Forever 21

A couple months after Philip died, a friend asked if I was interested in seeing a medium she knew, S. Since S. was recommended, I said yes. Before Philip died, I hadn’t been to a psychic in decades, not since the Famous Jeffrey, whom Stephanie and I had to get on a waiting list in order to meet. We finally got the call, and the visit went something like Jeffrey telling me I was going to have two children and me answering that I was pregnant with my second and him saying smugly, See? I told you and me not saying that no, actually, you didn’t tell me, you should’ve known I was pregnant, and with a waiting list months-long and a fee of one-hundred-and-fifty-(1993)-dollars, I expected precision.

After that, the fascination remained, but I refused to waste my money on it.

And much as I thought I was going to get myself in trouble seeing a medium so soon after Philip’s death, I went anyway. See, I thought a medium was like a telephone. Like it’d be, Hello, Philip? Medium here. Your Mom’s freakin’ out. Say something to her, will ya??

I called S. to make the appointment and she only asked for my first name. She didn’t want to know anything about me, didn’t even ask if there was a particular dead person I wanted to talk to. I hung up thinking maybe this’d be okay.

That day I’d say I was half out of my mind, except my mind was half gone already, gone somewhere far away, probably in search of my son. That day my anxiety exceeded the limits my meds could handle. I was all sped up with nowhere to go. My appointment was at seven. It was a ten minute ride which meant I’d leave 25 minutes early to get there so I could hurry up and wait. At 6:00 I took my dogs for a walk, hooking my glasses in the top of my shirt. I usually kept them on a chain around my neck, but it’d broken and I hadn’t replaced it. I needed glasses for reading, for shopping, for seeing the food on my plate that, since my son died, I wouldn’t eat anyway. I couldn’t use them for distance because if I did, the world became muddled and distorted. Kinda like it was anyway.

When I walked my dogs strictly for business (their business, that is), I took a right turn out the house, walked to the corner, crossed the street, and circled back home. That’s exactly what I did as quickly as I could, as if quicker would make 6:35 come any sooner. Once inside, I realized my glasses were gone. Goddamnit. I’ll be right back I snarled at the dogs, and stormed out of the house. Since I was already in the habit of asking Philip to help me find things, I said to him, Philip, I want my glasses. Help me find them so I know you’re here. 

Twice I went round, but no glasses. Furious, crying hard tears, I headed back to the house cursing and cursing and I don’t curse much but when I’m feeling whacked and out-of-control I go all Brooklyn-Italian on myself (don’t let “Smyth” fool you). Like, what the fuck, fuck this, are you fuckin’ kiddin’ me and fuck you, him, it and her.  I had no problem hurling it all at Philip. Fuck you Philip, what the fuck was that? I want my glasses and when I get to this fucking medium you better either tell me where they are or tell me you’re sorry you didn’t help me find them or whatever, but fuck you’d better say something about my glasses.

Or what? I’d kick his ass?

I knew I was in trouble at S.’s house when she put some goopy new-age chakra meditation on and asked me to close my eyes, put on the headphones and listen. Like I really wanted to hear the deep, dulcet tone of some Woman-Wiser-Than-Me telling me to let my orange chakra allow my abundance to be abundant and my yellow chakra to allow my self-worth to be worthy and my green chakra that should be red because it’s the bloody heart chakra to allow its lovepeacejoy  to be all that and Lady, you’re off your rocker if you think love, peace and most particularly joy and I can stand to share the same room, never mind the same headphones. I sat for ten minutes crying noiselessly because I was embarrassed by my need.

When it was over, S took my headphones, nodding, and said, “I know. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

Which pretty much sums up the session. Because what followed was this really nice lady saying meaningless things to me about ghosts I didn’t know or barely recognized. Although it did seem like my mother-in-law was making a stink, but we hadn’t much gotten along, so what was that to me? When I finally asked if I could talk to the person I wanted to, S. said it doesn’t exactly work like that, except that when I helplessly added, “See, my son…” she got the picture.

She told me that when I walked into the room, an 8-year-old boy came in with me. But he wasn’t eight, I said, not asking her why she didn’t mention that earlier. They do that sometimes, come in at different ages, S said. I don’t know why.

Then what the hell am I paying you for?

Nothing else much resonated. She said Philip liked to garden and he liked to draw and that he kept mentioning Brad, none of which meant anything since the first two were just wrong and the third wasn’t anyone I knew or ever heard Philip mention.  She also talked about the letter K, another thing meant nothing and has since come to mean something so okay, I’ll give her that.

I left there devastated, angry at S. for what I felt was her ineptitude, angry at Philip for not showing up, angry at myself for exposing myself to such a risk.

Next morning, I took my emotionally-hungover self out to walk the dogs again.  As usual, I walked without seeing, letting the dogs lead, lost in the space where Philip used to be. But then it was like something knocked me on my ass and I stopped dead where I was, looked up at the sky, and said, “Philip, I want my fucking glasses. NOW.”

When I looked down, there they were. Right at my feet, right on the grass I was standing on.

I got it. I really got it. Which is why Part One of this story set the stage, the part about me needing someone to please tell me how to live and please help me find the life I was missing. Because what Philip was saying to me was, “Mom, you don’t need a medium to talk to me. You need faith and responsibility, and it’s up to you to choose it. And you know I’m talking about something larger, too. I’m talking about life. Your life.”

Wouldn’t you think me “getting it” would amount to more than just some understanding? That “getting it” would be more than idea? Because so far, it isn’t. So far, I’m feeling like a lost little girl, alone and cut off again. So far, I’m crying a lot and thinking it’s all too much.

But I have another thought about this – well, actually, a lot of thoughts. More on that next.

© 2013 Denise Smyth

I’m taking a detour, again; swerving past the post I’m in the middle of writing because something half-formed is on my mind and I need to give some sort of shape to it. Because I’m trying to grasp some wisp of something that’s eluding me, something that’s solid about me and Philip because he’s not solid and the physical is easy, the physical we take for granted. Because I don’t talk much about him to the people whose lives he was part of, and they’re going about their business and I don’t know if they’re forgetting. And right now, it’s words that keep him real.

The couple I work for, Jack and Maggie, have two kids, a boy and a girl, in college. Yesterday, their son stopped in the office. A few minutes later, Jack walked in and said, “Hey, buddy.” And there was a seismic shift in my reality that took hours to recover from. See, “hey buddy” is a guy-thing. It’s a dad-and-son thing. It’s a thing I’ve heard before from fathers and sons on the softball field and the soccer field and at fencing tournaments and wherever I happened to be when I caught that moment of most generous affection some dad shot his son. And most of all, it’s a thing I heard between Phil and Philip.

Grief is insidious and unpredictable. It makes use of anything – an unintended glance at a picture I’ve looked a thousand times, the sleeve of a certain leather jacket sticking out in the closet, two little words from a time that doesn’t exist anymore. For hours I was closed and stung and pissy and weepy. Then, in an odd and directed way, there it was  – 201. And the pieces shifted into place, but yet another different place. Because what hit me was that for those few hours I’d forgotten that I have a relationship with my son, the way Jack and Maggie have a relationship with theirs. That I don’t have to accept that Philip’s dead, but I do have to accept my grief because he’s dead. It’s not what I want, but it’s what I have. And as I said to Lucia, I’m not in the world in the same way, and when I forget that, I get myself into trouble.

I was commenting on a post by afichereader at somenewnormal (who is a lovely, elegant and serious writer) and I’d said that there is only, ever, Now. Which got me to remembering that I can’t solve an imaginary problem in some neurotic future I’ve invented. I can only solve a problem where I am. The future, when it “comes,” only ever comes as Now. Which doesn’t mean I don’t plan – but planning and projecting are two different things. If I save money every month because I might need it down the road, that’s planning. If I sit here and chew my nails because I’m alone and I don’t think I’ll have money when I get too old to work and what’s going to happen because Natalie’s not going to want me to live with her and what happens when you can’t afford to pay your rent or buy food or pay your car insurance and you have nowhere to put your clothes and your computer breaks and you can’t get another one and…

Whew. I don’t know about you, but I need a breath.

Worrying, suffering, sorrow, require Time. I’m not talking about clock time – that’s for showing up where you’re supposed to show up when you’re supposed to be there. Or for sitting your ass in front of the TV because Breaking Bad’s about to premiere. I’m talking about past-and-future. Which I’ve also heard called, “psychological time.” I’m talking about the mental trips we take to places we’ve been or places we imagine and by “places” I mean situations, I mean scripts we write and stories we tell ourselves and all the misery we create while we’re at it. Think about it. When do you worry about what you’re doing when you’re doing it? If you say, well, here I am baking this cake and I’m worrying about it right now because it’s for my friend’s party and I want it to be like, the best cake ever, or at least better than anyone else’s cake but what if it’s not so good and nobody likes it and they all know I’m the one who made it, what then?

So you’re not worrying about the present, not at all. You’re worried because you’re already at that party with a crummy-no-pun-intended cake and you’re all embarrassed and such. You’re not really there while you’re whipping that butter and sugar into airy goodness and adding eggs and flour and vanilla and what-all-else to make a creamy, luscious batter that yeah, you stick your finger into even though you said you wouldn’t and when the cake is in the oven you get to lick all that creamy goodness off the beater because there aren’t any more kids at home you have to give it to first.

I know this. I know this because paying to attention to Now was my work when Philip died. It’s not something I did once, it’s not something I just got the hang of. It’s practice, and far as I can tell it’s the practice of making peace. Having peace. Because if I sit here paying attention to this hot cup of tea I’m sipping, I’m not thinking past/future and all the heartache and misery I bring along with it.

Right after Philip died, I told my sister-in-law Joan that I was terrified to live. That years and years and years were going to go by and I cannot do this without Philip because I will turn into a sick, wretched old woman who’s lost her mind because she lost her son. What is there for me, what the fuck is there?

You won’t, she said; I know you won’t. And she told me about an elderly woman, a patient in the dental office she works in, who carries around her son’s obituary. Every time she comes in, Joan said, she talks about her son and pulls out the obituary. And all I could think was, Obituary?? Philip has an obituary?? Where is it, who put it there, who wrote it? He can’t have an obituary, that’s for people who are really dead; for ghosts, people who have names and families but don’t exist except as names on the paper they’re printed on. Philip can’t have an obituary because he had flesh and blood that came from my flesh and blood and what does it mean to be ink on a page that someone will glance at and not even notice?

I am that old woman, I cried to Joan; she is me.

See, I recognize her, and she scares me. She went down the hole I stand on the brink of, which is not the same as the void that Philip left me. One’s where you go when you give up, the other where you go when you find the courage to do so. And I’m not going to say I don’t know which way I’m going because I know the choice I made. Thing is, I can’t go without bringing that old woman with me.

© 2013 Denise Smyth