytwo.

The number of years old he was when he died.

The number of years old I will turn this year.

(can I count to twentythree?)

The number of weeks I have attended church in Seattle.

The number of hangnails I have bitten off my thumbs this month.

I’m avoiding it. You know I’m avoiding it.

The number of months since he died.
I have to say it out loud.

I always wonder why the number gets bigger. I used to count days. Then weeks, now only months. I guess I will soon have to resort to years. I can’t decided if it’s harder or easier that the numbers tick up slower the higher it goes: easier that I don’t have to think about counting so much, harder that the ticks mean much much more time has passed.

“I think I might just be the happiest I have ever been in my life,” I told Laura on a blue and sunny Saturday.

Then I paused, What about Derek?

How could I dare to be (happy) in a world where he is not?

I return to this struggle every time that I begin to settle in to my current life. I become comfortable. I begin to feel as if I have always been here: why wouldn’t I have spent my whole life thus far in Seattle? When I watch children play in the park, I cannot relate to them. I was never that: I was always this—a grown woman, always twenty-something, always independent, always in this city.

It’s so easy to think that way, to erase the whole past. I cannot miss what I do not have if it never was what I thought I had.

This is my first summer in the city, my third summer of life being so different.

201(1)- Summer with Derek: summer of “off-roading” in his spare wheelchair as we tromped through the woods of PA; summer of us spending every night watching Golden Girls and Roseanne and Drew Carey’s Improv-a-Ganza and the like, sitting in his room before putting him to bed; summer of Italy and me being away while he was hospitalized again; summer of cold, air-tight hospital rooms and slumber parties in broken recliner chairs; summer that ended, summer he died.

201(2)- Summer in Waynesburg: summer of Chemistry and walking to class with tea in a green mug; summer of weeding and laying down newspapers and arranging stones; summer of a new family, learning my place, learning fellowship; summer of playing with three daughters, dancing in the living room, running in the grass, catching lightning bugs and walking to the honeysuckle bush; summer of running and fresh herbs from the porch, summer of wine; summer of thunderstorms and porch swings; summer of change, summer of the drive; summer to enter Seattle.

201(3)- Summer of the city: summer of plans and bucket lists; summer of adventure, white water rafting and skydiving and renting canoes; summer of frozen yogurt and Pad Thai; summer of church and community and learning god; summer of work; summer of biking; summer of swimming in every nearest body of water; summer of living six train-tracks away from Puget Sound; summer of Pickle; summer of ambition; summer of…

I do not know what happens next. The solstice just crossed a week ago; the whole summer lays ahead.

Can it all be so good?

Joan Didion calls mourning “the act of dealing with grief.”

Can I lay down the mourning to let the good happen? Can mourning and joy happen simultaneously?

I’m done pretending that I can see the “good” in all of this: that I could ever understand that there was a reason that he had to die just then and in that way, that I could ever believe that Providence has some divine plan to use this instance for good in my life.

Since moving here, I have detailed the ways that this is right for me (I still believe so), but I cannot pretend to attribute it to Derek’s death. I cannot know why things happened this way. Is that denying “evidence of God’s grace”? I simply cannot think that I know why.

I’m sure I’ve written this before, but I need it here (I’ll sum):

He told me he didn’t want to go out. His hips hurt. He didn’t want to leave the house, too much effort. I told him he had to go. #1 it was my last night in America for the next two months; we had big plans #2 there would be no pain if he was having fun; didn’t we always go out and do something so great that he forgot that he was even hurting? Yes. We went out. We had fun. He forgot that his hips hurt until he was nearly in bed, and he smiled. No pain + a beautiful evening.

Why is it so easy to force someone else into a good time, to go out, to just forget about the aching and be? Just be without worry or guilt or pain. But I cannot do it to myself.

I try, but that is what creates the moment of pause: he is not here to feed my own words back to me. He is not here for me to toss a smile to at day’s end, for me to say “You were right; I am happy.”

But maybe, even if he were, he would say he knows me better than that—that I would always pause, always worry, always try to fix what I cannot change.

Even after all of this, I cannot help but believe that some of life’s greatest joys can only come after the greatest sorrows: morning after the night.