Breezy Thoughts

I’ll have a café-mocha vodka-valium latte to go, please.

The sarcastic quote stares back at me where it sits on the windowsill. It brings a smile every time I read it, especially this morning where I face the back pasture and process my thoughts, scattered as they are. A storm front is blowing through outside, clouds traverse a vivid blue sky, and a symphony orchestrated by the breeze wafts through the screen door as your favorite wind chimes sing in concert with the swaying of the trees and the sound of laughing children next door. And I think of you. How much we loved days like this, especially when they were lucky enough to land on a Sunday so you could chew your fingernails off and watch football while I curled up beside you on the sofa, your free arm wrapped around me, the smell of you filling me with comfort and safety.

All the memories. They’re all I have left of you. The painful, recent ones clammer for my attention and have been the focus of a fair amount of counseling so I can allow them to co-exist in my soul. But I need the happy memories to stand up and be counted more often. Finally they’re doing that. Last night I stood at my granite island in a new kitchen like you always wanted me to have and reminisced with your sister and her husband about the way you and I could laugh together until we couldn’t breathe, Which, of course, made us laugh, too.

Until we turned off the lights and went to our separate rooms where I cried. Memories. They confuse me. They make me miss you. All those years that you and I put our squirreled away resources into vacations with our children, weekend romps in the mountains, camping creekside with friends, I always told our less adventurous acquaintances that we didn’t care about the big houses and late model vehicles we couldn’t afford—we were making memories with our family and they’d be a treasure to me someday. A comfort if ever I was left alone without you. I’d read your cards and poems and feel your love for me again. And I do.

But I didn’t know how much aching, excruciating longing all those memories and mementos would carry with them at the same time. They are no substitute for you, my love.

Recently my counselor said to me that there’s nothing wrong with being sad. As a woman with a melancholy temperament, I know sad but I prefer laughter. I’ve avoided sad like the plague, you could say. You’re not really allowed to be sad in our culture anyway. You can’t go into Hobby Lobby or even Walmart without being bombarded by wall art and t-shirts and jewelry all telling you to be grateful, or thankful, or announcing that you’re blessed. You never see encouragement to be sad.  It wouldn’t sell.

“Being in a valley is an important part of life,” my counselor told me. “It shows the depth of our emotion. We wouldn’t recognize the mountain tops unless we’d been in the valleys.” I guess another thing about being in a valley, for me at least, is that I don’t want to be here despite what a few people think. Remember how I avoid sadness? Sadness hurts. I’ve been criticized for being here, which is unkind and ignorant. Maybe when some people look at me right now, they fear seeing their face in my place. I understand. I used to be that person, too.

That’s what sadness teaches you. Life and death are givens. When sorrow comes to stay, suffering pulls up a chair and the classroom of life has begun. The things I’ve learned since I lost you, the depths of insight that pain has given me, all of it has revealed things about myself that I never knew. They’ve unmasked things about God that I never knew. For years I feared being in this place of grief and did everything I could to learn about God without having to personally discover the intimacy that only arrives disguised in suffering.

I’ve learned I can survive terrible things. I can hear painful words and recognize the ignorance behind them. I can listen to my own wisdom and acknowledge its strength. I can hear the voice of God. I can sit with discomfort and allow things to work out the way they’re going to. I can even let things be. Let things go. I don’t have to be in control. Sometimes.

Still, all of this feels like a basic course in being human. And yet I started out describing the paradox of how painful and helpful the memories are since all the photos and random videos of you that make it so hard to believe you’re gone remind me that you aren’t going to come home again. I guess it all flows together. The very things that bring me comfort arrive packaged in pain. In longing. In a little more acceptance of what is. And a long sigh as I recognize that, while in time I will see you again, be with you again, it’s one more thing I must sit with in expectation and patience and heart aching longing, knowing I have no control over when that will happen.

I guess all of this sounds very sad. “You’ll be companioned by sadness,” my counselor also said. It was validating to hear considering how much toxic positivity flows through our culture. I guess the thing about sadness is that it tells the truth. It doesn’t let me shove difficult feelings out of sight to make others feel more comfortable or to avoid my distress. After all, I’m learning to sit with discomfort until it works itself out.

Still, when the memories roll in like a tsunami and I find myself flat on my back again, I’d rather be anywhere else but here. You know what I think about in hard times like that, though, seeing your beautiful, photographed eyes and that loving expression on your face as you look back at me? I think you know something I’m not allowed to see yet. And it will make up for all of this pain. Someday. Somehow.

Can I still have that vodka-valium latte while I think about that?