Forever 21

I thought that if I had to live with Philip’s death, I could live with anything. Natalie aside, what could matter enough to upset me? What could matter at all? But that’s not true, not really. I don’t think this gypsy life suits me. I’ve been at Kirsten’s since I got back from California, will be here til I find somewhere to live. My dogs are still at my mom’s. My home is a Ghost Town, a huge storage bin for what I have and what I have to get rid of. Last week I had minor surgery with not-so-minor recovery. On my back the whole of the week, I found out the apartment I thought I had fell through, like the job I thought I had fell through. I have no job, I have no apartment was my uncontrollable mantra.

And for a while, I lost my voice.

So things happen for a reason, I’ll land where I’m supposed to. And I can flip all of this on its head because I might have lost my home, but I have friends who’ll take me in. I might have lost my job, but I have some income to help as I look for another. I might feel like I’m walking on shifting ground, but at least there is a ground; I am not as lost as I was a year ago, I’m not traveling in the Netherworld where I lived when I found out that Philip died.

I’m not in the interregnum of Days 3-4. The purgatory before the real hell started. I was out of time, out of mind, out of space; walking beneath roily waters, seeing and hearing and moving in some grotesque aquatic ballet. I looked at people as if I didn’t comprehend, but I did. Denial was never a part of this. My son was dead.

I surfaced when I was spoken to, surprised myself by answering back. Waited a second or two before I went under again, just in case someone was going to say something that mattered, something that had to do with Philip but didn’t have to do with death. But whatever anyone said, all I heard was, Philip is dead Philip is dead Philip is dead. So what was anyone talking to me for, then? It was hideously comic that I was supposed to do a certain type of normal because things needed to be done, phone calls had to made, arrangements had to be taken care of. To Phil I said, “I can’t.” To me he said, “I will.”

Because that’s what men do; they do, and Phil did it all.

What to say about 3-4? I can tell you that Ed came over and my parents came over and my phone rang a lot. I can tell you that after being awake for 38 hours my body took over and I went down for the night.  I can say that with Natalie’s help I materialized at Phil’s on Saturday where there were people milling around and that late in the afternoon, Phil said, “Maybe you should take a shower.”

I looked up at him. “Do you think I should take a shower?”

He looked kind and weary and so very sad and he gently said, “Yes, I do.”

Like a child, I was. Wearing the same clothes I had on since Thursday. Shocked and awed by the magnitude of what happened. Finding myself standing in rooms or sitting in chairs and not knowing how I got there or why I was there or what I was supposed to do. I made no decisions because there wasn’t any me to make them. And the longer that day went on and the more people came and the more hugs and kisses and tears made Philip more dead. Maybe no one should have come. Maybe if I hadn’t called anyone and sat quietly for a while there was a chance something could have changed. We didn’t give it a chance; we told people and they came with their bruised hearts and stunned disbelief and they made it impossible for Philip to come home. His death had taken on a life of its own.

© 2013 Denise Smyth