Pulling Strings

I'm always impressed when people say they can recall conversations and events as far back to when they were toddlers. I can remember all the birthdays of people who made even the slightest appearance in my life. I can recall my old girl scout troop number as well as the names of everyone in it. I can even recite the lyrics of the cheers I used to chant from the sidelines of football games in middle school. But I still feel as though there are years missing. So much of my life feels like vague events tied together by vivid flashbacks. Some of these images are burned into my skull like a thick, wax seal, holding in feelings that are too heavy to roam freely throughout my body. The rest pop up like strings: Pull here to remember.

I am young, no idea how young or what time of the year it is, and I am in my aunt’s basement in Ohio. My whole family is downstairs waiting out a tornado. The adults seem calm. It’s obvious that they knew everything was going to be okay. I’m playing it cool on the outside but on the inside I am petrified that we are all about to die.

I am fifteen and I’m working as a barista — my first real job. I’ve just made a cappuccino for an intimidating older man. He takes one sip, looks at me, tosses the full cup in the trash, splashing foamy milk all over the wall, and wordlessly walks out the door. He may as well have punched me.

I am still fifteen and I am at my dad’s office just outside of town. We are watching a set of four tornados touch down in the distance, miles away from us and what appears to be right above where our house sits in town. My mom is at home with Sam and my grandma. Scott is trying to call her but the phone lines have already been sucked up into the storm.

I am sixteen now, on the phone with my parents who are a little over an hour out of town. They need to come home right now. There's an ambulance coming. Scott is laying on the floor, convulsing, drenched in sweat. They get back just in time for his final Grand Mal seizure of the evening. I have my brother’s eyes and my dad’s eyes at the forefront of this memory: one set rolling back into his head, the other welling with tears.

I am eighteen and I’ve just woken up in a stranger’s bed, naked with a rolling headache. A toilet flushes from the other side of the bathroom door and I don’t wait to see who emerges. I’ve already gotten clothed enough to flee the house I didn't recognize, running barefoot down a street I’ve never seen.

I am nineteen and sitting on a paper sheet under buzzing, flourescent lights, worried my parents will be able to see my medical records. I'm not ready to explain that the "nice boy" I brought home for the holidays isn't very nice at all.

I am twenty, then twenty one, then twenty two, then twenty three answering a familiar phone call that is going to obliterate another little chunk of my heart. My recollections of each time I learned someone I love has died are so clear that I could write an entire book series on those sets of 60-second phone calls.

I get these clear, fleeting flashbacks that I replay in my head like a catchy song before they disappear again. Of course I have memories of the fresh air that was breathed into my body when I finally, truly fell in love or the sound of my grandma saying “Amy, look-ey here” whenever she’d place a tricky puzzle piece. Of course my temporal lobe isn’t this damp, musty room where I go to brood, but it seems like my ability to hold onto my most disturbing sensations is the strongest of all. I can’t stop pushing the buttons that force me to re-feel these things over and over again.

Bad memories sprout up like strings that are too tempting not to pull… and pull and pull and pull and pull until my brain is scattered into pieces. I braid the strings together and lay them out in the form of writing so that I can bare to look at them. There are so many now, but I like the way they weave together. Every year they're less tempting to pull.

The Many Faces of Empathy

I used to laugh louder. I would throw my head back and cackle at a joke I’d heard twenty times with not a thought about the sound of my laugh, my double chin or if I was being annoying.

Everything used to move me; the same hummingbirds gathering in my grandma’s garden every morning, an old man sitting in a park with no book, no phone and no companion, just his thoughts and the view in front of him… the news of somebody I’d never even met passing away, the sight of two people reuniting after a long time apart, the sound of a string quartet, the touch of an old, wrinkled hand or the taste of angel food cake covered in strawberries. These could all at one point in my life cover my body in goosebumps. I read once, “you cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness” and it reminded me that around the time all of my difficult experiences stopped feeling nearly as painful, nothing moved me anymore either.

Now every once in a while, I read a line in a book that stops me in my tracks and I reread it until the words stop looking like real words. When I listen to someone as they tell me something tragic, I search their eyes for whether or not their own story still moves them, if their words still feel like real words.

Jokes eventually get less funny. Alone time in the park eventually gets boring. Hummingbirds (and the old woman who put sugar in their feeders) eventually die. And words eventually stop looking like real words when you reread them too many times. I didn’t notice that cynicism had moved into my body until its bags were unpacked and suddenly I was pretending to cry at funerals so I looked as sad as everybody else. We’re all going to die, I’d think to myself, Why do we keep crying over and over again about death? I grieved loved ones by curling inside of myself, wilting into journals and outwardly not feeling anything at all. I didn’t notice I was protecting myself from happiness until my friends started asking permission to hug me and people looked at me with an expression that screamed, Are you even sad?

Something I’ve grown to appreciate now is that people know I won’t cry with them, yet they still come to me for comforting words. Despite the fact that the act of hugging sometimes makes my skin crawl, people love me enough to want to embrace me. I laugh with my husband like I’ve never laughed before because my dark sense of humor amuses him. I’m not actually that cynical at all. I’m just vulnerable differently.  

We don’t have to show empathy or be moved in the same way as anybody else. 

You’re Never the Same after Someone You Love Dies

You’re never the same after somebody you love dies. Almost like how you’re not the same person as you were before your first big love. Something deep within you changes. And when that love wandered off, it might’ve taken a bit of your innocence with it. But death… well death takes a lot more than your innocence. 

You’re never fully happy again after somebody you love dies, which is really sad for kids who experience loss when they’re young. It sounds extreme but it’s true. Of course you’ll experience happiness, belly laughs and those moments when you’re like, ‘Yes! This feeling, this is what being alive should feel like!’ And perhaps for a second you don’t remember that anything ever hurt you. That first big love never wandered off. That person is still alive.

Eventually you snap out of it. You’ll reflect on that moment of ecstasy and think, ‘God, the only thing that could have made that moment better is them. They should have been there for it.’ 

Memories of your first love fade with time, but grief comes back around for every holiday, every birthday, every milestone. You’re in a room full of laughter but you’ve not laughed as openly as you did before they died. You’re cracking jokes but you’re not as effortlessly funny as they were. You’re reading a book that someone recommended and it fucking sucks. It’s so poorly written that it’s comical and the person you lost would have never recommended such a shitty book. You’re saying “I do,” and of course you’re present for that moment but later on you’re in the bathroom, holding your wedding dress while you pee, alone with your thoughts and you get whacked again by grief. The only thing that could have made that moment better is them.

Nothing is the same after somebody you love dies, in fact everything is just a little bit worse. But you have to keep going. You have to tell jokes even if you’re not as funny. You have to laugh even if their impeccably-timed wit is nowhere in the room. You have to keep reading, even if it’s the same book over and over again because at least you know it’s not shitty. You get married and you cry tears of joy because you found a love that won’t wander off with any more pieces of you and even though the person you lost wasn’t there, it is still the best day of your life.

Maybe you have a baby someday. You grow a healthy human with your favorite person but even then, you’ll look into her big, beautiful blue eyes that have hardly seen anything and in your happy moment, the light still flickers. Because fuck, that person really should have been here to see this.

Years down the road you do the mental math and realize you’ve grieved them longer than you knew them. How is it possible that you’ve been half sad, half happy for so much of your life? 

On my especially sad days, I look around for other sad people. They’re everywhere if you look for them. There’s so much loss. So many of us are half sad, half happy at all times. It’s important to try and lead with the happy half and to show compassion to the people who can’t. 

That spark from your youth, ignited by blissful ignorance and the belief that you’re immortal, that spark is never coming back. There’s a shadow lurking behind joy and it’s waiting for its cue to interrupt. You can try to teach it manners, explain to it when and where it’s welcome, if it’s welcome at all. But grief doesn’t fade away the same as memories do.

You’re never the same after somebody you love dies. You’re softer. Or sometimes harder. You’re sadder. Sadder all the time compared to before. But that half sad thing, that whack of grief on your wedding night, the lurking shadow that has a habit of letting itself in without permission, that’s love too. It’s a pretty bleak form of love, but it’s the only kind you have left between you and that person who really should still be here.