2017: Love and Grief, Home and Grad School
Through some freak accident of copious amounts of work and conscious effort, I’m about to finish up my last ever week of grad school.
Last.
Week.
Ever.
I have *plenty* to say on the seven wacko classes I’m currently wrapping up and the completion of the fifth thesis project of my academic career but that’s a post for another time.
Rather than go through the whole walk and tassel flip thing (and something called a Hooding Ceremony that makes me think it’s some kind of reverse circumcision) that are the culmination of three years of post-grad, I’m forgoing the pomp and circumstance to tag along on a trip to the Pacific Northwest with my Mom while she attends an Architecture and Urban Planning Conference in Seattle. We leave tomorrow.
For those of you who started reading this blog to follow my adventures in National Parks, rest assured, I’ll have updates soon about my National Parks projects from last summer (both of which- an interactive art installment and an augment reality project- are in the works!) and I’ll be visiting four parks while we’re out west including Glacier NP in Montana!
Before I go blogging about National Parks, road trips, urban planning, and cross country train trips, I’m going to write a little bit about the last few months in the hopes that if I put down at least a sketch of what they’ve been like I won’t have to be constantly thinking about how much of my experience I’m leaving out of the subsequent posts when I don’t explicitly mention grief.
I’m many ways, I’m still in a self-protective mode. Things just keep… happening. Losing my grandmother a year ago, my father six moths ago, my friend Katy in November, and my uncle six weeks ago is enough to knock the sense out of anyone but in addition to that, three of my friend’s moms have passed away in the last four months, one friend lost her father, and another friend lost her life partner. My heart breaks for them and my heart just plain breaks. Again and again and again.
A friend of mine, who lost a parent a few years ago, told me that grief is like sunburn. Things that don’t normally hurt or even register on a pain scale become excruciating with grief. In my experience, this is an apt metaphor. Even just getting in my car (I think it’s something to do with being the most alone a person can be in a city) is enough to shake me. And while I am applying balms and staying out of the metaphorical sun as best I can, I am still more raw than I would ideally like to be. Even the silly projects I make for class are laced, or sometimes doused, with death.
It’s been almost seven months since my father passed away. I still measure time in moments, not hours or days. I’m still not writing very much. I still put on earrings he gave me just to have something of him close to me. But there are… moments.
A few weeks ago, I had this crazy, wild sensation of lightness. Something good had just happened but I was so unaccustomed to emotions that lift weight rather than add it on that I didn’t immediately recognize it as what it was: happiness. Even crazier was that the very next day my brother called me to report that he had had the exact same response to a positive event that morning. In telling me about it, he used the exact same words, the exact same questions and intonations, with the exact same combination of underlying curiosity and mistrust of his own sensations that I’d used to describe the experience to my roommates the night before.
“I’m so glad something good happened today,” I told my brother, “and feel free to call me up at 2 am sobbing when your hit with the full force of not being able to call Dad to tell him the news.” I knew this was a possibility because I’d gone through it the night before. The first blush of happiness quickly transformed to waves of grief and wracking sobs.
I keep thinking that I’m okay now, that the worst has passed. It’s naive and desperate thinking because the last six months have been nothing if not cyclic and I would be foolish to think that the next six will suddenly up and follow a completely different structure. Grief ebbs, grief flows, but I am always at the water’s edge.
The biggest change in the last few months is that we’re getting ready to sell the house I grew up in. It’s been my true home no matter where I’ve lived and I can tell you without reservation that this process is brutal. Walking through the house, half empty, I’m afraid of losing a physical link not just to my Dad but to the family I grew up with and to who I was as a kid. The backyard is layers of memories, one on top of the other like tissues folded into a box. Here, there was a swing set from which my brother accidentally kicked a plastic slide that hit me in the face and gave me a black eye before Kindergarten photo day. Here, too, is where my mother planted tomatoes on a trellis a few years later, and in this same spot my Dad and brother and I built a snow fort one year on a particular snowy day. And that’s nothing to the rest of the house, where I spent far more time than this one, tiny patch of earth in the back yard.
I slept in the house for the last time- in a bedroom that was designed for me, by my Mom, many years ago- for the last time a few weeks ago. It snowed that night. My house looks beautiful when it snows. And one of the worst things about selling it is that you will never get to see that. You. My new friends, the ones I didn’t grow up with or go to college with. You will never know this place that is quite literally my memory palace. And how can you know my heart if you have never known my home? It’s a sharp pain that comes with thinking this thought and I have this crazy desire to have everyone I know come up to Connecticut for a night and just, I don’t know, be here. But I haven’t asked anyone to do that.
Another friend asked me a few weeks ago if I feel like I have enough support. I immediately started tearing up because for as hard as this is, I feel deeply safe and loved by family and friends; the ones I talk to every few days, the ones I met only once, months ago, who still e-mail me every few weeks or months to check in, and the ones who don’t know anything about any of this but have made me laugh or engaged me in conversation that provided ten minutes of respite from thinking about- or thinking about not thinking about- grief.
I’m not such a novice in grief as I was the last time I wrote. We’ve been walking next to each other for a while now and while I am still utterly perplexed and undone by it pretty regularly, I’m getting better at letting happiness walk along side us, too. I’m excited about projects and people and ideas that I’ve encountered in the last few months and that excitement doesn’t always lead to 2am sob fests. I expect that the beauty and adventure of the next few weeks will be both rejuvenating and agonizing in turns but my Dad raised me to be boldly curious about the world and to voraciously take in it’s wonders so, in that spirit, onward and upward we go.
