Precious, dark secret

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I am marooned on my bed.

In the early evening, the apartment complex maintenance man steers his mower over the lawn under my window, the blinds tipping in and out from the slight breeze. The smell of the freshly clipped grass blends into the sound of the blades moving backward and forwards across the earth until the gardener accidentally scrapes against one of the concrete window wells. The trees outside splash shadows on the floor; the white carpet is my sea. I sit on top of blue and white striped sheets. The thin, summer comforter sprinkled with exaggerated and recurring images of Raggedy Ann and Andy, tulips, and rabbits carrying baskets of flowers.

With great effort, I pull my wooden toy wagon over to the edge of the mattress. The cream wagon is on wheels that often lock like one of the carts my mother maneuvers between the fruit and vegetable aisles at the grocery store. The wheels squeak so I cannot pull too hard or risk alerting my mother to my project. When the wagon is close enough to my bed, and I can reach into it from my perch, I survey its contents.

I have to decide which toys to save.

Luckily, my bed floats in water, but the toy wagon, I know, will sink to the bottom of the sea once I have retrieved my favorites. Those I do not choose will be lost. Once I select the lucky ones, I will push the wagon away from my bed with my tiny feet and set it adrift.

Nearly every summer afternoon, I played this game when I was supposed to be taking a nap. Teddy, my favorite bear, is not sure if he likes this game or not. He does not want to imagine being lost at sea.

“Will anyone find us,” my cherished companion whimpers surveying the wagon’s pile of toys beside the bed.

“Yes,” I whisper, stroking his soft fur behind his worn ears. “A sailor will find us, and we shall be safe, and then we shall have tea. Don’t worry,” I assure him. “Let’s decide which toys to save so we can play with them when we are rescued.”

Carefully, I begin pulling my toys out of the wooden chest, examining each one before stacking my most treasured ones on the bedspread. I will save all the stuffed animals first. I will not save the plastic rings that stack like doughnuts on a pointed bar. I will save the round puzzle with a picture of a miniature doll’s village painted on wooden pieces that my grandmother gave me.

I do not think I can save my battery-operated yellow dog even though she is wearing a red ribbon around her neck and white tufts of hair sprout from her head and paws. I adore this barking dog and the way she marches as she yelps when I wind her up, but she is too heavy and cannot be saved. I am immeasurably sad about this loss and resolve to save her the next time I play this game.

The caterpillar, each plastic segment decorated with a red dot inside yellow ones, is also awkward to keep. The wind-up clock plays Frére Jacques and may keep us company in the dark when we float at sea, so I carefully lay it on the bed next to my pillow. I retrieve a stuffed bunny from underneath a second puzzle, thankful that I have found him to join the other animals on the bed. By the time I finish sorting through my toy chest, the bedspread is nearly covered with puzzles and books, stuffed animals, and coloring books. It may be some time before the sailor finds Teddy and me, so we have to be prepared for many days at sea.

Finally, I retrieve my red purse that opens like a fish’s mouth and empties its meager contents on the bedspread in front of my crossed spindly legs. I count out the worn and tarnished coins: 15 pence and one quarter. Maybe that will be enough for Teddy and me to survive when we are rescued. I don’t know. I look at my wares arranged in neat piles in front of me and decide that I cannot leave my barking dog behind after all. I rescue her from the toy wagon before pushing it away from the edge of my bed.

I do not tell anyone about my little game, not my friends at school, not the neighbor brothers, Kendall or Willis, not my mother. I am not convinced anyone would understand my rationale for such a sad fantasy.

This precious, dark secret belongs only to me.

I do not have to choose between my toys stacked untidily in my wagon. I do not have to leave my barking yellow dog behind or my brightly painted caterpillar. If I wanted to, I could save all my toys and hoist them onto my imaginary life preserver. I am not lost at sea, nor do I think I ever will be. Still, each summer afternoon when my mother closes the bedroom door, this fantasy, with all its sinister gloom, yet curiously vast solace returns, and once again, I am marooned.

Maybe I will lie down and close my eyes. I will be safe on my bed. My toys will be safe, too, I repeat to myself as my eyes begin to droop and the hard edges of the toy wagon begin to soften. I imagine the waves lapping up against my mattress, and I snuggle down deep into the soft sheets. This bed is my home and my universe. Maybe being marooned would not be so bad, I conclude; before my thoughts become scrambled before I fall asleep dreaming, I am drifting alone in the middle of a great blue sea.

Mandy, by Julie Edwards

Home

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The central character in a cherished worn and tea-stained children’s book I still own is a cheerful orphan. Befriending younger children coming to the orphanage after their young lives implode, the little girl is kind and generous with her heart. The child is good too, eating all her vegetables and meat without complaint before wiping her dishes clean. But in the evenings, when the ten-year-old child should be studying, instead, she sits on the window ledge in her attic bedroom looking past the orphanage’s black wrought-iron gates and flintstone orchard wall.

Her daydreaming spirals into an obsession until one day. The good girl resolves to see the other side of hunger. On her ascent, she scrapes her knees on the flinty stone before scrambling down the plump apple tree branches.

Mandy, by Julie Edwards

Curious, the child follows a grassy path through the woods, only to find an abandoned cottage. The girl sneaks through the orchard through the seasons and climbs the wall to visit her cottage each day. She pulls weeds and plants the flowers she buys with her pocket money, sweeps the creaking wood floors, and washes the windows in the room with walls made of seashells. The child, Mandy, has found the object of her desire – four walls she can call her own — nursing a private ache that she does not share with anyone, a longing she, herself, barely understands.

The first time I read the book, Mandy, I was on an airplane with my mother flying the well-worn path of my childhood from London to Chicago, finishing the last page as the sky lightened, and the plane began its heady descent into America. At the time, I was not an orphan like the central character though I think I was “the good girl” as a child, eating my meat and vegetables and diligently finishing my homework on time.

Maybe I was even a good friend to others before friendships became situational, often connected with jobs skating the surface like an early frost before history and loss began to chip away at my heart.

The book I first read on an airplane, worn from years of love and desolation, is one I sometimes reread when something triggers the acute hunger I have never learned to satiate. I keep this hunger close and do not tell those around me that after all these years, I am still looking for a place that truly belongs to me, one where I might finally banish the “ghost of belonging” from my cellular memory.

Like my fictitious heroine, I always wanted a house. A house of my own, not one owned by a relative. Not an apartment or a duplex either. Not a communal house shared in college with roommates I do not remember.

My late-blooming transformation between ‘worst home occupier/renter on the planet’ to tidy, organized, ‘borderline OCD homeowner’ materialized the day the ink of my signature on the purchase papers had barely dried.

I bought my first house at the age of forty-four and six months after my multiple sclerosis diagnosis. Unlike Mandy, I hired window washers and fumigators, painters, and stone workers to cleanse a house that may have been ours but one that still housed the previous owner’s remnants everywhere. Still, I scrubbed every bookshelf and kitchen counter, bought a new refrigerator and freezer, and labeled every spice container in the spice drawer.

When I cleared my mother’s apartment, I was reminded that she kept her clutter out of public view.

My mother’s hallway between the front door and the bedrooms was lined with floor-to-ceiling closets, each shelf, every inch of the floor locked in a war for space. In the ‘office supply’ end of the far closest opposite, my adolescent bedroom stacks of envelopes of every size leaned precariously. Inside, I found battery stashes and dozens of unopened scotch tape rolls, post-it note packages of every size and color packed into a cardboard box with the Union Jack on its lid. Paper clips and file folders, white and yellow padded envelopes, tubes of brightly colored Christmas paper scattered with images of scarf-clad penguins and bow-tied teddy bears, bags of bows, my mother saved for a day that will never come.

The home my mother had created gave her sanctuary from her memories of my father’s blind, war-induced rages, her loss of England, and the foundation for a new life. I plucked random objects infused with invisible memory: objects I lived with through high school and college. Still, others that my mother added later, ones that appeared during the years, I tried to put my own life in order, others where no memory resonated for me. In her absence, the once familiar vase or salt savor I held was strange to me as if instead, my hand stroked an unfamiliar object like worry beads, desperately attempting to drive the pit of loss away. Now, I was the one left behind to salvage an unfinished life.

In hindsight, I recognize that my false, manic transformation, obsessed with order in our new house, was misplaced grief. Grief over my mother’s death. Grief over my diagnosis.

In my past, apartments and houses were simply an address, a place to sleep, a refuge to lament another broken relationship; these structures were not places to make plans or dream of possibility.

Even the address of our house was promising on the first day I stepped over the threshold. Eldorado. The Lost City of Gold, the city of the Muisca chief who covered himself in gold dust and became king. The mythology of Muisca represents energy constituting creative power. Place. All that I have sought, to find a place of belonging, a place of meaning, a place of sanctuary.

 

Other Side of Sadness Found in Objects

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After the funeral and the memorial, after delivering twenty boxes of clothes and kitchen wares to the local domestic violence shelter, and before the task of stripping the walls of my mother’s apartment of her coveted ‘art gallery’ of English scenes of memory, one morning I fled the four walls that had cosseted me in high school to seek sanctuary from my grief.

I fled to a local book store.

Wandering the aisles of self-help tomes, the titles of which made me cringe, I read the spines of various books on how to manage grief. Workbooks outlined Kübler-Ross’s stages of grief, posing the question, how do you know if you are progressing? Texts outline how belief in God was the only path to recovering from acute sadness. One or two admonishing the reader to dig down and focus on survival alone.

Needless to say, my place of sanctuary transposed into four walls of dread until I located one book tucked in the corner of the ‘grief shelf,’ a manuscript that flew in the face of the conventional view of grieving, encapsulated in the mantra of five stages, suggesting that the only option any of us have when a loved one dies is to accept and endure. In other words, get over it, and mind you do so quickly.

The book that became my solace and a reminder of not only my inner strength to not only accept and endure but learn how to thrive again is The Other Side of Sadness: What New Science of Bereavement Tells Us About Life After Loss.

Author George A. Bonanno guides the reader through topics both honest and uncomfortable for some to acknowledge, each one pointing to the central tenet of resiliency.

After my mother died and after the initial few months of death’s aftermath, yes, feelings of loss overtook me sometimes, but also a recognition that my life was now my own and not lived in the shadow of her history or my father’s life.

While eight months later, grief resurfaced, I understood that the decisions I made regarding my mother’s estate were mine to make. No eyebrow would raise in doubt. No sigh would undermine my confidence in knowing that it was the correct decision to leave my job and focus on my writing. I did not have to explain my shift in priorities or defend choices to anyone, even myself.

After clearing my mother’s apartment, my husband and I drove back a sixteen-foot truck half full of my mother’s things. I had to be ruthless. I gave most of my mother’s belongings to friends or charity shops. Parting with her artwork, commemorative Royal wedding mugs, English cottage sculptures, and jewelry stymied me. Yet, over time, the presence of ‘motherabilia’ suffocated my ability to move up a generation.

Last Saturday, I said goodbye to the remainder of the ‘motherabilia’ at a local flea market.

Among the items that brought joy to others were: 44 pairs of earrings; 13 watches; 82 silver and gold necklace chains with about 24 different charms; 59 rings; 12 commemorative Royal Family wedding mugs; and 11 porcelain boxes.

Some readers may find the term ‘motherabilia’ and the act of selling off a parent’s effects churlish. In my case, I discovered that keeping the most meaningful items instead of cramming others into boxes that never see the light of day imbues good memories of my mother. I saved and still enjoy many of her books. Others I donated to a local library for the quarterly book sale. This act would please my mother, I know. All of my mother’s bookmarks receive regular attention and use, too.

We build our lives around objects through the decades, but sometimes ridding ourselves of symbols of another’s life is the only way to the other side of sadness for good.

A life interrupted

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I did not need CT results to view a life interrupted. The evidence met me when I turned the key in my mother’s apartment’s lock for thirty years and entered.

A handwritten grocery list for the week hung from a magnet on the refrigerator. In my adolescent bedroom, wrapped presents without name tags but labeled with tiny yellow post-it notes instead lined the floor. Addressed but unwritten Christmas cards to friends and family remained where she had left them in neatly stacked piles next to sheets of international stamps on the dining room table.

The dust ruffle, unmoved since the last morning she made the bed, gathered in all the right places along the floor. A lavender scent lingered on her pillows. Tucked under the one closest to her bedroom door, a book she was reading at the time of her stroke suggested a life still being lived. A change of clothes, neatly piled on the chair by her desk, would never be worn again. Organization resonated with each list, in the stillness of each object, in each room.

Nothing had changed. Everything had changed.

As evening hours ticked into another day, I frantically culled and filed, sorted, and discarded objects, letters, and magazines often over ‘dinners’ of sherry and bowls of nuts and crackers that remained uneaten. Most nights, I wandered through the apartment, absently entering and exiting each room, and mentally sifted through my mother’s belongings to save and pack, which to give away or discard. I silently categorized the paintings on the wall she had collected with care. I debated whether to keep the china figurines of a nurse and a woman dressed in hunt attire. I packed paperweights on the unplayed piano, along with assorted mementos from my grandmother’s house in England.

Once upon a time, my mother’s job was to sort through her own family’s belongings. Diligently she sorted linens and china from bustles and pearls, emptying each drawer and wardrobe of cardigans, cotton nightgowns, handkerchiefs, and blouses. There were blankets and comforters, cast iron pots, and crystal vases to sort through. My mother saved the candlesticks from the front room mantelpiece, my grandmother’s silver hairbrush, comb, and dimpled mirror, the brass turtle and maiden handbell from the sitting room, Shetland wool throws, the hand-carved mahogany bellows from the front hall, and a small collection of books by the Bronte sisters. She found brand new sweaters from a woolen shop in Scotland in an old cedar trunk, still sealed in the original plastic bags.

Sixteen years later, these hints of her family home blended into my mother’s apartment. The hand-carved wooden bellows hung in her hallway, retired from duty, silent and breathless. The mahogany chest of drawers stored her winter sweaters and the local telephone book. My grandmother’s silver hairbrush, comb, and mirror laid on the dresser, unused.

I don’t live in the past, yet, I was still trying to measure the beauty of lost articles, too.

From room to room, I wandered, plucking random objects infused with invisible memory my mother and I both understood, hers perhaps more indelible like a scar, mine skating on the surface like a blemish. Objects I lived with through high school and college, and still, others that my mother added after I left home, I recognized. Others that appeared during the years when I tried to put my own life in order are ones in which no memory resonated for me. No perception of security echoed in my fingertips when I held an unfamiliar vase or a silver salt savor. Instead, my hand stroked objects like worry beads, desperately attempting to drive the pit of impending loss away from my mind.

With a routine, I savagely carved through a maze of sleep deprivation and grief; slowly, I dismantled my mother’s life. My mother never returned to her apartment to live, the four walls she once called home.

Mounds of paper I handled with aplomb, but the thought of stripping the walls bare and folding and stacking sweaters still smelling of her hair and perfume crippled me. I moved without focus, hunting through one drawer – boxes and garbage bags beside me – before leaving the room and starting another unfocused search for what I did not know in another room.

One night, I shuffled into my mother’s bedroom and surveyed the contents on her bed’s surface. Decades of annuity and investment records, brown-edged deeds to overseas properties, crisp cream bank statements, tax filings dating back to my father’s death thirty years ago crowded the corners of the floral duvet. A colony of her American and British passports, my father’s too, as well as my own, jumbled our collective web of identity. To sleep in my mother’s bedroom seemed sacrilegious, but to clear her past seemed like I defiled my mother’s waning life, too.

Nothing had changed. Everything had changed.