Sinkhole

Here is the picture I show
therapists in our fist visit
when they ask what I need help with.  

My sister and I communicated recently about how each of us has fared since our dad passed away. 

Because, not only did he pass away, he passed away three days before Thanksgiving and thirty-four days before Christmas, and if that was not enough of an undertow, he's been coming back to us in dreams. 

In hers, he appears in ways that make no sense, e.g., standing in his kitchen while people who have just attended his memorial service file in and ask why he's there. 

In mine, he is the dapper, v-neck cashmere and khaki-clad host of his own going away party, right as rain, standing at the door asking people if they had trouble finding the place. 

My sister's update: "Getting better with lots of pause-for-thought speed bumps, but unfortunately a sinkhole here and there."

Sinkhole.

I'm going to talk about sinkholes today.

Once, a few years ago, when I was facing a number of major transitions at once, I saw a therapist for help with untangling.  

"I'm usually really good at getting through stuff,  keeping myself in motion," I said, "but I keep doing nothing."

She said, "Your last two kids are leaving in the fall. Your fourteen-year-old cat just died. You don't like your job. Your brother is dying. Your husband is going to be traveling five days a week when this all happens. Do you know how stressful your life is right now?  Because you got a lotta, lotta stress going on." 

Why did I need someone else to point this out? I'm not sure. But it's come back to mind lately, because she was describing a sinkhole and I am in one of those at the moment. 

Since shortly before our dad passed away, I have been in a frustrating, alternating state of vague readiness for something new, and general reluctance to embrace anything new. My ideas for topics and projects do not feel new or inspired, but old and repackaged. 

Last week, I watched an episode of The Crown at 4:00 in the afternoon, which, in my world, is on par with drinking at lunch.  

The other day, I looked in the mirror and asked my own face why I keep doing nothing. And to my own face I answered,  "Because you got a lotta, lotta stress going on." 

I wrote in my last post about creating a "new normal," i.e. changing the habits and rhythms and routines that trigger such acute awareness of a person's absence. It's been my way of staying on this road without feeling I'll be thrown from the vehicle with every sharp turn.

But, sinkholes.

Sinkholes leave you understanding that you didn't actually leave Grief Town, you just moved across the street.

It helped to admit this.

It helped to understand that change, even if it's forced on us, can still be a gift of fate, long in the making, really essential, and often not possible to initiate without the catalyst of loss.

I woke up at three in the morning recently ( it's always three in the morning, ask anyone) and realized with a little panic that all this effort to envision a new normal had not moved me toward anything,  but only away from everything that was familiar.

It's how I feel when I wake up the first night on vacation in a strange hotel; like I've been abducted and blindfolded, until my husband says, "It's okay. I'm Larry and we're in Vermont."

I had not gone to bed dreading a dawn of worry or anxiety or fear. I just woke up that way.

In a sinkhole. 

Without a ladder.

I waited for my mind to settle. I asked myself the question I urge my children to ask themselves when they are tangled:

What do I know? What do I know I am supposed to do, right now?

Answers to those questions, elusive as they are, don't always come when they're called, but it's my belief  they come when they know they'll be welcomed.

What I know.

At least today,

I'm going to try a thing that might work.

I'm going to do everything a tiny bit better.

I'm going to be mindful, and not preoccupied.

I'm going to watch what I eat and read and listen to.

At least today, 

I'm going to make a plan that intimidates me a little.

I'm going to take John Mahoney's advice and remember the last time I wasn't just satisfied but thrilled.

I will be settled and focused instead of flighty and fighty, as I get when I'm overwhelmed.

At least today,

I'll speak to myself in stark, honest terms.

I'll admit that I'm not feeling the old goals right now. Not one of them.

I'll stop "pushing the river" as my mother says, forcing my heart to the page where we live, when my heart is trying to take me to other places where answers live.  

I'll reach out to guarded people who don't resist connection as much as they fear it.        

  

At least today, 

I'll understand that it will be like this right now, here and there, for a damn good reason and stop saying, "I don't know why I'm doing nothing." 

I'll be okay with that.

Because right now, here and there, there will be sinkholes. 

But. They are not that terrifying, when you realize that for a long time, you have been collecting skills to build a ladder.

Rung by rung, baby. Rung by rung.