They twist, take unexpected turns, and suddenly end.
A sweet woman who had married at seventeen and stayed married and never really found the love she needed became good friends with my ex over their shared work when they had kids in grade school. Later her husband stopped hiding the love he found and left her and she did not respond well and for awhile drank way too much, did a few drugs, damaged her children's respect for her, and unintentionally pushed my ex away as well. I heard stories of how awful she looked and how unhappy and creepy she had become, and then I heard nothing for awhile.
Yesterday a friend at work solicited input on possible job openings on behalf of a guy we used to work with. He in turn is the woman's brother in law and in the informal part of the email thread said how sad and shocking it all was. I said, what? Well, she had died.
I gathered the details and drove up to the house and sat my ex down and told her. She cried a bit. She was not terribly surprised.
This morning she texted me that she was planting forget-me-nots in her memory. Now it was my turn.
I don't always compartmentalize well and I don't know how things connect but when a woman grieves whom I cannot embrace through it, and plants flowers in a yard I no longer own, I find myself remembering a picture I took with me when I moved out, a picture of the two of us looking at each other, taken about the time we got engaged, full of happiness and hope. Obviously there's a connection with loss and with unplanned outcomes, with women who love to garden and whose husbands take twenty or thirty years to decide they want to go be somewhere else. Anyway, these connected images make me very misty, and I hope the forget-me-nots last at least a little while.
5 comments:
And I'm getting texts from a woman who is grieving this morning for a friend she could not save, and, all things considered, I cannot discover anything meaningful to do or to say.
Everyone grieves in his own way. It becomes difficult when you want to console a griever, but don't quite know how. I am awkward that way. The words, hugs, actions seem to ring false for me because they feel trite and overdone. I know that others do not perceive that same thing, though, and so long as my desire to console is true, the effort is deeply appreciated.
Sounds to me as tho you did and are doing the perfect thing for the ex. You passed the news to her in person. And you are listening to her expressions of grief, all with genuine sympathy and sadness that is likely shared between you.
Sometimes, planting the flowers is more than being embraced. It's a kind of embracing life and death that has deeper roots than we sometimes care to understand. You're a good man, Don. But you can't fix all the things you'd like to. No one can.
What they said. You are a good man. Really nice photo, too.
Guys, as a rule, always want to fix things and make them better, but death is one of those things you can never put right. Sometime you just have to embrace the loss and feel misty.
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