Xmas is canceled postponed.
Dale has COVID. He is marooned upstairs.
I keep thinking of the Anne Frank house. I listen to his footsteps upstairs. Pound. Pound. Pound. An occasional crashing sound that is actually nothing, maybe a shoebox slipping absently into the floor. I hear his coughing, coughing, coughing traveling down the stairs. I hear all his small and large movements existing entirely apart from me.
This is what it must sound like for him when things are ordinary, me upstairs stirring the environment around and around, pounding, pacing to and fro. Taking my micro walks. The attic is my space. I draw up there and write up there and sleep up there and read up there and watch the bulk of my tv up there. I am always a bit out of my element downstairs. Now I feel as though I’m on the underside of the world peering up and up and up–listening. Listening. Beginning to enter a state of lonesomeness. Fast approaching that old state of hangdog-woebegoneness.
This year has been an extraordinarily hard one–Dale’s dad died, James was (is?) gravely ill. Something seems different about Dale. Is he different? Or is it me? I wonder if he has “lost interest in the things you usually enjoy” as the questionnaire goes. I think he must be grieving on some level or he, like me, is bracing for what’s coming next. I had a sense about Covid, that a bad thing was just over the horizon (and yes, I know there is always something just over the horizon), but now it doesn’t need to be a natural disaster (those are already here and mounting) or another plague (those are inevitable). It only has to be the dang-sure consequences of getting older–people are about to start dying. It’s the one sure thing–Either you get older and watch people die, or you die and someone watches you doing it (if you’re lucky enough to not die alone).
I think we may be lonely, or lonely for something. We have somehow been socializing less even though Covid seemed to have passed over. Relax. Relax. You can now resume your life. And yet we haven’t. Not really. Something has fundamentally shifted. A sea change. And we both feel it, uncertain how to untangle this thing that has happened to us, as though we were uprooted and replanted in a new house all the while believing we have always been in this same house, this same place. This same life, this same inching forward.
~~~~~~~~
I am so dependent on Dale. We’ve been married 35 years. It worries me, the what-would-I-do-without him, the would I ever recover would I somehow survive? I am dependent on him for emotional support, for money. For heavy-lifting. I am unable to do much lifting right now (a female complaint). Who is going to do the garbage? Who is going to talk to me, talk to me, kiss kiss kiss always kissing me? And hugs. And the conversations, the long winding here and there of the standard model of physics, of certain cosmological events, of philosophical quagmires, of isn’t this funny, isn’t this also funny the laughing the laughing?
I rely on Dale for information, for education. For ballast. For buoy. I have always relied on him and he would be split-second quick to say that he has always relied on me and that is true. But he is such an uncomplicated person and I am nothing if not a series of complications and complaints. And lots of talking to myself and composing and performing musicals while I cook and clean. But when I think of how much Dale has endured with me being bipolar and us both riding all the waves that come with that, I don’t know how he has stood it. But I undervalue myself. Anyone who gets me, gets to have a part of me, is astonishingly lucky and Dale has the most substantial pieces of me. But that is the rub–what happens to me if he goes first and I am left holding this life up, like Atlas? Would I buckle under that weight?
No, I would not buckle. I do not have that luxury. I’m responsible for the care of so many others. I despair of this sometimes, I wish I would/could buckle, just jettison all that cargo of others, but I, like Scarlett O’Hara, have a sense of duty and blood-kin and honor and Christian kindness so that I cannot will not must never buckle until I’m no longer conscious.
~~~~~~
Dale flew down to Florida Tuesday morning, just for overnight, a work thing, and I thought, as I often still do I realize now, about him dying. I worry that he will have a heart attack because his family history is rife with heart disease. I worry sometimes about him falling, about him getting lung cancer or colon cancer or some other terrible deadly thing anything terrible will do I am a worrier when I don’t overcome it.
When Dale worked in Dalton, commuting 30+ mins each way every workday, I worried every single workday about his death. It was obsessive. It was destructive. It was a small pocket of agony I carried with me, a little pus-filled sac weighing me down. When, after 20 years of working in Dalton, he got a job here in Chattanooga, that little sac drained itself dry and I was free. Free of the fear of the open road. (When I was in high school I REALLY listened in driver’s ed. You are so much more likely to die on the Interstate than you are when you drive in town, or on backroads. This is a fact that cannot be argued over, and cannot be mitigated with thoughts of Dale is SUCH a great driver.)
I’ve had this fantasy for the last few days, maybe longer. It’s of me dealing with Dale’s death, how I would hear about it and just stop in place, achieve a state of absolute zero, until I could function, and this scene playing in my mind was is almost a comfort but is really a cheat because…When he left town to go to Florida, I was so excited. I could do anything I wanted! I could stay up till 3! I would watch stuff and eat stuff and, and, and!! !!! It was a delicious sense of being-all-on-my-own which was all horse shit because even though he was not here, he was everywhere. I kept expecting him to come into the rooms he normally comes into, to mount the stairs, to call me from his office (just downstairs) to tell me something important. Or odd. Or funny. My expectation of him was so keen that by the time he got back home I was almost vibrating with anxiety, with anticipation, with my-man-is-back-HOME, with I-like-to-convince-myself-that-I’d-be-okay-without-him-how-ridiculous-am-I-really?
And then on the first night back from his only-overnight trip, he woke up freezing and I piled covers on him and finally resorted to my warming up trick–a heating pad. He has had a fever. He has had “foods-don’t-sound-so-good.” I bought him all sorts of junky things at the store. I make (or get) his meals and deliver them to the top of the stairs, masked. I’m trying to anticipate his needs, wishing I could be at his bedside. I like nursing people. For a minute. This morning we waved at each other, me in the stairwell, he in the attic, both from behind our cheerless, black KN95s. It was brief, fleeting.
I am also nothing if not melodramatic and all those “M” words circling around each other–morose, moribund, melancholic, misty, mischievous, mildewed, mellowed, muted, molten…on and on and on with the Ms.
~~~~~
Misplaced, slightly out-of-phase. Awake in the Anne Frank house. What soft footprints.
I think this must be what happens with me after they’ve issued my new body and are installing me into it. A sense of newness that seems too familiar, a sense of what-the-hell-has-happened, how did I get here? I can feel my brain trying to gather itself up before it finally reseats itself in what is now its proper place.
I’m going through one of those inevitable phases where I look at Dale closely, listen to the rhythm of his voice, gaze at the contours his body left in the bedding, and wonder just Who The Hell Is He? It’s a thing that happens in a flash while my brain is resetting itself in a place where everything is strange and waiting to be discovered which may be why just the thought of him still effervesces my chest a rush of soda bubbles and something almost purple with delight Who The Hell Is He? Because sometimes I have no idea. I cannot fathom him. He is as mysterious as he was the day he first came to my house and just started dismantling our piano to diagnose its ills.
Wearing a bright TEAL sweatshirt.
His brain so big and brilliant I could have eaten him whole without any salt. That throbbing, hard pulse of love love love please just let me crawl inside you and be so close, there is no difference between us, your breathing is my breathing, your blood is entirely my blood, when you eat the apple I will become an apple tree sprouting in your belly, when you taste the vinegar tang of your hot sauce I will become a pepper plant blooming perpetually inside you. I am every pore and solid surface of each of your bones, curl your arms around me, press me so close I can’t breath. Crack me open. Because then I always start laughing. And it’s so hard to stop.
And this, this is the man I feel I would-be-okay-without?
Right.
~r.
I’m not sure how it is that I have become so insular, how the feeling of drawing the heavy blinds of the house shut is so comforting. Sometimes when things get harry, I almost want lockdown back, when we were all in the house. We were shut-ins. We were a world unto ourselves.
