Haunted Places

In a year and a half of mourning, I have traveled to many haunted places.  Places soaked with memories and feelings from a life gone by.  Places where in my mind's eye, I can vividly see living movies of Ryan and I walking together, holding hands, laughing.  Places like the the grocery store, the mall, Target, our favorite restaurants.  The bookstore where we met where we met (even though it's now a Sports Authority).  The entire town of Phoenixville.  My brother's backyard.  The ocean.  The globe is littered with these places, full of ghosts and relics.

For a long while, it seemed that everywhere I went carried some great emotional burden.  Over time, this has faded; I've re-entered almost every place of any importance many times over at this point.  The places are still haunted to me, but I'm used to it now.  When I walk through Macy's, for instance, and think how nice Ryan would look in a particular shirt, I have a dull ache and lingering sadness still that I won't get to buy it for him for his birthday.  It's not as sharp of a hurt as it used to be.  But every once in a while, I walk into a place to which I haven't yet returned, and it reopens a deep wound.

Yesterday, I had a business lunch at Maggiano's.  Ryan and I used to go there all of the time - we both loved the food and the ambiance.  I took Ryan to the Center City Philadelphia location for his birthday one year, and after that we returned often.  It quickly became one of our staples for date night- Ryan would usually order the gnocchi and a beer, and then complain about having eaten too much.  We actually stopped there the day before he died, to pick up catering I had ordered for his graduation party.

This was a haunted place I'd returned to several times already; I'd stared at the catering counter, and felt hollow and sick.  I'd started playing the butterfly effect out in my head - how could I have let him carry all of those heavy trays of food to the car?  Maybe it was the final strain on his heart!  If he hadn't exerted himself like that, or if I'd have helped even a little, maybe he wouldn't have had the arrhythmia in his sleep the next night.  Maybe he would have been okay.  I play this "what if" game out a lot - it's never satisfying, but always impossible to avoid.

So, having been back to Maggiano's many times, I didn't think going there yesterday would be a problem for me.  Until I got there, that is, and they directed me upstairs and to the left, to the banquet rooms.  My heart sank.  I walked up the stairs (past the aforementioned catering counter), and past the second level seating in the restaurant.  There was the table where Ryan and I had eaten once, and decided that it was our favorite spot to eat because it was quieter than the rest of the restaurant.  I kept going up, passed the restrooms on the right, and turned to the left, and the movie started to play in my head.  I was wearing a blue Calvin Klein dress, which later became on of Ryan's favorites.  He was wearing a nice suit, and about 40 of our friends and family were with us in the first banquet room on the left.  It was the night before our wedding - our rehearsal dinner.  One of the happiest days of my life.

I could see Ryan and I sitting at the table in the center, listening to toasts and talking to the people who loved us most.  I could feel his hand holding mine.  I could feel a shadow of the memory of excitement and happiness, thinking of the next day.  Everything was ready and perfect, the weather looked like it was going to be good, and all of the stress of wedding planning was over.  That night I could relax and enjoy myself - and I did.  My biggest concern was trying to not drink too much - I didn't want to oversleep, or have puffy eyes in the morning.  It didn't matter - when I went home to my parents' house that night, I couldn't sleep anyway - I had butterflies.  Ryan was incredibly happy too - he was the calmest groom-to-be I could have hoped for, solid as a rock.  He was enjoying himself immensely.  It was a night when we believed that we had a long life of happiness in front of us, and the possibilities were endless.  The next day we got married, and never knew how briefly it would last.

Walking past the room yesterday afternoon, I wanted to bail on the meeting.  I didn't want to sit there, trying to focus and pretend that I wasn't going through an emotional turmoil, which, of course, I was.  My stomach felt sick, and I didn't think I'd be able to eat.  For the beginning of the meeting, I felt like I wasn't present, my mind kept drifting back four years.  But I pulled it together, and compartmentalized as best as I could.  And before I knew it, I had ripped off the band aid, and now I will never have to go to that place for the first time again.

A lot of my life since Ryan died probably would have been a lot easier if I had bailed on everything.  Years ago, I told myself that if my life ever totally fell apart, I would leave everything behind an start new.  My "last resort" plan included quitting my job, buying a plane ticket across the Atlantic, and making my way however I could - with no baggage.  In a lot of ways, that still sounds good.  But I'll never, ever do it.  Not anymore.  Because the thing that truly makes all of this marginally tolerable is my daughter.  While tiny in size, she serves as a great big anchor to my current location - I'm not going anywhere.  I can't and I honestly don't want to anymore, as romantic as it sounds.  But forgoing a clean slate means that I have to live in the world I lived in before Ryan died - I'll have to return again and again to these places that used to mean so much to our lives.  As hard as it can be to walk in our footsteps, I guess I probably prefer it this way.  It's a lifeline - a tangible connection to memories that I don't want to lose.  While dealing with the hauntings can be emotionally exhausting, it's better than having nothing to remember.  

Fleeting

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may
Old time is still a-flying
And this same flower that smiles today
Tomorrow will be dying
-Excerpt from "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time", by Robert Herrick
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
It's funny the way that memory works.  I, for example, am not always that great at remembering a person's name right after meeting them, memorizing lists of data, or remembering dates.  I'm better with songs and verses - I know all of the words to every song on my iPod.  And I did memorize the above poem after hearing it just once in Dead Poets Society.  I have also always had a fantastic memory for stories, and that includes the story of my own life.  I remember things no one else does, about an event, or a location, what a person wore, or the order in which something happened.  I remember senses, colors, feelings, all with vivid detail.  I remember what feels like every moment of my life with my husband.  But, in truth, I'm finding that there are things I'm already beginning to forget.

Like last night.  My Dad was flipping through the channels, and landed on the Simon Pegg/Nick Frost movie Hot Fuzz.  It's probably an obscure flick, I don't know.  I know it quite well though, because Ryan and I went to see it at the Regal Cinemas in Warrington the year we moved in together.  The movie is ridiculous, a parody of buddy cop action movies, and ends in a blaze of insane, almost cartoony, violence.  By the end of the movie, Ryan and I were both in tears laughing because it was so cleverly stupid.  So when my Dad had it on for a moment, I told him what a great movie it was.  Clearly, I use the term 'great' very loosely.  With my recommendation, he left it on.

As we reached the over-the-top climax of the movie, I very briefly had a clear as day vision of Ryan, doubled over with laughter, a huge smile on his face, trying to catch his breath and wiping tears from his eyes.  Ryan did this every so often, and it was one of my favorite things - when he would totally lose it in laughter, usually over something pretty stupid.  And in this moment, I remembered it so clear; what he looked like, what he sounded like, and how funny it was to me to see him laugh like that.  And then, a second later, it flitted away, and I struggled to pull the image back into view.  I had forgotten, until that moment, the joy I got from watching Ryan crack up laughing.  For the moment thinking of it, my heart became so full, and then deflated again just as quickly.

Like so many things since Ryan died, this vivid image presented itself only briefly, and then sank back into my brain.  It was like when there's a word on the tip of the tongue, so close yet so far away.  It's not that after that moment I couldn't recall the memory at all - the specific event is locked in my mind, as is the fact that Ryan had an incredibly vulnerable funny bone.  What I lose is the incredibly vivid, visceral memories where all of my senses are involved.  These are full color, 3D, tactile memories.  They have smell, texture, temperature.  They come along only every once in a while - the other day it was a vivid memory of what it was like when Ryan would walk up to me from across the room and casually kiss me hello.  The image is there, as though it happened yesterday, as though I'm living it again for a moment, and then so quickly gone again, as though twenty years have gone by.  I can't seem to pull it forward at will - not those full sensory images.  They attack as they like, and slink away with equal speed.

And what's most frustrating is that these memories keep getting farther and farther away, without new Ryan experiences to replace them.  And I'm the only one around who can remember these details of our story.  There is no one else to talk to about it, no one who would remember.  As the memories start to fade from my head, will they still exist anywhere?  It's like that old tree falling in the forest again.  Did it make a sound?  It did to me, but not to anyone else who's around to talk about it.  Maybe I'm not even remembering the sound correctly - maybe it made a different sound.  There's no one with whom to cross-reference.

Then there's the other gut wrenching truth - that as much as these pictures in my head ease the grief for a moment, they cannot compare to reality.  And the reality is just gone.  I'm never going to see Ryan laughing like that again.  Not ever.  The finality of it is crushing.  The moment I have these flashes, all I want is to experience the real thing again, and I know I never will.  I ache for it.

Maybe I'll always continue to have these flashes of clear, lucid memory of my life with Ryan.  I hope they'll always flit back into my head when I'm least expecting it.  It catches me off guard and takes my breath away, sometimes brings tears to my eyes, but unlocking that portion of my brain even for a second makes me know for sure that it did all happen - the great love of my life was real, and I can always keep that.  I can hold it even if I don't have him to share it with anymore.  I hope.  But, even if that's true, maybe this is all a good reminder of an undeniable truth:  much in life is fleeting.  Nothing can last forever, and most of the good stuff will end before we want it to.  It comes quickly, and then is gone, without our being able to control it.

Gather ye rosebuds.

Collision

A shooting star is nothing more than a small meteor, burning up in the Earth's atmosphere on entry.  These little heavenly bodies never make it to the surface, but instead are absorbed into the sky, as if nothing ever happened.  They just burst into a beautiful spectacle of light, and streak across the sky.  The ones that actually collide with the Earth's surface are much bigger, and come along much less frequently.  But oh, do they leave their mark.  On collision, a larger meteor drives deep down into the bedrock, displaces rock and soil, and creates a crater.  The ground is forever changed, the terrain destroyed and turned into something completely different.  While it is still composed of the same elements that existed there before, there is now something else there too.  The collision has left a hole.  It has also left a part of the meteorite, melted into the ground, an inextricable part of the land.  Over days, years, and centuries after such a strike, the land will change again and again as it is weathered into something new.  Flora and fauna may change, climate may change, and after it all, the land will look nothing like it did before the meteoroid set its collision course.  It is something new.

Perhaps it is a labored metaphor, but I was hit with such a meteor.  I can see it vividly in my mind's eye.  Tragedy came swiftly, collided with my happy life, and turned it into something unrecognizable.  It left a deep, wide hole.  And the grief is still there, melted into me, a part of me that will never really go away.  It is something that I have begun to learn to live with, a thing that I will get better at carrying as time goes on, but a thing which will always be there.  It lives deep inside, and has changed my surface and my core.  I feel it every moment.  I am forever changed, and the change extends into every facet of my life.

Two days ago, I left my house for the final time.  On the last day that the house was mine, I went in alone, and walked through every room, remembering a life that seems so far distant now.  In the kitchen, I stood at the stove and imagined stirring the risotto in my red Martha Stewart pan.  I stood at the island and thought of taking cookies off the cookie tray.  In the basement I sat where the sofa used to be and thought of eating popcorn, watching a movie with Ryan on a Saturday night.  In the master bathroom I thought of doing my makeup every morning, while Ryan sat on the bed in his button down shirt and slacks, drinking coffee and making fun of The Today Show.  I thought of the spot on the counter where I'd set the pregnancy test that turned out to be positive, and how lightheaded I was when I saw the word "Pregnant" appear on the stick.  In Ryan's office, I imagined the expression on his face when I ran in that same morning and told him the news.  And in the bedroom, I sat where my spot on the bed used to be, and yet again, begged for Ryan to just come home, so that I wouldn't have to leave the house alone.  Then, I said goodbye to the place, knowing that I will never see it again.  The collision in my life happened a year and a half ago, and in the moment that I left our home for good, it felt strangely as though my transformation were complete.

It's not, though.  Perhaps the destruction finally is - I don't know.  But I still haven't changed into whatever it is that I am going to become.  I don't even know what that is yet, or how long it will take.  How do I become a new person, and yet keep the parts of me that make up my core?  Because there are parts of me that I want to keep - while I was forced to change, there are parts of who I am that remain,  and yet they are often entirely incompatible with this new life.  While I go through the motions of my life, being a Mom, going to work every day, I still wake up every morning and think, "now what?"  In which direction should I turn my feet?  And how, while carrying the heavy weight of grief and loss, do I begin a new life?

I pose these questions because I truly don't have the answers.  I don't expect anyone else to either, and I don't know how long it will take until I find them for myself.  But I do know that I will find them.  I'll probably find many of them without realizing it, gradually, over time, bit by bit.  I'll learn to carry the weight, to live with the hole and yet live a full new life.  I'm already so, so much better at it than I was six months ago.  While the hurt hasn't gone away, and won't ever, it has become somewhat more bearable, and I have become stronger.  I will learn how the new circumstances of my life fit in with the old person that I was, the person that I want to keep.  I'll learn how to make the two compatible, how to blend them into something tolerable.  I think I've used the word "insurmountable" in a post before, and I'll use it again here.  It seems insurmountable - the thought of starting again.  But it can't be.  The only option is to find a way, let a new life take form, and hope that one day it might be as beautiful as the old one was.