Grief Stew

When I started my current job four years ago, I sat on the design side of the office between one of the designers and a design assistant. It was while sitting there that I discovered that I am a heavy sigher. From out of nowhere I’d hear Natalie say, “Kathy, are you okay,” and have no idea why she was asking. “You were sighing,” she would say, “I thought something was wrong.”

Last week Michael and I were laying in bed, the windows slightly opened to let the cool evening air in, when I sighed. Michael asked me what was wrong and I said in the dark what is so hard for me to say in the light. “Sometimes,” I said, “I cannot handle the sound of the trains.” I hear the nearby trains multiple times a day. Often they are barely heard background noise and other times an excruciating reminder of Mark’s final moments. There is no rhyme or reason why sometimes they don’t bother me and other times I want to cover my ears and scream the sound of them away. He inched closer, held me, and said, “There isn’t a time I hear them that I don’t think of Mark.”

I love my job 95% of the time. The environment is fun and creative, the work can be challenging, and I am paid well. But it is still a job and those come with obstacles and personality conflicts. A few weeks ago I was told that a person who used to work in our office was being hired back for a few months. I worked with her before, she trained me on some aspects of my job, and I liked her. I was okay with all of it and then was told that I would have to share my work space with her. It caught me off guard and as her start date got closer I kept looking at my space and wondering how two of us were supposed to make this work seeing as how I used all of my desk. I am part-time, though, and two days of the week my desk isn’t used so it seemed logical to everyone but me.

The day came and did not start well. I was trying to assemble an under-desk storage piece that had arrived the day before to hold things that used to be on top of my desk. My immediate boss arrived for the day, put her lunch in the fridge, and came back to our work area and said something about the situation that incensed me. The day was already brewing with emotional landmines as it was the first anniversary of my mom’s death. At 8:30 in the morning a year ago I was on a flight to Chicago. Now I was at work and at my limit for things being taken away from me that I had no say in including half my desk. Things got smoothed over later that morning and in a better version of me I’d say I was accommodating in defeat. But instead I sighed a lot and stored any grace I was capable of in the crappy Amazon storage piece under my desk.

A few days later I had a therapy appointment. Prior to every one I think I should tell her that I am a-okay and she can move on to another widow via suicide. We started our session about my work drama, then to the anniversary of my mom’s death, to the sound of the trains rattling me, and how the past week had knocked me out emotionally. “And then the pope this morning,” I said increduously. “The pope? The only moral compass left in the world up and dies. I mean, how much more are we expected to handle?” “I haven’t been to a Catholic church in years,” my therapist said, “but I loved him. He was such an antidote to what we have been living these last few months.” I felt my throat catch and my eyes tear up. “The thing about grief,” Eileen said, “is that it can start with one little thing and then it takes you down a road where you’re adding another griefy thing and then another until it becomes this big pot of grief stew,” and this is why I will keep seeing her every other Monday until one of us dies.

When Michael and I moved in together I said that I had to be able to do something with the backyard, that I needed a garden. He said the whole backyard could be a garden as far as he was concerned and I knew he meant it. A few weeks ago the bed was cut and last Saturday we went to the nursery where I loaded a cart with plants while he pushed and said encouraging things like, “It looks like you’ve got a plan,” which was extremely generous considering there is a a lot of winging it involved.

I placed the plants in this new garden, moved them, hated it, and wondered why I even thought this was a good idea. Over and over I’d do it again, stand back, sigh, then move them again. A week later half are in the ground and the other half are still being moved around. I don’t know what I’m doing but I’m going to keep the faith that something good is going to shake out of this stew of living things.